Bonus vacation!

Our flight from Bonaire to Curacao was uneventful, then we had a six hour layover in Curacao, which wasn't so bad since we were able to go sit outside in the sun and read for a bit, plus they have free wifi... Winter Storm Nemo was in full force, however, so we tried to talk to the gate agent about rescheduling our flights. She said we had to wait until we fly to Miami to reschedule, which we knew was going to be trouble...

We arrived in Miami just in time to see that our flight from Miami to Hartford was canceled, as we expected. We waited in line at a separate area for rescheduling flights (the wait was a half hour!), and they informed us that all flights were booked until WEDNESDAY! (this was Saturday) She keep looking for ways to reroute us, and finally figured that we would have to spend two nights in Miami, then fly an extra leg to Chicago, spend the night there, and then finally fly to Hartford on Tuesday morning. All of course on our own time - no help with hotel rooms, etc.

Well, I'd never been to Miami other than the airport, so we rented a car and decided to make the most of it. :) We checked out the Sunday market on Lincoln Road in South Beach, where I was delighted to find a Desigual store - one of my favorite stores in the WORLD since our Barcelona trip! We ate dinner at a nice restaurant called La Lupa di Roma - delicious Italian food and nice outdoor dining. Then we drove the half hour back to our hotel, only to find that Gavin had left not one, but BOTH our iPads (in one bag) at our table at the restaurant! So we had to drive right BACK and pick them up! We were really lucky they had found them!

Obviously a bit windy on Ocean Drive. :)

Me on Ocean Drive

Miami Beach - a kite surfer in the background.

Panorama of Ocean Drive

Our second day we didn't have to fly out until later at night, so we checked out late from our hotel and headed over to The Filling Station - one of the top restaurants in Miami! And I was craving a burger. :) It was a bit of a dive bar atmosphere, but DAMN good burgers!!! Then we headed over to Ocean Drive to happy hour - every bar along the drive said "two for one drinks," so we just picked one at random and sat down. I ordered a mojito, and Gavin ordered a beer. My mojito arrived, and it was the size of a small fish bowl... Luckily we had plenty of time for me to sit and drink it slowly... It was a really good mojito, and I am pretty picky about those...

...but it was DEFINITELY not worth the price... Gavin and I got the bill a couple hours later, and it was THIRTY TWO DOLLARS for my mojito, and he got his measly $8 beer for free! We checked with the waitress to see if this was correct, and she said that it is $1 per ounce, and the mojito was a 32 ounce mojito. Wow. Ocean Drive is too rich for my blood! :) She tried to soothe us by saying I could get free refills, but we had to leave to go to the airport, and I was plenty tipsy already. :)

Well, I'd never make a special trip to Miami - not really my kind of town (even the mannequins had fake boobs), but it was fun to hang out since we were stuck there anyway!

 

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Almost paradise... in martini form. :)

Today we decided to head over to Klein Bonaire for some snorkeling and a "real" white, sandy beach. Klein Bonaire is a tiny, uninhabited island off the west coast, and it is only a half hour boat ride to get there. We tried to catch the 10am ferry, but missed it due to another Carnival parade that blocked off all the main roads through Kralendijk! So we found a parking spot and watched the parade, then headed over to Gio for some more delicious gelato to pass the time until the noon boat to Klein Bonaire. I also bought myself some fins for snorkeling.

Revelers blocking the road. :)

Gavin enjoys gelato at Gio.

When we arrived at Klein Bonaire on No Name Beach, we were delight to see a real, white sandy beach. We weren't sure where the best snorkeling spots would be, so we wandered north along the coast, following a couple women who appeared to be "serious" snorkelers with tons of gear. :) When we caught up to them, they ended up being from the US (the first people we had met from the US in Bonaire!), and they said we could just let the current keep pulling us north and then swim back. We tried their suggestion, and we ended up in a really nice, shallow coral reef that dropped off into the deep blue probably about 100 feet from shore. We let the gentle current pull us north for a while, then turned around to swim back... The current didn't feel as gentle on the way back. :) We got a little tired, but made it back to the exit point.

The shallow coral reef around Klein Bonaire.

