First Days in Bonaire

Wednesday June 4, 2014

So, after arriving last Saturday we've been enjoying the first few days of our two-week vacation in Bonaire. Click in that link and you can see where we are. We're only 50 miles from the north coast of Venezuela. 

Check out the sunset last night:

We're on a scuba diving holiday with four of our close friends we met during our training over the past year. 

The weather here is, well, paradise. Daytime temperatures are +28C to +30C, feels like +41C. That sounds hot at first, but when you've been diving for 45 minutes, it's actually quite nice. Put another way, we could get used to this!

Tuesday after our morning dive we went for a drive south along the main (only) highway. We drove past the salt plains where they, yes, scrape salt off these flood plains once the water has evaporated. During this evaporation the salts sprays up like foam when the wind blows, and the water turns pink. This high concentration of salt is why the flamingos here are pink.

In the latter half of the 1800s, slaves were used as cheap labour to work the salt fields. They lived in these little concrete huts:

Today we're going to dive on the Hilma Hooker, a sunken cargo ship with a colorful history that lies under a hundred feet of water just off the coast of Bonaire.