On the plane back home. A great family time. Amazingly, we woke up to torrential rain. Really the first rain we have seen all week. Very cloudy and overcast, indeed a bit bumpy taking off.
A few more pictures to describe the island of Bonaire. It is indeed a rather sleepy island. As mentioned before, not a whole lot goes on here. Tourism is really their only “export”, (and salt). Their busy season is December through April, when it is quite cold in northern Europe. Otherwise, we were told it is up and down.
Many of the service personal here are tri-lingual. Dutch, English and Spanish. Because Bonaire is so close to South America, many of the vacationers are from Argentina, Venezuela, etc.
There is a lot of building going on, and lots of buildings that are partially built, but looked abandoned. Prices for vacation homes and condos seemed high - $400K to over a million. But, nobody is looking. Weekends seem busier downtown, but restaurants are never full, and the few curio shops we looked at yesterday were totally empty.
Diving, though, was excellent. Although unique in that it is all shore diving, with a little of research and energy, there was plenty of opportunity and variety. We ended up going on 17 dives. A great variety of soft and hard corals, invertebrates, and fish. Visibility ranged from 40-70 feet. They have a “no touch” policy, indeed you can’t wear gloves to dive, to discourage you from touching any of the coral.
This was our setup, 4 or 8 air tanks and all our gear in the back of the mini 4-foot pickup.
We found some Indian hieroglyphics on a isolated part of the island.
All of the diving on Bonaire is on the leeward, western side of the island. You can see why one doesn’t dive on the windward side!
This is downtown Kradeldijk, main town on Bonaire.
These are cute, each dive side is ID’ed by a yellow painted piece of coral on the road.
We finish with last night’s sunset at the harbor. Thanks for your interest in McKelvey Travels.
Our next adventure will be in October when Gloria and I travel to Cambodia for a week of service dentistry with the same multi-national group we went to China with a few years ago. We will be working at numerous orphanages in the country. We anticipate blogging again, hope you can follow us!