Me snorkeling. Yes, I AM wearing a baseball cap turned backwards under my mask... My head was getting badly sunburned by all our time in the water, so I needed to protect it. :)

Wow, we actually got a semi-decent and in focus picture here... :)

 

After that, we walked down the beach (Gavin tried not to look at the nude Dutch women sunbathing on the beach... :) ) toward the south end of the island, where there were a few marked snorkeling sites and we could see a few snorkels sticking out of the water, which we took to mean there was something to see. :) This time we left our stuff DOWN current and walked up current, and once we were in the water the current carried us right to our exit point. :) Much easier that way.

We took the 2pm boat back to Kralendijk and tried to find somewhere to eat lunch, which proved to be harder than expected at that late hour. We really wanted to try Maiky Snack for some "real" Caribbean food, but they were closed. So was every other restaurant along the highway to Lac Bay. So instead, we went back to our apartment and had some snacks, then drove over to the 18th Palm snorkeling site, which had been recommended by the guidebook at our apartment; the book said there were a lot of fish at this site. 18th Palm was inside the Plaza Resort - we had to go through a gate to get in, and it felt a lot like trespassing, but legally all the beaches and dive sites are public in Bonaire - Plaza Resort couldn't charge us unless we tried to use any of their beach chairs or equipment. :) So we wandered into the water with a large SCUBA diving class that was going at the same time - and right away not even 10 feet from shore I saw another one of those cool peacock flounders! It was so close to shore it kept moving because all the SCUBA divers were in danger of stepping on it! We did see a wide variety of fish on this site - it was really fun! We swam under a dock and there was another school of those lovely yellow and silver fish hanging out underneath, and we also saw several small barracudas swimming along the top of the water. When we finally decided to head back, at the entry point some woman had brought a handful of bread with her and was surrounded by swarms of fish. I don't agree with feeding the ocean life, but it was fun to see all the fish. :)

After this last snorkeling trip of the day, we went back to our apartment to get ready for dinner. We headed over to Wil's Tropical Grill in downtown for our last dinner of the trip. We saved it for last since it is a top restaurant in the Lonely Planet book and TripAdvisor. They almost didn't let us in, since we didn't have a reservation and they were fully booked, but they had one table left and said we could have it if we didn't mind the service being slow. We were fine with that, so we waited for them to have time to serve us. I ordered one of THE MOST DELICIOUS martinis I have ever had - called the Almost Paradise martini, aptly named! My dinner of Wahoo (a kind of fish that is everywhere on the menu in Bonaire, and I hadn't tried it yet!) was tasty, but the highlight food wise was the chocolate lava cake, which I of course can never resist. :) Yet another Carnival parade went by while we were having dessert! As we had to get up early for our morning flight, we headed back to the apartment to pack - an unimpressive end to a delightful day. :)

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More windsurfing blunders

Today we decided to try our hand at windsurfing again. We took the second beginner level lesson, which taught us how to turn around 180 degrees and how to sail upwind. This instructor seemed to be a lot better than our first instructor, and I really started to understand the mechanics behind using the sail rather than just trying to stay upright on my board. :) First he taught us the Jibe turn, for which Jibe City, the windsurfing place we have used here in Bonaire, is named. To Jibe is to turn downwind, and just entails turn the board around and shifting the foot position. The other turn, which I forgot the name of, consists of turn the board upwind and requires the rider to walk all the way around the sail to the other side of the board, which was a bit harder to keep your balance. To sail upwind we learned how to balance speed with turning to make a kind of zig zag to go upwind. Eventually, you could get the right balance of speed and turn to not have to zig zag and maintain a constant speed. It was a really useful lesson, and I found myself able to now steer away from possible collisions instead of screaming "I can't steer!" at anyone who came near me. :)

When we headed back to land for lunch, Gavin and I met at the beach and as he walked out of the water, I noticed he must be feeling a little extra breeze windsurfing... He had completely ripped the crotch out of his shorts - a good eight inches! And he hadn't even noticed!! He had no other shorts with him, so he had to buy some shorts for $75 at Jibe City - they didn't sell anything cheaper!! After that, we had lunch at Jibe City's bar, then we went out windsurfing again for a couple hours. I was feeling pretty proficient with the turns, but after the first hour I started to get really tired; the wind was stronger and I was also trying to use a bigger sail. I started making more mistakes, and I finally crashed on my back in water only a couple feet deep, and it happened to be one of those few places in Lac Bay that jagged rocks instead of soft, white sand... I scraped and bruised up my hands and back a bit, so adding the the pile of "battle scars" I had gained on my first day windsurfing... Gavin survived the day with no more wounds other than a pretty bad sunburn on his back. :)

