Happy Birthday to me!

Happy Birthday to me! Day 3. The day starts with a boat dive. Surprise , surprise! Debbie and I got up and ate, gear to the dock and into the boat. We have decided to do one boat dive a day and that being the first one in the morning.  I asked if, when we are on the boat, we could do sites that are not accessible by the shore and Karen, the dive master, was quite amenable to the suggestion. No one else had any specific requests so we headed to a place called Country Gardens. Good dive, thought we might see a seahorse but it had moved on and Karen was not able to relocate it.

J and A decided to windsurf today so they stayed on the east coast, R, B, S and J continued on with their diving lessons and are now within ½ day of being certified and A hung out by the pool and did a stint of snorkelling off the dock at the hotel.

Boat dive complete we head out on the first shore dive of the day. Salt Pier, easy to find, there is a huge pier that transports salt from the evaporation ponds to the cargo ships. It is impossible to miss and the dive is right below it. You would have to be quite distracted to drive by this particular site. The dive was great. The pier has been there a long time and the reef has built up around it and is encroaching on the supports. There are fish everywhere and the entry/exit and navigation is very easy.

Lunch at the Boudoir. Bedroom? Doesn’t make sense to me either but that is the name and that is where we ate. Good lunch considering I guess we had it served to us in bed???

It takes time to do 3 dives a day so it is now 2 or 2:30pm and we are just heading north to do the third dive, 1000 steps.  This dive is one of the well know dives on Bonaire. I guess it is a ‘must do’. The 1000 steps are really 50 or 60 and it has one of the best entry/exit points that we have been to yet, including the steps. They are not that hard to negotiate, up or down, and the dive is very good. Not as many fish as some of the other dives but the coral structure is unbelievable.

As I said earlier, it is my birthday. I get to choose the restaurant. First one I pick is closed. It doesn’t say closed, in fact it says today’s special is ribs, but it is closed. At try number 2 we ran into the first pain in the ass person on Bonaire. This woman is a totally unaccommodating restaurant owner that said she could not seat a party of 9. We had no reservations and she only had 2 wait staff and 2 kitchen staff. I don’t think she will be in business long if that is her attitude. I cannot imagine running a business and turning down potential customers that are standing at your door wanting to come in. I did not get how a table of nine which she refused to take, would differ from a table of 4, a table of 3 and a table of 2, all of which she had already accommodated because they were sitting eating. This particular lady was also under the misunderstanding that we would not be able to get served anywhere in town without a reservation. A feat which we have been able to accomplish 3 days in a row, in fact Richard, the owner of Richard’s, was absolutely thrilled to have us. Anyway try number 3, Cactus Blue, was a go. I don’t think it took them long to figure out that they could almost double there nightly business at one table. And we might even tip, being as we are from North America. There is that place again, the place where everybody that lives there is so uptight we cannot understand that it makes sense to alienate potential customers, but you can bet we will not go back to nor recommend  that lady’s restaurant. I guess it is a loss of revenue she can afford.

Bonaire still only has one strike against it and many hits for in the people category. If that continues, it may be a place to return to and Debbie and I do not really like to return to places as there are so many places to see and so few days left in our lives to see them. (We aren’t really old but life is finite and there is one heck of a lot of places to visit on this earth).

CIAO for now.

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