Bon Dia!
Jul 29th, 2008 by jcchickles
Which means “Good Day” in the local language of Bonaire (Papiamentu). It’s quite the mish-mosh of a language – Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, English, French with a hint of African and some Indian tribe influences.
It was a great vacation! My parents convinced Derek and I to update our Scuba certification for the trip, and what a great call that was. It was awesome! The trip was planned through the dive shop my parents got certified at (www.gobedivers.com), so there was a large group from Colorado that all went together….which was really nice since that meant we got the boat to ourselves all week! Everyone was great! Peter from the dive shop did our final skills update with us upon our arrival in Bonaire. He was a very calming presence, which was great since I have to admit that I was a tad nervous that first time out after such a long time. Derek took right to it as you can see from his pose below. 😉
The resort we stayed at had a terrific kid program in the mornings and then Derek and I would hop on the boat and get in a couple of dives with the rest of the group until we needed to pick them up. The kids got to do all kinds of cool stuff. Snorkeling, playing in the pool, a trip to the Donkey sanctuary (yes, I said donkey) and for 2 of the days Theresa actually got to try out scuba diving!! She took right to it. Of course, at her age she stayed between 10-15 feet. She got all of the hand signals down and all of the important safety skills including clearing her mask under water and buddy breathing. Afterwards, she was better at naming all of the different types of fish and eels than we were!
In the afternoons, we took the kids on the boat with us and we took turns snorkeling with them. We saw all kinds of cool stuff – seahorses, turtles, lots of eels, tons of fish (of course), and some amazing reefs. One of the highlights was actually on our last day, where Derek and I got to see an octopus out in the open changing colors as it landed on various surfaces. Wow – was that cool! Theresa actually saw this same octopus when she was diving with her instructor. This particular octopus had it’s den not to far off the pier from where we were staying. 🙂
Of course, we couldn’t spend the whole week diving. We took the opportunity to check out the island and do a little off-roading in the Slagbaai National Park there. The only roads in the park are dirt and it was very interesting in our styling Mitsubishi “van” (more like a small bus). First stop “Playa Chikitu” where the sand felt like fine sugar.
There were a TON of lizards running around everywhere, including some huge iguanas and some that thought they were brave enough to try to join our picnic lunch at another stop, “Boka Slagbaai”, where we spent the afternoon snorkeling and checking out the flamingos hanging out in a large pond on the other side of the road.
We found lots of great places to eat. It was interesting with the both the heavy Dutch and South American influences in the food. We wore out the kids so much during the day, James had a hard time actually making it to the end of the dinners…and if you know James, you also know it takes a whole lot to wear this kid out! 🙂 We had to carry him out of a few places!
As with any vacation like this, it seems to fly by way too fast. Ahhhhhh….well….I guess we’ll just have to find an excuse to go back. 🙂 If you would like to see more photos from our trip, Derek has actually uploaded an album onto our site. He also included some fun little video clips he took during the trip: www.chickles.net/trips/2008_bonaire/
Time for silly faces…. 
