Bonaire 2019

June 29 to July 12 2019

We had the dreaded 5:30 am flight from Minneapolis into Atlanta where we connected to Bonaire. The only thing worse than a 5:30 am flight is if that flight is delayed, which ours was. There was a problem with the midair collision avoidance system so I was happy they repaired it even if it meant a delay.

That did mean our tight connection in Atlanta was nearly unmakeable. The flight was boarding by the time we got to the gate.

We were almost the last people to get our luggage in Bonaire. One of our bags was the second to last on the belt. We quickly cleared customs and immigration, then it was a short cab ride to the resort.

Divi Resort and the Dive Club

We are meeting our dive friends, Doug and Stephanie, at Divi this year. In the past we have gone on dive vacations with them at Turks and Caicos and the Bahamas. Doug took his daughter to Divi ten years ago and really liked the resort and wanted to return.

Unfortunately there was a dive club with a large group of divers staying at the resort the same time we were there. We encountered them at check in. Luckily they had their own kiosk for check in. There were several days where we couldn’t get a spot in the dive boat because the dive club had it completely booked. We also had problems getting into one of the restaurants because the entire club was there. I think it is great when you can travel with a group of divers but this was a large enough group that it did inconvenience other divers at the resort.

Divi is not fancy. Our room was a small, very basic and the furniture was a old. The staff is nice but most everything happens on island time.

All of us booked the all-inclusive option at Divi. The Divi resort is both all-inclusive and non-all-inclusive. We ordered all our drinks, hor d’oeuvres and meals from the menu at the restaurant or bar. We could easily order $70 worth of drinks and food at a time and that was just drinks and snacks after diving. I am sure that we ordered at least $2500 each in food and drink for the week. We had to wear special wrist bands to get free food and drinks and we signed zero dollar tabs when we ordered.

Doug and Stephanie stayed three more days than Karen and I stayed a week longer than Karen. I came back to Divi to dive with Steph and Doug until they went home. When Karen and I checked out they were disorganized so they didn’t cut our wristbands off which allowed me to enter the resort later.

Diving

We did one boat dive at Divi. We also did some shore dives from the resort. Our first full day at the resort we did a shore dive from the dock. My wife can get a little freaked out on unguided dives but it was a really easy shore dive. We swam from the dock to the drop off. There was an old row boat that sank out from the dock and there were usually several tarpon hanging around there. Once we reached the boat we would go left until we were at half a tank of air and then turn around. We always saw a lot nice small reef fish.

We did one night dive and we were told by other divers we just missed an octopus. We also did a dawn dive. We got up when it was still dark, put on our dive equipment and the sun came up when we were still under water. We saw more sea life on the predawn dive than on the other dives from the resort. The more interesting sea creatures we saw were on our early morning dive. We saw an octopus and sharp nosed eels. I had never seen one before so I wasn’t sure what it was and it resembles a sea snake so I didn’t get too close. I had to look it up when I got back to my room.

The thing to do in Bonaire is rent a truck and dive around shore diving. We rented a truck for a week from AB Car Rental.

Our favorite dive was the Salt Pier. It is on the southern end of the island. The ships pull up to the pier to be loaded with salt from the salt ponds. From below the water the supports looks like someone randomly threw them into the water which makes for a visually interesting dive.

The first time we did the Salt Pier it was overcast and raining and underwater visibility was so poor that I had to use my compass to navigate between piers.

Both of our dives at the Salt Pier we saw many barracudas, turtles, tarpons and other sea life.

We also dove the Hilma Hooker. This is one of the most famous wrecks that you can dive anywhere. It was a beautiful dive. We had good visibility and saw large tarpon and other creatures.

We dove Thousand steps. We parked our truck across the road from the dive site and put our equipment on. The dive site is accessed using a concrete staircase. It wasn’t a thousand steps but it was a lot when you are wearing fifty pounds of equipment.

We drove to the Washington Slagbaai National Park to drive one day. It is a long day. It took us about forty minutes to drive to the park entrance. Driving through the park was no easy chore. The roads were rutted dirt. We went to two drive site in the park.

A Note About Shore Diving on Bonaire

Putting your equipment on and walking into the ocean sounds mildly difficult but the Bonaire beaches are rocky not sandy. That means that it is easy to step into a hole between two rocks when trying to enter the ocean. You also have the waves crashing into the shore while you are trying to wade into the ocean. We all took at least one tumble getting into or out of ocean.

We saw a woman at the Divi who had a large clear bandage that covered a good portion of her leg. She got the scrape trying to do a shore dive. I also saw another person on the plane with crutches because of fall entering the water.

