Snorkel Adventure in Klein Bonaire

For those of you who think all I do is go to the Caribbean and play all day long, here is some fodder to support your argument.

For the record, there was no ship in port today and the store was closed. So we couldn't work. This was my first full day off EVER on a Caribbean business trip. And we made the most of it. Check out the video of our experience here, or scroll down to read more details.


"We", by the way, is Justin and me. Justin is the Regional Sales Director for this area. We decided to team up on this trip to get more done and it's been highly productive. You'll see him in pictures below.

After a great breakfast at our hotel, we picked up water, sunscreen, and snacks at the supermarket and then headed downtown. We took the water taxi "Kantika di Amor" across to Klein Bonaire at noon. In the picture above, we're standing on Bonaire, but you can see Klein Bonaire in the background, just above the roof of the boat. ("Klein" is Dutch for "little" - it's a little island).

The water taxi takes about 20 minutes to get across to Klein Bonaire and they drop you off at No Name Beach. The front of the boat drops down so you can just walk off onto the soft sandy beach.

For only US $15 return, it's a great service and makes for a cheap and awesome day trip.

No Name Beach, from what we hear, is the only true sandy beach in all of Bonaire. As this is the first and only beach I've ever been to on Bonaire, I can't dispute that. All boats bring their passengers here because it's the only spot on the 6+ mile circumference (about 10k) of the island that doesn't have coral reef protecting it.

So we walked up to the north end of the beach and snorkeled around. It was nice, but not spectacular. Lots of fish, a few corals I'd never seen before. But the colors weren't as bright as I was expecting.

So we played on the beach for a while and ate some food and then hiked down south to Buoy B (No Name Beach is at Buoy A. It's a rough walk.

You walk south because the current (albeit a weak one) runs north. So when you finally get in, you can drift (slowly) back to No Name Beach for your ride back. By this point, Justin had seen a turtle and gone off to swim after him. Later I found out he swam into an eel. I kept going because I wanted to see more of the reef.

So the reef runs pretty much unbroken around the entire island (except for No Name Beach). However, there are small sections every once in a while, maybe 5 to 10 feet wide, where you can swim through it. As you can see in all of the water pictures above, the light blue/teal water is the shallows. Then the dark blue is the deep ocean. The reef divides the two, with no middle ground whatsoever. The second you cross the reef, the bottom drops out and it's very intimidating. Only snorkel Klein Bonaire if you're really confident in your swimming and snorkeling abilities. Because once you cross the reef, you can't get back in.

So if you run into trouble out there, you don't really have any options. Because if you try to swim through the coral, you'll end up in worse shape than whatever the problem was you were swimming away from. Plus there's fire coral here, which I had never seen before, but it's COOL.

I saw tons of fish and lots of different types of coral. Besides the regulars - Parrotfish, Sergeant Majors (the zebra striped fish, there's one in the pic above), a few French Angelfish (love them!), the Blue Tangs (Dori from Finding Nemo), and all the others - there were a few sightings that got me particularly excited.

First, turtles are always exciting.

This was the third (of four) turtle I swam into today. He was the most photogenic and least camera shy. I also saw a sting ray (always fun) and a flounder. But my personal favorite from today was a giant purple lionfish. Let me rephrase that. A LIONFISH.

When I first saw it, I thought it was a fan coral. But when i saw it move, I knew. And had to get a closer look (it was about 35 feet below me - my camera has a depth gauge). When it saw me dive, it retreated into a nook in the coral. I couldn't find him when I got down there, so no pic. :( [It looked just like this.] It's probably for the best though. They're so venomous and I'm stupidly curious, so things could have gone downhill quickly. And remember that part about not being able to get back to shore because the reef blocks the path?

By the way, Lionfish aren't native to the Caribbean so seeing one here is rare. They're an invasive predator that destroy everything and kill all the fish and are basically the worst thing to happen to life in the coral reefs. But my goodness are they pretty.

I got back to the beach and found Justin and we took our pic on the beach for the corporate newsletter (Justin is in Del Sol flip flops, shorts, shirt, and hat. I'm in Cariloha sandals and shirt, Del Sol shorts and sunglasses - we were definitely reppin' our brands).

We caught the 4:30 water taxi back to Bonaire, quick dropped off our rented mask, fins, and snorkel at Dive Friends, and then went back to the hotel for showers and de-sanding our bits and pieces.

We caught the sunset...

...and grabbed a bite to eat at the PureOcean restaurant at the Divi Flamingo resort.

It was a great day off. Now it's back to work.

