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Bonaire by Emma
sent out October 1, 2001
This e-mail has, sadly, been much delayed, partly because I
wanted to finish my journal recording of what I'm writing about here first-but
anyhow, that is done now, and it leaves me free to type this.
It's a month since we left Bonaire, so the dive talk has
died down a bit; but back in late August, when Mum, Bronwen and Douglas were
still absorbed in their five-day scuba course and the open-water dives that
followed (we rented the gear and took Margarita out for most of them), Dad, who
stayed aboard the boat to work, and I, who didn't really want to do it in the
first place but occasionally feel that I should have, were getting quite enough
of it. All they could talk about all day, more or less, was their hydrogen level
and gear condition and all the terms they had learnt that day. We found some of
these amusing, but it wasn't exactly perfect for them to go off gallivanting
diving each morning and, when they did come back, have no diving-unrelated
conversation.
So Dad and I went off on a scooter trip instead, one day
when the others had received their qualification as open-water divers and were
off using it. We rented a scooter from a building that, according to the sign,
leased scooters, bicycles and Dutch bikes. (A Dutch bike I assume is a bicycle
with a motor and no pedals, for they were most certainly in the shop along with
the rest.) Our scooter was the best they had-with a split-level seat, black
color and the unusual and hardly fitting name "Dink" on it in white lettering.
The other kind was inferior in the single-level seat and lurid yellow-and-purple
paint, but its name "Typhoon" seemed much more fitting to the vehicle.
We drove off out of Bonaire town, which is quite small in
proportion to the island, and began on the blazing roads, lined by sparsely
vegetated plain, the only bushes on which were exceedingly painful-looking
thorn-ridden things that would be the doom of any scooter that was so foolish as
to swerve off into them. Fortunately Dad has great experience with motorcycles
and has owned one or another since he was quite young, so there wasn't much
chance that our scooter would do this.
Along the way we stopped at a large lake surrounded by
hills and populated by flamingoes. At first, from the official viewing site with
its walled-in parking lot, all we could see was a few flocks of pink dots
scattered across the lake, but when we went into the bushy rocks on the banks we
saw a few from only a dozen or so feet away, which was interesting because
although I' ve seen flamingoes along the trip I've never come that close to any,
and that was the first time I'd seen them as anything but pink dots. They were
really quite pretty, with their soft pink feathers and graceful arched necks.
After a while more of driving along the hot roads, we came
to a water well, with all sorts of modern contraptions and a set of faucets as
well as a sort of foot-pool, the water of which was dirty and used mostly by
bees that clustered around the edges. The faucets, however, had clean water that
was very refreshing to splash on our faces. Across from the well the vegetation
was more lush than usual, with banana and mango trees, windmills and some
chickens pecking around.
Next stop was a village to eat lunch. We did so in a sort
of restaurant with a small, open kitchen building and tables under
thickly-leafed trees. There wasn't much breeze but the shade was quite effective
and we ate quite a good meal, consisting of chicken or fish, rice, a sort of
salad and fried plantains-the usual, it seems, in these parts. We had meant to
have ice cream at another place, and although it was shut the owners very kindly
opened up to give us some. It was rather freeze-burned and had almost the
elastic quality of Turkish ice cream-although I suppose that won't mean much to
you-but it was very rich and refreshing nonetheless.
We had originally planned on going around the island and
seeing the giant salt piles on the south end, but we decided to spend the
afternoon snorkeling at one of the sites along the road, which couldn't be
reached by foot or dinghy. So accordingly we went back to Bonaire town and went
back to the boat to get our snorkeling gear; we met the others there as they
were taking a break between dives.
Back on the scooter, we drove to where the snorkeling
site, Thousand Steps, was marked by yellow boulders painted with the name, and a
set of steps (only about seventy of them) down the cliff to a rocky beach. We
swam out to a good snorkeling depth, encountering on our way swarms of tiny
creatures that reminded me of fleas. I'm not sure that they actually bit you,
but when you ran into them it seemed as if they did. They clustered on the
surface, so you could avoid them by diving down, but it wasn't very nice.
The snorkeling was quite good-deep, so the colors weren't
very strong, but there were lots of fish and different kinds of coral. The weird
animals didn 't go out this deep, so the only trouble we had was getting back to
shore, but we managed it.
On the way back we saw a lot of Harley Davidson
motorcycles, roaring and buzzing around and making our inconspicuous little Dink
seem even quieter than usual. In fact this was the Thursday before Annual Harley
Davidson Weekend, and all kinds of Harley fans were congregating. It got noisier
and noisier until Sunday, when we saw all the motorcycles trooping past-it must
have been a hundred or so of them.
That was about the end of our sojourn in Bonaire, and as
I'm sure the others will want to document Curaçao I'll stop. Emma
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