Sillygrendel and I drafted some notes up during our layover in San Juan this afternoon and we pretty much agree on the following aspects of the trip, which we categorized to make it easier to follow.
Vehicles
Being the shore diving capital of the world, we rented a truck on Bonaire to travel to the dive sites. Here are our list of things to keep in mind and anecdotes from our trip:
- Gas stations do not take traveler's checks
- Gas costs an arm and a leg (about $4 US per gallon, or $42 to fill a small truck tank ~12 gal)
- All vehicles are standard transmissions (at least the ones we saw)...not a problem for us, but some people in the US can't drive them.
- You CANNOT lock your doors and windows or your windows will be smashed and stuff stolen (see "Theft" section). We left them open at all times and the windows rolled down and only got ransacked once.
- Some dive sites are hard to drive out of (watch this when pulling in) since the dead coral piles do not provide good traction.
- 101.1 is a decent radio station to listen to in your car/truck
- King cab pickups are pretty cheap and work great. That way you have a backseat for stuff that might blow out of the truck, the bed to store tanks, and the tailgate to get kitted up on. Ask for a tank rack though...most trucks had one (ours didn't) and we were really wishing we had one.
- The one way road to Rincon doesn't become one way until sometime after 1000 steps when you see the sign. Before then you can backtrack and it makes your trip a lot shorter if you are accessing the lower northern dive sites.
- The locals drive like they watched the Fast and the Furious 200 too many times. They rev their engines, peel out, and drive their motorcycles like crazed banshees. Watch out.
- Get the car insurance.... 'nuff said.
- Police presence is non-existant. Sillygrendel cracked up every day when I blew by the local cop at about 2x the speed limit daily and all I got was a friendly wave.
Food
Two single guys can't be expected to cook for themselves...we ate out most meals. We have arranged a three tiered ranking system to analyze our opinions.
Donkeys won't eat it (poor)
Chibi Chibi, Lion's Den, Julio's (this deserves it's own category...something akin to Donkey fecal matter).
Donkey food (mediocre)
Rum Runners, CoCo's, City Cafe, Swiss Chalet
Fit for human consumption (good)
Mona Lisa, Lover's (ice cream)
Tips: watch your checks for accuracy...we had people trying to slip us extra charges for stuff we didn't order all the time. Watch the Bonaireian mental currency conversions too...there's a reason they are so quick to convert guilders/florins to dollars and for some of them it ain't the ability to multiply and divide by 1.75. The breakfast and crepes at City Cafe were pretty good. Coffee and soft drinks do not get refilled. Remember, the price is for ONE serving...and you thought Starbucks was expensive...a guilder and a florin are the same thing (same coin and everything).
Cultimara (grocery store) - meat section looked like something out of a horror movie, no milk, and an assortment of strange foods. We got chips and salsa, PB&J, bread, and some assorted snacks. We decided we were scared to cook anything found in the meat section and that some of it, if purchased, was just as likely to eat us as we were to eat it.
Nightlife
We got in on New Year's eve and despite what we had heard, the place was a ghost town. Everything shuts down for New Years. We amused ourselves driving around looking for donkeys and watching local fireworks. I don't think there is a word in papiamentu for "nightlife"...it simply doesn't exist. Think "tropical retirement community with cute employees" (Dutch waitresses) and you have the idea.
That being said, we figured some things to help out the traveler who decides to look for more to do than just dive.
- City Cafe is the best place to go on the island for nightlife (Dutch waitresses and Amstel Brights...your two best friends on the island).
- If nothing is going on at City Cafe, try Karel's down the street.
- You are in for a real treat if the Dutch are doing karaoke...their songs are a riot.
- Things don't get going until around 11 pm, so plan to stay out late to hit the peak time for Bonaireian nightlife (remember, the peak ain't much and usually not worth going out at all). Most bands/DJs don't start until around 10:30-11:00 pm local time.
- Time is EST +1 hour.
Lodging
Definitely stay in a resort if you want to meet other people to hang out with. The Plaza resort has a wonderful beach...we never saw the inside of the resort, but didn't need to to know this would be the place we would stay on a return trip.
