Bonaire contd.

The water is so blue here it doesn't even look real. There is a picture in a real estate ad that shows a place with one of those endless pools that looks out onto the ocean and the pool and ocean are virtually the same color. The native people are all really friendly, though I am still trying to figure out what language they speak. The island is owned by Holland, but is so close to Venezuela and so visited by the US that it is really hard to find what their identity here is. They even use US currency. I don't mean like they take US dollars, but that is ALL they use! From what dad said, they used to use this standard called Gilders, but now they don't even have those. US only. We went to a grocery store yesterday and bought hot dogs in a can and some weird kind of spam meat made from chicken and packed according to the religious rights of Islam... don't know exactly what that looks like, but it tasted like very lean spam. 

All the dive spots are marked by rocks painted yellow, so basically you drive down a coastal road until you see a yellow rock and then you stop, park, dive, and then drive home. Diving is a strange thing. Sure, there are young people that do it, but for the most part, it's engineers, investment bankers and other older and retiring professionals. There is a lot more gray hair in the water these days. It seemed like mostly people in their thirties when I was growing up, but now, it's still the same people and they have aged. Especailly Dad. I guess you can't go through a kidney transplant, open heart surgery, cancer treatment and two strokes and not have at least some of it show up in wear. It's like his body has gone through some sort of war, and he wears the scars on his skin and it's effects somewhere inside. I guess I probably notice it more because when we used to do this together, he was in better shape than most of the people we used to dive with, who were all younger than him. It is good though, to be able to kind of reverse roles here. He even asked me at one point if mom told me to keep an eye on him, and said that if she did, I was doing a good job! The coolest thing about it though, is that serving him feels so good. I round up his gear, carry his tanks and wait for him on our dives. I check to see that his air is where it should be and drive everywhere we go. My new role is different, but I like it, and Dad says I can carry his gear any time I want! (of course right?)

Let me explain to you what I am looking at right now. I am on a second floor patio, looking through the rungs of steel railing at the roof of a tiki hut, beyond which is several dive boats, teal ocean and in the distance, the desert mountains on the far end of the island. To my left is Klein Bonaire, which is a little island off the island that is perfectly flat and covered with cactus and very thorny vegetation. In the air are sounds of generators, construction, the lapping of th water on the natural rock seawall, and the sounds of people speaking English, Dutch, and the native language here.

We went on an 8:30 am dive this morning and then explored the downtown area and the salt mountains that lay near the salt peer from where they ship the salt all over the world. They have these huge drying beds where the pump in the salt water and let the sun evaporate out the H20 and leave the salt behind. Then they scoop it all up and load it onto huge freighters to be made into industrial salts for water softeners, etc.