Where in Texas are you? Continental has a weekly direct flight from Houston to Bonaire Saturday morning. It's a red-eye and technically departs on Friday night so that's the way you find it on their website. It arrives early Saturday morning so the resorts have arrangements to store your luggage or let you into your room early. After breakfast and the Bonaire Marine Park Orientation at nineish - you can be diving by 10AM!
We flew AA through San Juan. It's a lot more hassle, there's a 6-7 hour layover and the plane to Bonaire is tiny. From here it was a red-eye flight to San Juan also so we were traveling for about 18 hours.
Another option is to fly into Aruba or Curacao and then take one of the Dutch Antilles Express flights over. Leaving from Curacao is the closer/cheaper flight option.
North of town are the dive resorts, Buddy Dive, Capt' Don's Habitat, Sand Dollar Condos, Den Laman Condos, and others - all about the same price range/quality. Den Laman is the newest of the bunch - Buddy Dive seems to get the most praise here. I can't comment on the rooms but the resort/diveshop looked more than adequate.
The nicest dive resort on the beach is Harbour Village. Also the priciest.
Just slightly south of town is the Divi Flamingo, it's the only dive resort with a casino and you can walk to downtown from it.
Farther south is the Plaza Resort. Nice property but sprawling and the diveshop is located at the opposite end of the property from the divesite. So it's a little less convenient. Makes up for it somewhat with a nice beach/pool area. The SB sponsored trip stays there.
Most of the diveresorts have their own or are adjacent to restaurants and all have their own diveop onsite. Most are also located on named divesites on Bonaire so the shorediving is often excellent right off your resort. All of the north resorts with the exception of Harbour Village also sit on ironshore so there's little or no beach. Plaza and Divi both have a beach.
We stayed at BelMar condos south of the airport in Belnem. Really nice, on the water and quiet but they're a 5-10 min. drive to everything else, including
any sort of food. The other Buddy Dive location is onsite so that makes it convenient for tanks etc. And you can use the northern Buddy Dive drive-thru tank pickup also since you're a guest of their properties - and book on their boats if you plan to do that. Good, not great house reef offshore also.
There's a forum here on Scubaboard for all things Bonaire:
http://www.scubaboard.com/forums/abc-islands/
Might ask a Moderator to move this post there...
Good general info sites are
Info Bonaire and
Bonaire Talk - a forum about everything on Bonaire. The Bonaire webcams are also found there.
Tip: Bring good
treaded boots, you'll need them to get over the ironshore/coral rubble prevalent at the majority of the shore dive sites.