Captain Don's Habitat - we only stayed one night, but it seemed pretty nice. We met two groups of US tourists that had had their rooms broken into on successive nights and had lost digital camera outfits, miscellaneous dive gear, and money. Of course they locked everything and took precautions, but there isn't much you can do when your room is broken into (they were eating in the hotel restaurant when it happened).
Happy Holiday Homes - we stayed here for 10 nights...nice place and very adapted to diving with hoses, rinse buckets, and clotheslines for your wet stuff. There was no a/c in our main rooms, but there were in the bedrooms...not a concern in Jan, but might have been in the heat of summer. There were only about 10 or so units and it wasn't a social gathering type of place...very functional accommodations though.
The hotel safes are just for money and important documents. The safes in both our rooms were not large enough for most underwater cameras or dive lights.
Theft
This aspect of a Bonaire trip deserves its own category. I thought all the pirates were gone from the Caribbean, but it turns out they just moved to Bonaire and became land based. You will be much better off when you realize that everyone is out to rip you off. We ain't no naive small towners either (I live in Washington DC and SG lives in Baltimore), so we know big cities and crime. This place is worse than either one, IMHO, and the population is just a tad over 10k. However, the degree to which you get bent over (and you will) can be minimized by being assertive and using cautious planning/practices.
In your vehicle, as mentioned before, you cannot lock your car or roll up your windows. Even if you don't plan to, get the insurance. Crime is too rampant here to put yourself at risk. Everything is a potential target for theft....especially at night. We parked our car at Angel City for a night dive and came out to find the locals had conveniently turned off our interior light, gone through all our stuff, and scattered it about the car. There were numerous tales from people we encountered about thefts from vehicles and three articles in the local free paper (The Reporter) about incidents that had occurred recently including a local woman who was put in the hospital for trying to thwart a mountain bike theft.
If you leave it, they will steal it. If you operate on this premise, you will be ok. That goes for dive gear, cameras, shoes, and even dirty shorts and ratty t-shirts. The people are unscrupulous pilferers and will take anything not chained down..and they will take that and the chain if they can figure out how before you get back. Trust us on this one...the theft reports are NOT exaggerated.
We did some night dives and found this to work: Kit up at your hotel (in full wetsuit) and ONLY take what you will take underwater...nothing else...not a towel, not dry clothes to change into after the dive...they will take these if left in the car.
You have to be careful at the bars, restaurants, souvenir shops, hotels, and at the dive sites. If I didn't mention it, I forgot, and you should be careful there too.
Miscellaneous
The Internet cafe at City Cafe is great. It has fast connections and competitive rates. The one across the street from Cultimara on the second floor has really slow connections and charges about the same rates, so save yourself the headache if you need to check email and access the Internet.
Wildlife
The donkey sanctuary is not really worth the drive out to it since the donkeys are all over the place anyway. You can pet them anywhere you please since they are readily available at all your favorite local hangouts. They seem to like tortilla chips really well and will practically climb into the truck if you pull up to them and offer some chips.
Watch for iguanas in the north and on the road back through Rincon (unless you like the crunching/popping sound of a lizard hit at high speed). It is easy to speed here since there are no police and the lizards are hard to avoid if you are exceeding 70-80 km/h.
Goats, dogs, cats, donkeys, etc. litter the roadways at night and you should exercise caution when driving at night lest you hit one of the poor critters.
Diving
At last, on to the diving! The most touted of Bonaire's offerings.... We managed to squeeze in 25 dives, some snorkelling, and some freediving. We did 4 night dives and all our dives were on EANx32.
Most of the advice we got before going was pretty on the mark...but here is some of it again with a few of our own observations.
- Boat dives are not worth it (we did 1). The vis was a little better, but other than that the dives are the same on Klein Bonaire as they are from the shore of the main island.
- Oil Slick Leap is now open with a new ladder, but is not yet marked with a yellow rock. You can dive it by turning left right at the sharp corner that leads up towards Karpata and 1000 steps, etc...look at the map and you can pick out where it should be. You will know you found it when you see the nice new aluminum and concrete ladder.
