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!