Day 16

I have a confession to make: for a smart person, sometimes I make some pretty dumb decisions.

Take today, for instance.  I'm just getting over the flu, so I decided to speed up my recovery by "sweating it out," as they say.  I hopped on my bicycle and pedaled south, hoping to see the slave huts and then turn around.  It was supposed to be about seven miles there, seven back.  That's a lot for me, but I had all day and it sounded doable.  Unfortunately, I made the poor decision to keep going after I hit the slave huts.  And I kept going until I got to the southern tip of the island.

Here's the thing about biking, though: when you go a certain distance on a bike, you have to do it again to get home.  You have to do it twice.  I may have forgotten this fact today, and I ended up cycling about 24 miles.  My butt hurts!!!

I didn't really plan on going all the way to the bottom of the island.  Whoops.

At least the bike ride was pretty!  I got to see lots of nice beaches, colorful salt pans, and beautiful vistas.  No flamingos, but maybe next time!

Pretty pink!

Bonaire has two main industries: tourism and salt.  The entire southern third of the island is made of salt pans, which are basically big drying fields for salt.  Seawater is pumped in, the water evaporates, and the sea salt is left behind.  The salt industry has been operating here for hundreds of years, starting with slave labor producing salt for the Dutch mainland.  Today, the salt flats are operated by a company called Cargill.

The salt pans are beautiful shades of pink, blue, and sometimes green.  These colors aren't the salt itself, but the color of the salt-loving bacteria that thrive in the super-salty water.

Once the salt is dried up, it's collected into enormous cone-shaped piles.

Salt piles.

The white stuff on the edges of the salt pans isn't salt.  It's foam!  Kinda gross foam, but probably not any more gross than the foam at a frat house foam party.

This stuff jiggles like jello when the wind blows.

Mmm, foam.

Once in a while, a ship will come and dock at the Salt Pier to pick up the salt.  The Salt Pier is a great diving spot, because large shoals of fish like to loiter around the pier supports.  I dove the site a few years ago, and I'd love to do it again soon!

This is the Salt Pier!

It's actually kind of pretty.

If you've ever wondered how shore-diving works, here it is: you park your pick-up (or ute, if that's what you like to call it) near the water so you don't have to carry your gear far.  Then you just walk right in!

A few pelicans were diving into the water for fish.  They aren't really afraid of people.

The salt pans are pretty, but I wouldn't go swimming in them.  Probably illegal, and also not good for your skin.

There's a moat between the road and the salt pans.  Not sure for what.

This one is light blue.

I have a bicycle.  It's a Dutch bicycle, which I'm told means that it's good-quality.  It's also made for a Dutch man.  The average height of a Dutch man is 6.0 feet, and my feet are about six inches off the ground when I'm on it.  My lovely housemate had someone weld the bar down lower, like on a women's bike, to make it easier for me to get on and off.  I am glad to have this bicycle, but I also hate it with every fiber of my being.  It also might be trying to kill me.

I fight with this bicycle every day.  Mostly, I lose.
This is a rare photo of it standing by itself.

That box on the back?  It falls off every time I hit a bump.  No fragile stuff goes in there.  I always lose a few eggs on the ride home from the grocery store.

The most common pose of my bicycle.  I'm not sure if the kickstand is defective or what, but this thing REFUSES to stand up on its own.

But back to pretty things near the Salt Pier.

Beach, of sorts.  There wasn't much in the tide pools, to my disappointment.

The road is actually pretty nice and smooth, for the most part.

More tide pools.

There are four large, colored pyramids on the island's west coast.  They are blue, white, red, and orange, and they once served as markers for the incoming salt traders.  The colors were indicative of the quality of the salt they could get at that 'port.'  Today there's only one place to pick up salt (the pier) but the pyramids still stand.  The first pyramid, the blue one, is at the current location of the Salt Pier.

The next one, white, is further down.

Very picturesque.

The white one is my favorite.

Farther south on the island, you can find mangroves just off the road.  I love mangroves!

Pretty, and great for the environment!

I went looking around in the mangroves, hoping to find some nice baby fish or crabs.  I found this guy, but sadly, he was already dead.

Pretty good size!

Down at the southern tip of the island, the red and orange pyramids are very close to each other.

The red one and this building are fenced off for some reason.

There are some ruins of some old buildings, and no signs to tell you what they were used for.  Bummer.

I like signs.

Then, just past that building, is the orange pyramid and the slave huts.  (There are white slave huts farther north, but there are more slave huts at this location.)  The dive site here is called Red Slave, and I once saw an enormous loggerhead turtle here.

The slave huts are reconstructions.

A painting on a sign, depicting men and women carrying salt to the boats.

Orange pyramid.

Slave huts!

At least the slave huts had a nice view, right?

This is basically as far south as you can go before turning up toward the east coast.  I didn't want to go on the east coast, so I turned around.  Pretty soon, I saw a wild donkey!  They're pretty common, and their poop is literally everywhere.  Literally.  You would cry if you knew how much donkey poop people step in without knowing here.

His eye looks like a ^_^ face, right?

A picturesque scene.

In case you were worried about the poor defenseless donkeys--although I can't imagine any reason to be--you can rest assured that they are looked after.  There is a donkey sanctuary just south of the main town of Kralendijk, and all the donkeys are tagged and checked on once in a while.  They're fine.