- Alice in Wonderland and The Lake have really neat coral formations and were among our favorite sites (along with Red Slave, 1000 steps, and Invisibles).
- The book rating system (the Bonaire Shore Diving book) is a little off. Don't let things called "Advanced" or "Intermediate" throw you off...the entries and exits we did were all pretty easy.
- Current? What current? People were obsessed with current down there. We couldn't figure it out. On a number of dives as we headed back to the car I would get asked if the current was bad today. I finally stopped saying no after I heard how difficult one couple's exit had been (crawling on their hands and knees to the shore through the rocks) and started qualifying it with "compared to the Atlantic, there is no current. Where do you usually dive?" and taking it from there.
- The Salt Pier is a nice night dive.
- On night dives watch out for urchins on your exits...they come out at night and are all over the shallows. We just kept the lights on and waded in as far as we could with masks in the water watching for them.
- There are no large fish on Bonaire...sans a couple medium sized tarpon. If you want to see sharks, large barracuda, etc. stick to North Carolina or your local equivalent. Bonaire is like diving in a giant aquarium with lots of small stuff, but if you are into the big fish you will be disappointed.
- Most sites look very, very similar to one another. There is the double reef system in the south, but you are diving basically the same reef no matter where you go...just at different spots. There isn't any variety as far as wrecks, caves, etc. go...this is all reef diving and best done at 60' or shallower where the light and colors are better.
- Dives in the north and south seemed better than the dives in the middle.
- Eighteenth Palm and Windsock are not worth doing.
- Vista Blue had naked men wandering around picking up shells on the beach. Based on that, I would include it as a "must skip" too unless someone can guarantee that the men won't be there ever, ever again.
- 1000 Steps is well worth the climb and is a nice night dive too. Don't let the name or the steps deter you...they aren't hard to negotiate.
- Do not pay $5 to dive the La Machaca wreck off the pier of whichever operation it lists in the book as being the place to dive the wreck/reef from (can't remember the name...we gave our book to a Dutch couple before we left the island). The wreck is very tiny with not much on it and you can dive it from The Cliff dive site by just following the reef south (that's how we did it and didn't have to pay $5 each).
- Photo Tours Divers was the operation we dived with and we cannot say enough good things about them. Unlimited nitrox was exactly that...sometimes we had 8 tanks out at a time with no hassles from the shop. We never once had to use air for lack of full nitrox tanks waiting for us when we brought the empties back. Just drop your empties in the empty pile, analyze some new ones, load up your truck and go. They also had 24 hour access to air tanks should the need for a 4am dive strike you and you forgot to get tanks while the shop was open.
Closing thoughts on diving....in our estimation the diving was not markedly better than diving off our own coast. In our opinion, North Carolina diving is better...we see larger life, historical wrecks, and have just as warm water temps and the vis is about the same. That being said, we are a couple of wreck heads and if you like taking pictures of small fish, coral formations, and sponges, this will be right up your alley.
What we Liked Best
- Ease of diving/capability to do multiple dives on your own schedule with your own profile and plan. You can do whatever you want here, just don't touch anything or spearfish. No annoying DM led dives that turn when the resident boat hoover gets to 1500!
- The night diving was great. We saw octopi, squid, tarpon, eels, and the bioluminescence was very cool.
- Water temp was consistently 79 degrees. That being said, be smart about it. You may be fine in 79 degree water in a 3mm shorty, but what about after 4 repetitive dives?
- Relaxed attitude/atmosphere of the island. It takes a little getting used to "island time", but the island can be very relaxing. It is NOT a mecca for singles like some of the other places that have great night life and diving (Cozumel for instance).
- Dutch women
- Our dive operation and the unlimited nitrox package...both first class and well done.
- Double reef dives were usually very cool.
- Donkeys...they are everywhere and the little fuzzy ones are kinda cute. They are also a lot less likely to steal from you than the locals.
