Day 12

Today we spent the morning practicing water rescue techniques, and of course I was the only girl to get paired up with a guy.  Have you ever tried to fireman carry someone twice your size?  It's really, really hard!  I mean it's not like Trevor is fat or anything.  But seriously, boys are heavy.

Carrying people is exhausting.

In the afternoon we had another boat dive.  This time we dove off of Klein Bonaire, which is the little uninhabited island off of Bonaire.

See that little island smack dab in the middle?  That's Klein Bonaire.

It was a great site, tons of corals and fish!  We tried to do some sciencey stuff with tools and tape measures but I'm pretty sure my mask was too foggy to record valid data.  Some of the other students saw octopi and a sea turtle!  I got a charlie horse right after surfacing--thank goodness I wasn't underwater!--and had a bit of an incident.  I didn't have my snorkel or regulator in my mouth and started choking on the water, so I was lucky that a few others were on the surface and helped me inflate and get my snorkel.  But because they were helping me, they didn't get to see the turtle!  I felt pretty bad about that.

We're like an underwater herd.

Collecting data, doing science.  

Apart from the charlie horse, I've also developed mild vertigo.  It isn't bad, except for when I'm trying to write or focus on something.  Apparently it's not uncommon for new divers, so I'm not horribly concerned.  Something to do with all the equalizing we do underwater messing up the delicate balance of the ears.  I'm sure it'll be fine within a few days but in the meantime it's pretty trippy.

Day 11

Today we went on a boat dive!  It was my first one and it was awesome.  I got down to 54 feet, which is the deepest I've ever been.  (I'm only certified to go 60 feet right now.)  I was the first to be out of air, so I need to work on breathing less.  It's just so unnatural to breathe underwater!  But I definitely think my ears are getting better at equalizing, because now I can go up and down in the water without any problems.  (Last week, if I went down and came up a few feet, I'd have to surface and redive to get deeper again.  Thank goodness that's over!)  I don't have any photos yet, since I'm still working on my buoyancy underwater and taking a camera would make it even worse, BUT one of my professors took photos so I'm trying to get copies from her.

This is week two of Diving Boot Camp, and apart from diving we've also been working hard in the classroom.  We've learned tons of different fish, corals, and algae.  We've learned how to navigate underwater, make underwater maps, and identify coral diseases.  We've learned all about dive injuries and how to treat them.  We've also been working on getting CPR and Rescue Diver certified.  There's a lot to know!  It's fun and all but I kind of hope things slow down a bit once Boot Camp is over on Sunday.  In the meantime, we have to practice all the CPR and rescue skills in class and I think we've got some pretty good actors in the group.  Of course, I took pictures.

Charlotte giving Malia a splint.

Trevor used a water bottle as a splint for Chris?

Lori bandaged me up real good.  Look at that excellent hand wrap!

I think my hand bandage for Lori was pretty good too, actually.

Running around here is great!  I go in the morning before class or at night, and it's always perfect weather.  Last night I tried to keep up with Chris and went super-fast, and ended up not feeling very well.  Tonight I walked along the water with Cammie, one of the interns (i.e., one step above us on the food chain) and we had a lovely talk.  She's a divemaster who has over 450 dives!  Then I went running and heard music, and ran waaaaay across the island trying to find it.  I found the source--a little band in the parking lot of a closed supermarket.  Unfortunately it was a bit far away and I got lost on the way back, but a nice car rental owner named Jon gave me directions!  I love how friendly everyone is here!

Now we're all home watching Finding Nemo and identifying the fish and coral species in the movie.  I love this place.  :)

Day 8

Today was a lazy Sunday.  I wandered around (and apparently out of) town and finally found the post office!  There was a cruise ship in port so there were lots of American tourists roaming about.  I went on a good 7 mile run today, so I guess I wasn't that lazy.

Yesterday we rented bikes and rode out to a dive site called 1000 Steps.  I am doubting whether it's actually a dive site because I can't imagine lugging my gear down those steps.  (There aren't quite a thousand steps but it's still a long way!)  We snorkeled and sunbathed and ate lunch there, but we had to get the bikes back by 4:30 so we couldn't stay long.  (There was apparently some copious drinking the night before so nobody else woke up early.)  It was lovely, although I have swimmers' ear so I couldn't stay in the water for very long.  I got some very cheap medicine from the botica (pharmacy), $3.00 for a bottle with no prescription, no instructions and no expiration date.  Hooray for medicine in foreign countries!

We've gone to a few bars out here and I have to say, I miss Michigan and its smoke-free policy.  Apparently all Dutch people smoke, and I absolutely cannot stand the smell of cigarette smoke.  But being blonde and standing just a few feet from a group seems to attract Dutch people.  Dutch men can be described as very tall, blonde, model-looking men, but they're not terribly attractive on the whole.  (That could have something to do with their smoking habits, though.)  They seem pretty nice friendly, I suppose.  But seriously, they're all over six feet and blonde, every single one.

Anyway, on to more pictures!  There's more in my picasa album, here!

The group in front of the slave huts.

The bar/windsurfing place in Lac Bay.

Salt, the main export of Bonaire.

Also at Lac Bay.

Me, with snorkel gear.

Underwater camera!

Something cool I found.

Lac Bay again!

Somewhere scenic.

Cool lizard!

Cool lizard close-up!