After our day of windsurfing, we headed back to the apartment to relax until dinner. We made some more tasty piña coladas and took them down to the small pool that is part of the apartment complex - we were the only ones swimming, so nobody to tell us that drinking by the pool is not allowed... :)

For dinner we went back to Jibe City's bar/restaurant. On Thursdays nights they do a special candlelight dinner where they put a tiny charcoal grill on your table and several kinds of meat for you to grill on it. We got steaks, pork chops, hamburgers, chicken breasts and fish, all nicely spiced. As if that wasn't enough, they also gave us salad, baked potatoes, bread and dessert, and also offered us more meat if we wanted it! This was by far the best meal we had in Bonaire - lovely spiced meat, and we did a great job grilling it, too! And yes, we finished all the food; Gavin and I are not amateurs at gluttony. :) We ended our night sipping wine in the outdoor bar, listening to the wind and the ocean waves...

Jibe City at night.

 

A meat-tastic candlelight dinner.

Grilling on the table.

 

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Hidden beaches, rocky roads, phalluses at Washington Slagbaai National Park

Today we took a nice drive up the west coast of Bonaire, following the coast with lovely views of the ocean, heading towards Washington Slagbaii National Park, which takes up the entire north quarter of the island. On the way we passed many of the more famous dive sites, like 1,000 Steps (which is actually only 67 steps, but feels like 1,000 when you are carrying all your heavy SCUBA gear). We didn't stop at any of these since we decided diving is WAY too expensive here. After following this road all the way up to the north side of the island, we discovered that the entrance to the national park is on the EAST side of the island... Luckily this part of the island is only a mile or so wide. :) To get across, we were going to drive through Rincon, Bonaire's only other town. A little before Rincon, we stopped off at a lookout point on the top of a large hill, so we could see over the tiny town with its brightly colored houses. At the lookout point were some ruins, but we weren't sure what they were, and Lonely Planet didn't enlighten us. It was still a nice view.

Me in front of a huge "candlestick cactus."

The ruins at the Rincon viewpoint.

Rincon viewed from above. :)

On the way, we kept trying to get pictures of local "wildlife," without much success. Little wild goats are running all over the place, but they get away from the road pretty quickly if a car slows down to take a picture. The only success we had were some bored donkeys. There are a lot of wild donkeys on Bonaire that are descendants of the donkeys used during the slave-era salt production industry. There are so many left that there is a sanctuary for them south of Kralendijk, but there are still several (according to Lonely Planet - 400 wilds ones!) hanging out munching weeds on the road sides. We also noticed a lot of locals use cactuses as fences for their property - the "candlestick cactus" grows tall and thin like a candlestick, and they are leaned against each other from opposite directions.

A candlestick cactus fence behind a lizard marker that showed the way to Washington Slagbaai National Park.

When these wild donkeys are in the middle of the road, I yell at them jokingly, "Move 'yer ass!" Get it? :)

Finally we arrived at Washington Slagbaai National Park. Both of us needed to use the restroom, so we headed behind the little museum to use the restroom. The restrooms had handy little signs to designate men and women. See below:

Do you think this was the mens' room or the ladies' room? :)

Even more amusing, RIGHT OUTSIDE the mens' restroom we discovered the following fine cactus specimen:

Even better... I dub thee "Cocktus." :)

 

The ranger stationed at the entrance gate to the park told us we could take a long or short route, and he told us the best places to snorkel and what times we had to be at certain points to reach the end before the park closed. We chose to drive the 2.5 hour route (that is, 2.5 hours if you just drive without stopping at any of the points of interest). I wondered how it could take 2.5 hours to drive ANYWHERE on the island since it is such a small island, but we soon discovered the awful dirt/gravel roads inside the park make it impossible to go faster than 20km/h. As the undercarriage of our poor little Yaris dragged and scraped on large rocks in the center of the roads, Gavin mentioned that he signed a line on our car rental agreement that we would not bring the car into this park... Oops. :)

Just inside the park entrance. The road doesn't look so bad, but they get WAY worse...

We stopped at several of the points of interest, some of which were interesting, others not so much. See below:

Gavin at Playa Chikitu - huge waves and too dangerous to swim, unfortnately.

The rocky landscape of the east coastline.