Disclaimer - your mileage may vary...this was based on our limited experiences on our trip and obviously things change and have associated variability.
Vehicles
Being the shore diving capital of the world, we rented a truck on Bonaire to travel to the dive sites. Here are our list of things to keep in mind and anecdotes from our trip:
- Gas stations do not take traveler's checks
- Gas costs an arm and a leg (about $4 US per gallon, or $42 to fill a small truck tank ~12 gal)
- All vehicles are standard transmissions (at least the ones we saw)...not a problem for us, but some people in the US can't drive them.
- You CANNOT lock your doors and windows or your windows will be smashed and stuff stolen (see "Theft" section). We left them open at all times and the windows rolled down and only got ransacked once.
- Some dive sites are hard to drive out of (watch this when pulling in) since the dead coral piles do not provide good traction.
- 101.1 is a decent radio station to listen to in your car/truck
- King cab pickups are pretty cheap and work great. That way you have a backseat for stuff that might blow out of the truck, the bed to store tanks, and the tailgate to get kitted up on. Ask for a tank rack though...most trucks had one (ours didn't) and we were really wishing we had one.
- The one way road to Rincon doesn't become one way until sometime after 1000 steps when you see the sign. Before then you can backtrack and it makes your trip a lot shorter if you are accessing the lower northern dive sites.
- The locals drive like they watched the Fast and the Furious 200 too many times. They rev their engines, peel out, and drive their motorcycles like crazed banshees. Watch out.
- Get the car insurance.... 'nuff said.
- Police presence is non-existant. Sillygrendel cracked up every day when I blew by the local cop at about 2x the speed limit daily and all I got was a friendly wave.
Food
Two single guys can't be expected to cook for themselves...we ate out most meals. We have arranged a three tiered ranking system to analyze our opinions.
Donkeys won't eat it (poor)
Chibi Chibi, Lion's Den, Julio's (this deserves it's own category...something akin to Donkey fecal matter).
Donkey food (mediocre)
Rum Runners, CoCo's, City Cafe, Swiss Chalet
Fit for human consumption (good)
Mona Lisa, Lover's (ice cream)
Tips: watch your checks for accuracy...we had people trying to slip us extra charges for stuff we didn't order all the time. Watch the Bonaireian mental currency conversions too...there's a reason they are so quick to convert guilders/florins to dollars and for some of them it ain't the ability to multiply and divide by 1.75. The breakfast and crepes at City Cafe were pretty good. Coffee and soft drinks do not get refilled. Remember, the price is for ONE serving...and you thought Starbucks was expensive...a guilder and a florin are the same thing (same coin and everything).
Cultimara (grocery store) - meat section looked like something out of a horror movie, no milk, and an assortment of strange foods. We got chips and salsa, PB&J, bread, and some assorted snacks. We decided we were scared to cook anything found in the meat section and that some of it, if purchased, was just as likely to eat us as we were to eat it.
Nightlife
We got in on New Year's eve and despite what we had heard, the place was a ghost town. Everything shuts down for New Years. We amused ourselves driving around looking for donkeys and watching local fireworks. I don't think there is a word in papiamentu for "nightlife"...it simply doesn't exist. Think "tropical retirement community with cute employees" (Dutch waitresses) and you have the idea.
That being said, we figured some things to help out the traveler who decides to look for more to do than just dive.
- City Cafe is the best place to go on the island for nightlife (Dutch waitresses and Amstel Brights...your two best friends on the island).
- If nothing is going on at City Cafe, try Karel's down the street.
- You are in for a real treat if the Dutch are doing karaoke...their songs are a riot.
- Things don't get going until around 11 pm, so plan to stay out late to hit the peak time for Bonaireian nightlife (remember, the peak ain't much and usually not worth going out at all). Most bands/DJs don't start until around 10:30-11:00 pm local time.
- Time is EST +1 hour.
Lodging
Definitely stay in a resort if you want to meet other people to hang out with. The Plaza resort has a wonderful beach...we never saw the inside of the resort, but didn't need to to know this would be the place we would stay on a return trip.