One more thing I forgot: we visited the hyperbaric chamber on Wednesday!  A hyperbaric chamber is a big tank that compresses the atmosphere to simulate an underwater environment.  They're used to treat dive injuries, because sometimes nitrogen bubbles get trapped in your body and it causes decompression sickness, or DCS.  DCS usually just causes joint aches but if you get a big enough bubble in your blood vessels it can kill you.  We got a lovely tour, but we're hoping we don't ever have to go back!

Us in the chamber.  (I'm not in there, I'm taking the picture!)

The controls.  Scary!

Day 5

Today we were supposed to dive again, but our instructor fell ill and so we took a tour of the island instead.  The island is small but it took us all day!  We started on the south end, which is mainly salt beds.  Salt is Bonaire's only export, and the salt beds (called saliñas) are evaporation beds for seawater.  'Salt beds' is a misleading name because other elements are purified out as well, like gypsum and organic materials.

All the blue/white spots at the bottom are saliñas.

The ocean view from the south end.  (Not a saliña.)

The salt beds are controlled by a company, but they're also a vital nesting area for flamingos.  Fortunately, the company carefully controls the salinity and water levels to keep them ideal for the flamingos.  We're hoping to take another trip after the babies hatch!

Flamingo in a salt bed.  (Click to make it bigger!)

Flamingos over a salt bed.

The slave huts are also on the south end.  Slaves were the original workers for the saliñas, but there's no freshwater in the south.  The solution was to have the slaves work all week in the south end, then walk to Rincon (the north end) on the weekends, where they and their families lived and had access to freshwater.  The huts are reconstructions, not the real thing, but they're still neat!  They're also very small, I could barely stand up inside.

Slave huts!  (A reconstruction, not the originals.)

There were about 20 of them, all lined up and right next to the ocean.

My roommate, Lori.  (I'm in the slave hut.)

Next we drove up the east side of the island.  The eastern side of Bonaire is very rocky, windy, and wavy.  You can't snorkel or swim there, and you can only dive on calm days.  There's a lot of trash on the shore that gets washed up by the huge waves, and there are big walls of rocks that occur naturally from storms.  We drove onto a dirt road--although it's the rainy season, so perhaps mud road is more accurate--and through a cactus desert to get to a deserted conch farm.  Conches used to be farmed on the island, but the facility went under and has been abandoned for years.  There are huge piles of conch shells lying around!

Malia with a conch shell, and a huge pile of shells behind her.

Leah and Charlotte looking for anchovies.

Moi.  

After making the difficult trek back through the mud (our van is an off-roading beast!) we went up to Lac Bay.  The bay is known for kite- and windsurfing, and there were lots of windsurfers out today.  We stopped at a bar/windsurf shop for 'refreshments' (because 12 people in one van with no air conditioning is hot) and played in the water a bit.

All the girls! 

We went back to the house for lunch, because this charming old guy named Gibi makes and delivers us personalized, handmade lunches in fruit-themed tupperware containers with our names on them.  They're adorable.  After lunch it started pouring but we went back out anyway!  I couldn't take many pictures, but we found a really cool snorkel site that we want to bike to this weekend.  (I might have an ear infection, so we'll see if that actually happens for me.)  We saw a sea turtle and an iguana there!

Iguana!

Now we're home for the night, and I'm looking for topics to do my independent research project on.  I really want to do mine on octopi, since I'm apparently the octopus-whisperer of the group.  I found two last night during our night snorkel!  We also saw bioluminescent plankton that light up when you move the water around them, so we formed a circle and kicked our fins and they lit up like fireflies!  We also see lots of moray eels and barracudas.  It's amazing what you can see in just a few feet of water here!

Day 4

Bon dia! It's been four days since I arrived in Bonaire and I've already got a pretty good tan.  (And I've been wearing SPF 70 every day!)  Every day has been sunny, 80 degrees, and clear skies.  The water is incredibly clear, and there's fish everywhere.  Some of the best fish viewing is in just two or three feet of water!  There's no sandy beaches here, but we share a dock with the Yellow Sub Dive Shop and spend a lot of time snorkeling and sunbathing from it.

There's ten of us here on the program.  We live in a house with air conditioning and hot water, which is rare for Bonaire.  Almost everyone here runs, so I always have someone to run with!  We can run right along the water, too. The first two weeks of the program is Diving Boot Camp, where we dive every day and develop skills. By the end of this program we will (hopefully) all be certified in nitrox, rescue, night, deep, and scientific diving, and also CPR/first aid. After boot camp the real classes will begin, but we'll still get to dive a lot.

The island is small. It's 24 miles long and in some places only 6 miles wide. The people here speak Papiamentu, which is a combination of Dutch and Spanish. I have a guidebook and I've been trying to learn a little. The town, Kralendijk (pronounced Crawl-en-dike), is tiny.  We can walk there in ten minutes, and the entire town can be covered end-to-end in about five minutes.  There's a grocery store called Cultimara, which doesn't sell milk but makes up for it by selling nutella for $4.  There's also an ice cream shop with reasonable prices for waffle cones!

Now for some pictures!  (Click to enlarge, and also in my album at the bottom of the page.)

The research station.  (This is across the street from our house.)

The kitchen in our house.

Our house's protection: barbed wire and broken bottles.  (We have locks and a security system too.)

This is how Bonaire looks every day.

Me!

Trevor and Chris in front of the water.

This is where I run.

Wine on the roof.  (Yes mom, it's legal here.)

Queen Parrotfish

A Juvenile Parrotfish

Scrawled Filefish

Sand Diver

Itty Bitty Crab!

Leah, the fish.  (This girl got down to 40 feet today with no gear.    Crazy!)

Spotted Moray Eel

Spotted Moray Eel (again!)

French Grunt