Seru Grandi point of interest. The top terrace is 1 million years old, and the bottom terrace is 210,000 years old.

Me at the Supladó point of interest. Supposedly it is a blow hole and is supposed to have huge splashes, but I stayed dry... I felt a little touch of mist once, though.

Boka Kokolishi - those rock formations form a natural protection of the beach from strong waves.

The lovely little beach at Boka Kokolishi. We finally got to get our legs wet on this hot day!

Gavin was excited to find some bits of a dead crab. "The claw still moves!!" he said after dropping this piece of a giant bug in my hand. Joy. :)

A little lizard friend. Tourists must feed them, because all I had to do was stand still beside the car and about 5 of them came right up to my feet!

An iguana hiding in the bushes.

Malmok point of interest is the northernmost part of Bonaire. These are ruins of a lighthouse and research center.

Playa Bengé, described on the map as a "white sandy beach." We didn't see a grain of sand in sight, so we took the picture and moved on. This is another beach where EVERY rock is dead coral!

Small beaches, unimpressive ruins, etc. Then, we finally got to the snorkeling area. We chose Wayaká 2, as this was what the ranger recommended as the best snorkeling in the park. We walked down a few steps from the road and came across this absolutely lovely gem of a hidden beach.

Wayaká 2 - gorgeous!!!

And the snorkeling was awesome!! The coral reefs came all the way up to shore, but there are a space to swim between them and out into the reef, which was only about 6-10 feet deep with tons of lovely fish to see. My favorite was the Peacock Flounder, which swims along the bottom and when it lies still, you can't see it at all! I only saw it because I saw it move. It has two eyes on its left side because it always lies on its side on the bottom of the reef. When it does move, there are little blue iridescent patches that shimmer in the light from the surface.

Grabbed this pic online - invisible when lying still...

 

Iridescent when moving! Also not my picture. We tried taking pics with an iPhone in a waterproof case, but all our pics came out like the one below...

 

This is one of the better ones - at least it is in focus! Almost all the others are blurry. And we got lucky catching a fish in this one. :)

When we had had enough snorkeling, we went back up to the car to get changed and drive out of the park. When we arrived at our car, two rangers were just about to walk down to retrieve us - we were leaving this site after the scheduled departure the ranger had told us previously - I guess they drive around more than an hour before closing and make sure everyone is on their way out! Then they just sat in their truck staring at us. I had wanted to change, but I was not about to do it with them watching. Gavin was not so shy - he gave them full frontal nudity as he changed out of his swim shorts. (He said, "They were leering at you and expecting you to strip in front of them, so it serves them right they just had to see me instead! :) )

We drove down to the last point of interest, Boka Slagbaai, but didn't have time to eat at the restaurant there as we had planned. We got out of the car to take pictures of the flamingos hanging out in the lake Saliña Slagbaai, but as soon as we stepped out those two rangers told us we can't stop and have to keep driving out. I told them we are just going to take a picture. This was an HOUR before the park closed that they were harassing us! We took a couple crappy, far away pictures of the flamingos (a sign stopped us from getting closer), and then continued our drive out of the park.

 

If you look closely, you can see little pink dots on the shoreline. Those are the flamingos.

On our way out, we saw why they rangers had been harassing us. It took us a good 40 minutes to get back to the entrance of the park on the awful roads. We made it back only ten minutes before the park closed. :)

We drove back to our apartment, and decided we were tired of spending so much money on dinners on the island - we just can't seem to find ANY cheaper restaurants! Gavin had been craving nachos, so we went to the grocery store and picked up the ingredients we needed to make our own nachos. We melted the cheese in the microwave, then took the nachos outside and read books on the terrace while we ate. (the salsa and guacamole we bought were TERRIBLE! The guac tasted like mustard, and the salsa tasted like tomato paste with a little oregano, but Gavin's craving was still satisfied...)

After "dinner," we headed into downtown for drinks and dessert. We ended up going to At Sea, a lovely candlelit open air restaurant close to the waterfront, and I had a decent mojito, while Gavin had some of the BEST rum punch we have ever tasted! We ordered dessert, and Gavin had apple pie and I had a little chocolate sampler. I guess the Bonaire version of apple pie is significantly different than the American version... Poor Gavin's pie was four slices of apple on a plate with some ice cream, little circles of custard and wafers of sugar cone. My chocolates were unimpressive except the mini lava cake. :) Next, I tried out a drink called By the Sea, which had blue curaco in it, making it look like the inside of a chemical toilet, but it tasted good! :) After that we made our woozy way (well, me woozy, but not Gavin since he was driving. :) ) back to the apartment to dream sweet, Caribbean dreams.

