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.
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| Revelers blocking the road. :) |
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| 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.
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| The shallow coral reef around Klein Bonaire. |
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| 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. :) |
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| 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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