Snorkeling

We booked a snorkeling trip through Divi. It was a good snorkel trip. We took a catamaran to the south end of Klein Bonaire and snorkeled at a couple of sites. My favorite part of the snorkel was when we ran into squid twice. Squid are usually cautious around people but these squid paid no attention to us. I followed them for several minutes with my GoPro less a foot away.

My Additional Week in Bonaire

I wanted to stay in Kralendijk for my extra week. I found Hotel Islander Bonaire which is in downtown Kralendijk. I was considering Bonaire Oceanfront Apartments but they were a little far out of town and I walked past them and of course they were not as nice as in the picture.

Hotel Islander Bonaire was near perfect. The people that worked at the hotel were very nice. The location was close to everything in town. The hotel was almost brand new so I had a huge flat screen Smart TV in the bedroom.

I could access my Netflix account on the TV but unfortunately I forgot to log out when I left so when I got home and tried to watch Netflix I got a message that another device was using my account. Just an FYI, if this happens to you you have to go into settings and logout of your account everywhere, then change your password.

I had two complaints with the room. The first is the maids left the hotel door open when they cleaned so I always found mosquitos in the room. I realized that the mosquitos were in the bathroom during the day, I would assume because of the standing water, so I shut the bathroom door when I went to bed at night. Otherwise I didn’t wake up with bites in the morning.

My second complaint was that there was a door between my room and the room next to me. There was a person in the room only a couple of nights. You could literally hear everything in the other room.

I went snorkeling on Klein Bonaire one day. Rather than pay for a catamaran ride to get there I was able to take a ferry from Karel’s to Klein.

The ferry was a large pontoon boat. After it picked us up it made two more stops and then brought us to Klein. The boat pulled up to the beautiful sand beach where they would pick us back up so people could unload their coolers and food.

The boat then went down current and we all jumped off. I was solo and the boat captain made me partner up with a couple. Once we were in water I told them I would be fine by myself because I wanted to do my own thing.

We were warned not to feed the fish and if we were caught we could be fined. It was obvious that people did feed the fish. I had two large angel fish swim right up to me, looking for a handout, I assume. That neve happens.

Once we snorkeled to the beach there was a path to walk down current again and so I snorkel one more time. I opted to explore the beautiful beach rather than snorkel again.

There was a lot of good food in Kralendijk. I had breakfast at Illy and stopped in for coffee several days. I had drinks at Karel’s several days. I had breakfast and pizza for dinner several days at Rumba Café.

Doug, Steph and I ate at Cuba Campagnie several days and it was excellent. They also had one of the best bar bands I have ever hear… anywhere! They were Latin jazz on steroids and caffeine.

Other Things to Know About Bonaire

Bonaire has salt ponds that create mountains of salt to export (hence the salt pier). The salt ponds are pink but the mounds of salt are brilliant white in the sun.

Years ago slaves were usd to harvest the salt. They were forced to live in tiny dirt floor, concrete huts near the salt ponds. It would have been a miserable existence.

Since Bonaire is part of the Netherlands I was hoping I would be able to get good Belgium beer. Belgium isn’t part of the Netherlands but they are neighbors. Divi had Amstel beer, which as it turns out I like less than Corona.

I found a restaurant in town that had kegs of Belgium beer. I stopped in daily for my glass of real Belgium beer. It was very good.

So…the brewer was Oedipus brewing in the Netherlands, not Belgium but it was excellent Belgian style beer. My beer below was Thai Thai Triple. It was great.

Pelicans are all over the island

Recap

Divi wasn’t our favorite all inclusive resort that we have stayed at. The food was good and the alcohol choices were decent. It was trying to have such a large dive club group staying at the resort while we were there but that is not the fault of Divi.

There aren’t many sandy beaches on the island. The inland part of the island isn’t very picturesque. The same with the windward side of the island. Washington Slagbaai National Park is interesting but most of the roads are rutted sand which makes it challenging to drive.

I am not sure I would recommend going to the park. It takes about forty minutes to get there and it is slow going once you are in the park. There are some nice beaches with decent dive/snorkel sites in the park but again, I am not sure of it is worth the drive to get there.

The four of us talked about if we would return. Both women liked the diving and the island but Doug and I voted not to return.

We were both disappointed in the diving. We are usd to seeing larger sea life in the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos. We discovered that Bonaire didn’t protect rays and sharks until 2010. That might explain the lack of larger sea life.

I was in Curacao in 2015 and my diving experience there was very similar to Bonaire, a lot of small fish but few rays, no large eels and no sharks. I was afraid Bonaire would be the same and it was.