On my way back home, I stopped to check out the kite surfing spot.  It was super windy today, and there were quite a few kiteboarders taking advantage of the weather.

See all the kites?  I count six in this photo, but there were over a dozen people in the water.

The only place to buy food at the kite boarding spot.  They have reasonable prices, though I can't vouch for the food.  They also sell a lionfish burger, which I might have to try.

They've got windsocks to tell the kite surfers which way the wind is blowing.  Lots of extra kites on the beach.

And last but not least, here's a few of the panoramas I took today.  I look forward to the day when I can afford a camera that will stitch them together for me.

Salt pans.

A tide pool near the Salt Pier.

Tide pool near the road.

Salt pans.

More salt pans.

More salt pans!

More tide pools.

More pink salt pans.

More salt pans!

 And that about sums up my day.  Did I mention that my butt really hurts?  It hurts a lot.

My dive camera is on the fritz, and I'm not very happy with the photos it takes, but hopefully I'll get some nice-ish photos to put up soon!  Wish me luck!

Cheers,
Ashton

Day 12

The bad news is, I've come down with the flu!  Fortunately it's just a mild one, mostly causing me to feel tired, sore, achy, slightly nauseated, and a little confused.  It comes in waves, so I'll feel fine for about twenty minutes and then the next twenty minutes  I'll feel like I've just taken a few Vicodin on an empty stomach.  I've also chemically burned all the fingers on my left hand by cutting up jalapenos without gloves.  Boooo.

The good news is that I've crossed something off my bucket list that's been on there for three years: prepare, cook, and eat my very own Bonairean lionfish!

Those spines are venomous!  Fortunately you can cut them off with scissors.

Now to be fair, I didn't catch this lionfish myself.  Only long-term residents of the island are allowed to take the lionfish hunting class and get a speargun for fishing them.  Lionfish are an invasive species; they have no natural predators, can eat everything, and multiply like crazy.  To help curb the lionfish problem, they can be hunted by divers with spring-loaded spearguns called ELFs, which is an acronym for 'eradicate lion fish.'  Lionfish are the only animals you can go spearfishing for.

Now, on Monday I finally caved to the cold and bought a 5mm wetsuit, and I was very excited to try it out.  I went on a dive last night intending to be a lionfish spotter, but the new wetsuit was too tight around my neck and was making me dizzy, so I had to end the dive after a few minutes.  Fortunately we were a team of three, so my two buddies, one of whom is a legal lionfish hunter, kept going, and came back with the beautiful specimen pictured above.

My buddies exiting the water.  The guy in front has a PVC container for holding the lionfish.  You don't want to stick yourself with their venomous spines!  They can still stick you when they're dead.

Being a kind and generous soul, (and also because I asked very nicely,) he bequeathed the lionfish unto me.  I was so excited that for my entire bike ride home, I sang a little song about my pretty new lionfish and how tasty he was going to be.

It's a big one!

Once home, I realized that we didn't have any knives sharp enough to filet my fish.  My dive knife was perhaps not the perfect choice, but it got the job done.

Isn't my dive knife pretty?  I love that thing.

Lionfish are an easy fish to filet--if you've got the proper knife.  You make a cut behind the gills, along the backbone, and along the belly, then peel back the skin and cut along the bones.  Hopefully next time I'll remember to scrape off the scales first.  I admit that I definitely need more practice!

First cuts made, and skin peeled back to the tail.

Can't believe I forgot about the scales.  What a mess.

Two good-sized filets!

As far as fish go, lionfish are a very non-fishy fish.  Once I threw away the carcass, there was no smell of fish left in the house.  They look fatty and good for sushi (and I've heard that the sushi restaurants here serve it a lot) but I didn't have the stuff to make sushi.  I did, however, remember seeing cilantro, limes, roma tomatoes, onions, and jalapenos in the three grocery stores on the island--all the makings of pico de gallo.  I went out and got my ingredients, but came down suddenly with flu symptoms when I got home.  So sadly, my lionfish filets went into the fridge.

Today was better but I'm still obviously sick, so I got sent home from work.  After a five-hour nap, I finally felt well enough to hold a knife.

Because I'm just one person and I had two good-sized filets, I decided to try two different ideas--because who needs recipes, right?  The first idea was a combination of ceviche and pico de gallo.

Ceviche de gallo!  Pico de lionfish!

Wow!  It's incredibly delicious!  I honestly didn't expect it to be so good.  Plus it's very simple and easy to make.  I give myself a 10 out of 10 on this one.

If I didn't have the flu, I'd have eaten it all already.

My other 'idea' was to just take every spice on the shelf and throw it on.  I rubbed a mixture of garlic salt, oregano, black pepper, and paprika on the filet, then pan-fried it in butter.

Oh my goooooodness it's so good!

Tender, moist, juicy, flavorful, melt-in-your-mouth--this thing was perfect.  And it took less than five minutes to season and fry it.  The only fly in the ointment was that it had a few little bones in it, but it certainly made the house smell amazing.

Mmmmm.  This recipe gets a 10 out of 10 too!

Lionfish is really healthy too; it's got lots of omega 3 fatty acids and protein.  Yum!  I can't wait to try lionfish sushi!

Here's hoping I get better and can help hunt for more lionfish soon!  :)

Cheers,
Ashton