Captain Don's Habitat - we only stayed one night, but it seemed pretty nice. We met two groups of US tourists that had had their rooms broken into on successive nights and had lost digital camera outfits, miscellaneous dive gear, and money. Of course they locked everything and took precautions, but there isn't much you can do when your room is broken into (they were eating in the hotel restaurant when it happened).
Happy Holiday Homes - we stayed here for 10 nights...nice place and very adapted to diving with hoses, rinse buckets, and clotheslines for your wet stuff. There was no a/c in our main rooms, but there were in the bedrooms...not a concern in Jan, but might have been in the heat of summer. There were only about 10 or so units and it wasn't a social gathering type of place...very functional accommodations though.
The hotel safes are just for money and important documents. The safes in both our rooms were not large enough for most underwater cameras or dive lights.
Theft
This aspect of a Bonaire trip deserves its own category. I thought all the pirates were gone from the Caribbean, but it turns out they just moved to Bonaire and became land based. You will be much better off when you realize that everyone is out to rip you off. We ain't no naive small towners either (I live in Washington DC and SG lives in Baltimore), so we know big cities and crime. This place is worse than either one, IMHO, and the population is just a tad over 10k. However, the degree to which you get bent over (and you will) can be minimized by being assertive and using cautious planning/practices.
In your vehicle, as mentioned before, you cannot lock your car or roll up your windows. Even if you don't plan to, get the insurance. Crime is too rampant here to put yourself at risk. Everything is a potential target for theft....especially at night. We parked our car at Angel City for a night dive and came out to find the locals had conveniently turned off our interior light, gone through all our stuff, and scattered it about the car. There were numerous tales from people we encountered about thefts from vehicles and three articles in the local free paper (The Reporter) about incidents that had occurred recently including a local woman who was put in the hospital for trying to thwart a mountain bike theft.
If you leave it, they will steal it. If you operate on this premise, you will be ok. That goes for dive gear, cameras, shoes, and even dirty shorts and ratty t-shirts. The people are unscrupulous pilferers and will take anything not chained down..and they will take that and the chain if they can figure out how before you get back. Trust us on this one...the theft reports are NOT exaggerated.
We did some night dives and found this to work: Kit up at your hotel (in full wetsuit) and ONLY take what you will take underwater...nothing else...not a towel, not dry clothes to change into after the dive...they will take these if left in the car.
You have to be careful at the bars, restaurants, souvenir shops, hotels, and at the dive sites. If I didn't mention it, I forgot, and you should be careful there too.
Miscellaneous
The Internet cafe at City Cafe is great. It has fast connections and competitive rates. The one across the street from Cultimara on the second floor has really slow connections and charges about the same rates, so save yourself the headache if you need to check email and access the Internet.
Wildlife
The donkey sanctuary is not really worth the drive out to it since the donkeys are all over the place anyway. You can pet them anywhere you please since they are readily available at all your favorite local hangouts. They seem to like tortilla chips really well and will practically climb into the truck if you pull up to them and offer some chips.
Watch for iguanas in the north and on the road back through Rincon (unless you like the crunching/popping sound of a lizard hit at high speed). It is easy to speed here since there are no police and the lizards are hard to avoid if you are exceeding 70-80 km/h.
Goats, dogs, cats, donkeys, etc. litter the roadways at night and you should exercise caution when driving at night lest you hit one of the poor critters.
Diving
At last, on to the diving! The most touted of Bonaire's offerings.... We managed to squeeze in 25 dives, some snorkelling, and some freediving. We did 4 night dives and all our dives were on EANx32.
Most of the advice we got before going was pretty on the mark...but here is some of it again with a few of our own observations.
- Boat dives are not worth it (we did 1). The vis was a little better, but other than that the dives are the same on Klein Bonaire as they are from the shore of the main island.
- Oil Slick Leap is now open with a new ladder, but is not yet marked with a yellow rock. You can dive it by turning left right at the sharp corner that leads up towards Karpata and 1000 steps, etc...look at the map and you can pick out where it should be. You will know you found it when you see the nice new aluminum and concrete ladder.
