5-18-09 Day 2 in Bonaire

Today was another fabulous day. We did 3 dives in total today – 1 in the morning, 1 in the afternoon, and one night dive. The morning dive was the best. We saw 2 drumfish, eels, porcupinefish, and a super huge tarpon. However, the coolest thing ever was as we were surfacing, we encountered a huge school of fish. There must have been hundreds of thousands of them swimming together. They all turned synchronously and moved as one mass. It was amazing. It was also amazing to see them divide and then join together again as they swam past us. I tried to get some videos of their swarming behavior but was unable to get my camera to work properly, bummer! Our second dive was not super special as in we didn't see anything out of the ordinary but was good nonetheless. We did our night dive ourside our hotel. We saw some arrowcrabs, several different types of eels, huge tarpans, and a cute little rock crab. There were also some brittle stars but they shied away from the light very quickly. I think I saw an octopus but it got out of the light too quickly for me to be sure.

After our night dive, an interesting thing happened. The city lost electricity. Well, most of the city, a couple restaurants seemed to have generators. And the airport seems all electrified up. But we were without light and were forced to get dinner in town instead of cooking at hone as we had planned (bought lots of food at the supermarket today). After dinner, I came back and laid by the ocean and watched the stars. It was beautiful. There are always plenty of stars to be seen when on one of these tropical islands but without the hotel lights, i could see star systems between the stars, at least that's what it looked like, maybe I was hallucinating :). But in any case, very peaceful and beautiful,, staring at stars and listening to the ocean waves, and feeling the refreshing ocrean breeze.

Day 1 - morning dive + afternoon dive

We got off to a great start today with a morning orientation dive and an awesome afternoon dive. It took me a while to get back into the swing of things and get used to being underwater again. Having put on sunblock and thus having my mask lead was not helpful. Neither was trying to figure out the best way to carry and take pictures with my camera + external flash. So I didn't see anything too awesome during the first dive. But the first dive is almost never very productive.

After diving, we drove into the city for nourishment. We had lunch at Watta Burger (how fitting), and it was very yummy, surely enhance by our hunger.

Then after lazying around a bit at the hotel we headed off to our second dive at Pink Beach. This time, no mask issues, and I was getting the hang of the camera setup. We saw many eels, tiny baby ones to big intimidating ones, a gimpy turtle with a bite taken out of his shell (he looks like he'll make it though, he's a fighter), scorpion fish, and sea cucumbers, and a tiger's tail. A very excellent dive. And the on shore, we chased after a flamingo (it was better than us though).

Here are some pictures for your enjoyment. Sorry I haven't had a chance to fix them up yet, no good editing software on my EEE.

Bon Bini na Bonaire!!
I have arrived, a bit tired, but nothing some cold water and
some nourishment can't fix.

Our plane landed around 4:30 AM and we napped for a couple hours until our dive orientation. Now we've got our dive gear, a map of dive sites, and are ready to go! (Well, still waiting for the car to get here.)

I think it's time for a morning dip in the poo!

picture upload complete

I've uploaded all my trip pix:

Kyoto pix

Himeji pix

Tokyo pix

Nanjing pix

I'm still working on the captions.

This is my last posting for this trip.