 

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SCUBA diving the "Pillars of Salt"

This morning we headed over to Div'Ocean (pronounced "devotion") to have a couple guided SCUBA dives on the Bonaire reef. Our guides Joob (probably spelling it wrong, but pronounced Yoob) and Natalie (both Dutch expats, as seem to make up at least half of the permanent resident population here) drove us down to the south of the island to take a couple of his favorite dives. The first was The Rock, an unofficial dive site, named for a huge rock at the bottom of the ocean, but we didn't go see that. The goal was to SCUBA at 40-60 feet along the side of the coral reef. Unfortunately, my ears but the kibosh on that; on my first dive of the year I can't get one ear to equalize for a long time. For about half the dive I was only able to get down to about 10 feet and still feeling pain in the one ear. Gavin and Joob hung out on the bottom of the shallows, only about 30 feet, and not over the edge of the reef as planned. About halfway through the dive as we were turning around to go back, I felt a POW in the "bum" ear and it FINALLY figured out how to equalize, so I was able to go to the bottom for the rest of the dive, but by that time it was too late to go over the shelf and go deeper. Poo on my ear - it made me miss the Blue Hole last year in Belize, too! But I still got to see a BIG barracuda, a sea turtle and an eel. :)

On this sunnier day, the condenser lakes are even more pink than when we last saw them! We SCUBA dived across from them.

Ready to dive!

Sea turtle in the shallow part of the reef.

Barracuda - the pic doesn't do justice to its size.

Nobody looks attractive in SCUBA gear. :)

A pretty, iridescent fish.

Our second dive was Salt Pier, so named because it is the pier from which the salt collected in the salt condenser lakes is exported off the island. I had no trouble equalizing my ears, so I was able to go to depth right away with everyone else. We swam through and between the pillars holding up the pier, and these pillars were covered in coral, sponges and more. They were also a home to a LOT of fish - I was able to swim through a HUGE school of beautiful yellow and silver fish - probably at least a thousand fish in it! Definitely the highlight of my day in the water!

This is the salt pier. We SCUBA dived underneath it.

Me swimming in seriously a THOUSAND fish!

Sea life on and around the pillars of Salt Pier.

After our dive guides drove us back to the apartment (their dive shop is in Caribbean Court, where we are staying), we took our own car and drove back down past the salt lakes to Pink Beach. According to Lonely Planet "Pink Beach" was so named because the broken coral and shells that make its sand add a pinkish hue to the sand. We arrived at Pink Beach and were surprised at the LACK of sand. Most of the beach was made up of broken up and worn down pieces of coral! This is the only beach I have ever seen that is made entirely of coral bits - not a "real" rock in site! We had intended to hang out and read on the beach, but there as no shade available on this beach in late afternoon, so we headed right back into town. :)

Pink Beach. As you can see, not really pink at all. :)

Coral bits that make up Pink Beach.

After our brief viewing of Pink Beach, we headed back into town and had some ice cream at Lilly's and read our books in their comfortable booths for a while. Then we wandered toward a Peruvian restaurant called Plazita Limena that had caught my eye with their sign advertising ceviche. On the way I stopped and bought a hat - my head is sore from being sunburned where my hair parts. :)

We ate our dinner pretty early, so we we pretty much alone in the Plazita Limena for the first hour we were there. We ordered ceviche as an appetizer (Gavin is a good sport - he HATES ceviche but will still eat it with me because I love it! :) ) and it was pretty good, almost as good as we got in Peru. I had the "Land and Sea," for a main course, which was a steak and some garlic shrimp. Pretty good, but a kind of tough steak. We had a "choco volcano" for dessert, which was a YUMMY chocolate lava cake - my favorite part of the whole meal! We also tried a pitcher of their sangria... not so great. Honestly, probably the worst sangria I have ever tasted - so watered down with sparkling water and some kind of fruity liquor that we could barely taste the red wine! Both of us had to force it down and wished we had ordered it by the glass instead. :) After dinner we headed back to relax in the apartment for a while, making it an early night.

 

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