Another new island for me. Bonaire used to be (still is I guess) the B in the ABC Islands (Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao), but since 101010 (10 Oct 2010) is the B in the BES Islands (Bonaire, Eustasius, Saba), which are now a special municipality of the Netherlands.
History lesson over! We were docked behind Britannia. She didn’t look much bigger when we got off, but when we saw them from a distance, you could see she was a bigger lady!
Rob, Linda, Barbara and I went on a private round island tour. On the way to the minibus, we passed the oldest building on the island. It is now the courthouse and dead opposite the prison. The prison houses 102 Bonarians, which to me seems high for a population of just over 19,000. Heading to the south of the island, we passed vast salt pans. They were all varying shades of pink, depending on how far along the evaporation process they were. In the middle were enormous mounds of salt that was graded by size. The larger grains (I’m talking fist size here) are used for water softeners and such like and the smaller ones are used for pharmaceutical and medical type things. There was a ship in that was loading from a conveyor belt that went over the road. They are only exported to the US.
We saw some flamingoes, as they breed around there. Caribbean flamingoes, don’t you know. As we were driving along, we saw a really long line of the birds flying in the distance. Bonaire is another windy island and we saw some freestyle windsurfers. Boy can they shift through the water.
Off to the north of the island next. We passed lots of coral walls, three types of cacti and three types of mangroves. There are a lot of feral goats and donkeys on the island. I saw quite a few of the former and none of the latter. They use one of the types of cactus to make hedges.
We saw a tree with a huge termite nest on it, lots more flamingoes and while we were stopped a pair of Safroon Finches (correct spelling for Bonaire) played around our wing mirror.
Washington Slagbaai National Park next. There was a Bryde’s Whale skeleton there that had been reassembled by some school children. The whale had arrived on the bow of a Princess cruise ship earlier this century, but was already dead before stowing aboard. One surprise at the park was the availability of free Wi-Fi. So I uploaded yesterday’s blog. It was really fast.
Then back through the village of Rincon to Kralendijk. We strolled into the little town and had coffee and pie (and some tasty ice cream) before the girls did a little window shopping and Rob and I had a couple of bottles of Bonaire Blond beer. Despite the name, it’s now brewed in the Netherlands but to a local recipe with local ingredients. In the bar were two ornate ceiling lamps. One of them contained a Safroon Finch nest and the bird was flying around. Another good port day.
After dinner Rob, Barbara and I sat on the Terrace Deck and killed one of my more expensive bottles of Tannat. I think we all preferred the cheaper one. It was rather surreal. As it was dark and we could not see the horizon, the moon appeared to be moving up and down rather than the ship.
It was a pub quiz in Champion’s tonight. We scored 27/30 and won the tie break. So only our third bottle of wine although not our third victory as before they were giving out prize stickers. We didn’t do too badly in the Syndicate Quiz either, we scored 14 and the tie-break winners scored 18. Sadly, it wasn’t table 39 this time, hahaha.