- Alice in Wonderland and The Lake have really neat coral formations and were among our favorite sites (along with Red Slave, 1000 steps, and Invisibles).
- The book rating system (the Bonaire Shore Diving book) is a little off. Don't let things called "Advanced" or "Intermediate" throw you off...the entries and exits we did were all pretty easy.
- Current? What current? People were obsessed with current down there. We couldn't figure it out. On a number of dives as we headed back to the car I would get asked if the current was bad today. I finally stopped saying no after I heard how difficult one couple's exit had been (crawling on their hands and knees to the shore through the rocks) and started qualifying it with "compared to the Atlantic, there is no current. Where do you usually dive?" and taking it from there.
- The Salt Pier is a nice night dive.
- On night dives watch out for urchins on your exits...they come out at night and are all over the shallows. We just kept the lights on and waded in as far as we could with masks in the water watching for them.
- There are no large fish on Bonaire...sans a couple medium sized tarpon. If you want to see sharks, large barracuda, etc. stick to North Carolina or your local equivalent. Bonaire is like diving in a giant aquarium with lots of small stuff, but if you are into the big fish you will be disappointed.
- Most sites look very, very similar to one another. There is the double reef system in the south, but you are diving basically the same reef no matter where you go...just at different spots. There isn't any variety as far as wrecks, caves, etc. go...this is all reef diving and best done at 60' or shallower where the light and colors are better.
- Dives in the north and south seemed better than the dives in the middle.
- Eighteenth Palm and Windsock are not worth doing.
- Vista Blue had naked men wandering around picking up shells on the beach. Based on that, I would include it as a "must skip" too unless someone can guarantee that the men won't be there ever, ever again.
- 1000 Steps is well worth the climb and is a nice night dive too. Don't let the name or the steps deter you...they aren't hard to negotiate.
- Do not pay $5 to dive the La Machaca wreck off the pier of whichever operation it lists in the book as being the place to dive the wreck/reef from (can't remember the name...we gave our book to a Dutch couple before we left the island). The wreck is very tiny with not much on it and you can dive it from The Cliff dive site by just following the reef south (that's how we did it and didn't have to pay $5 each).
- Photo Tours Divers was the operation we dived with and we cannot say enough good things about them. Unlimited nitrox was exactly that...sometimes we had 8 tanks out at a time with no hassles from the shop. We never once had to use air for lack of full nitrox tanks waiting for us when we brought the empties back. Just drop your empties in the empty pile, analyze some new ones, load up your truck and go. They also had 24 hour access to air tanks should the need for a 4am dive strike you and you forgot to get tanks while the shop was open.
Closing thoughts on diving....in our estimation the diving was not markedly better than diving off our own coast. In our opinion, North Carolina diving is better...we see larger life, historical wrecks, and have just as warm water temps and the vis is about the same. That being said, we are a couple of wreck heads and if you like taking pictures of small fish, coral formations, and sponges, this will be right up your alley.
What we Liked Best
- Ease of diving/capability to do multiple dives on your own schedule with your own profile and plan. You can do whatever you want here, just don't touch anything or spearfish. No annoying DM led dives that turn when the resident boat hoover gets to 1500!
- The night diving was great. We saw octopi, squid, tarpon, eels, and the bioluminescence was very cool.
- Water temp was consistently 79 degrees. That being said, be smart about it. You may be fine in 79 degree water in a 3mm shorty, but what about after 4 repetitive dives?
- Relaxed attitude/atmosphere of the island. It takes a little getting used to "island time", but the island can be very relaxing. It is NOT a mecca for singles like some of the other places that have great night life and diving (Cozumel for instance).
- Dutch women
- Our dive operation and the unlimited nitrox package...both first class and well done.
- Double reef dives were usually very cool.
- Donkeys...they are everywhere and the little fuzzy ones are kinda cute. They are also a lot less likely to steal from you than the locals.
Disclaimer - your mileage may vary...this was based on our limited experiences on our trip and obviously things change and have associated variability.