Maho Beach St. Maarten (Airport Beach)

Maho Beach was the only thing I wanted to accomplish while visiting St. Maarten because it is one of the most unique beaches in the world. There's nothing particularly amazing about the sand or the water (although both are surprisingly great and an added bonus). For Maho, it's all about location. And that location is basically on the runway.

Watching the planes fly just barely overhead is a lot of fun. And trying to time a picture of the moving plane behind you while not looking at it is a lot more difficult than I thought it would be. But luckily there are quite a few small planes landing and taking off to give you practice.

But the most fun is when the big jets take off.

Honeymoon

We're back from our honeymoon!! It was amazing. Most of the pictures are up on Facebook now, but I'll post a few here to show you all the cool places we went.

Our honeymoon had three parts. The first part was Disney World:


It was so much fun. It was freezing cold, but that kept the lines down in the morning. Big thanks to Isa's friend Tom who works at Animal Kingdom and got us in for free each day. We rode everything from Space Mountain to the Tea Cups. :)

Next stop was Landon and Mel's house in Fort Lauderdale. They're good friends of mine from Del Sol and were kind enough to open their home to us for the weekend. They're awesome. We took out their beach cruisers and rode down to the beach.


And we did a little house shopping.



The last part of the honeymoon was a 12-day cruise. We started in Miami, took two days at sea straight to Aruba (we were next to Haiti when the earthquake hit) and then went to Cartagena (Colombia), Colon (Panama), Limon (Costa Rica), and Grand Cayman. It was pretty darn fantastic. We were excited not only for the itinerary, but one of my friends was the shopping guide on the ship (we had worked together in Alaska last year):



This is us sitting on a Divi Divi Tree on Eagle Beach in Aruba. :) We. Love. Aruba.



Check out the size of this flag in Cartagena! Can you see us below it? We're teeny!!



I still can't believe we went to the Panama Canal! That was so cool to see and so interesting. I HIGHLY recommend it.



We hiked through a rain forest in Costa Rica. We saw monkeys, sloths, and lots of other animals. We ended up on this little beach and we climbed out on this palm tree.



Our last stop was Grand Cayman. If you've been there, you know there's one thing everyone MUST do: Swim with the Stingrays. We went to Stingray City and we loved it! They were so much fun to play with. Apparently, if you kiss a stingray, you get 7 years good luck. With Isa and I just recently married, we thought starting out our life together with 7 years of good luck would be a great start.



That brought us back to Miami and we hopped on a flight back to New York. Now we're getting back into real life, with Isa in school and me getting a temporary job here in the City. (We have a surprise plan for the Summer!) :)

Thanks for reading! See you again soon.

Culebra

Culebra is a little island about halfway to St. Thomas. When we bought our tickets in the morning, they told us that the return ferry was "conditional." Basically, if the weather turned any worse they would cancel the ferry and we'd be stuck on the island for the night, and Isa would miss her flight back to New York the next morning.

We figured it was worth the risk. :)

The ferry ride over was crazy. The people on the top deck were screaming like they were on a roller-coaster. I thought the boat would flip a few times. Way fun.

The island was gorgeous. We went straight to Flamenco Beach, which apparently is rated as one of the best beaches in the world. I beg to differ, but whatever. What do I know about tropical beaches, right? It was pretty, but one of the best, I don't know.



The coolest part of the beach were the abandoned tanks out on the LEFT side of the beach (not the right, as Isa and I found out when we hiked all the way out past the rocks into the bees nests and found no tanks).



At the end of the day, there wasn't a cloud in the sky and the water was calmer than a lake, so we had no problem going home:

El Yunque

Yay. Isa came down to visit me. :)

We went out to El Yunque. This is the only tropical rain forest in the US. It was amazing. I've never driven though anything like it before. My favorite part was all the bamboo. I don't think I've ever seen bamboo growing in the wild. It was pretty exciting for me. You know, I'm pretty simple to amuse. :)

We went out and hiked to a waterfall and then continued up (off the trail) along the river. It was fun.


You should watch the video: I swung from a vine over a river just like Tarzan. It was awesome.

Puerto Rico

Woohoo! I love this island! I've only been here a week but it is quickly becoming one of my favorite islands. The people here are great, the energy level is high, and the island is beautiful.

I've been working a lot, but I just went and explored Old San Juan yesterday. I'll post a video on YouTube shortly, but here are some pics to start out with.

This is El Castillo San Felipe del Morro (watch my video about it):



And this is my apartment. Pretty sweet, huh? :)