Lockdown Activities

Lockdown means you entertain yourself at your house. Curfew is 9:00 pm...no one can be on the streets walking or driving. We have entertained ourselves with various activities. 

The wind blows in Bonaire. Sometimes it is strong enough to blow food off your plate.  Actually, let's be real, it can blow chips off your plate.  So we have a magnetic set of cards and a mat on which we can play card games without the cards blowing away.  Last night it was Gin...or Gin Rummy...who knows the difference. Rick had to Google it to get the rules straight.

We swim or dip in the pool several times a day.  Rick and I both swim laps.  We also swim in the ocean.  It is much, much harder to swim in ocean water than the pool.  The ocean waves and currents are often difficult to over come.  Although the ocean allows buoyancy, it seems like its a drag on swimming.

I also do yoga via Zoom once a week with my sisters.  I have a sister in Arizona and another one Colorado so it nice to see each other once a week and do something together. Yoga by Zoom is great because you can lay on the mat and slough off whenever you want and no one knows.

Walking on the beach is a favorite past time.  There is a long beach near us so we often take our walks on what is called Pink Beach.  We also take our lawn chairs and watch the sunset several time a week.  Since there is no drinking in public allowed during lockdown, we fill our water jugs with adult beverages and head for the beach.

Snorkeling is one of our favorite past times.  We try a different site every time we go.  That is how we sort out the good and bad sites. Good sites have easy entry and exits, lots of fish and critters and are close to the reef for extra fun stuff to look at without scuba diving.  Rick's ears just won't tolerate the pressure of descending and ascending in deep water. We do, however, look at all the photos people post on the expat site of their dives so we feel like we are still diving. 

Flamingo

I finally got a photo, actually a bunch of photos, of a lone flamingo wading near the road. And I got more than just butt shots with a head in the water.

So enjoy these photos.  It may be the last time I ever see a flamingo close to the road when I have my camera with me.

 

Cactus

 

The Kadushi cactus grows all over Bonaire. It is particularly plentiful in the interior and on the eastern coast. It's protected because it a vital food source for the Lora parrots in times of drought.  These cacti are on all three of the ABC's.

There is a distillery in Rincon (a small rural town in the central part of the island) that uses the Kadushi cactus to make a liqueur out of the plentiful cacti. The Cadushy Distillery harvests the cacti and make liqueurs and spirits in their 1500 square meter mecca. 

The liqueurs are named after the Dutch Caribbean islands and made using local flavors. We were not fans of the liqueurs that are served at the tasting room. The rum, gin and vodka, however, are really good and have unique flavors. 

The distillery has a toasting sign.  It shows all the words for toasting in different languages. In Dutch the word is "Proost". Good first word to learn in a foreign language.  Next we will learn "where is the bathroom".

Fences are also made from planting the Yatu cacti in straight lines.  These are all over the island.  Very effective for keeping everything out or in. And decorative too.

 

Easter

I didn't know there were seasons on Bonaire.  But the last few days I have seen everything blooming. Even the palm trees.  I think it is Spring time in Bonaire. 

This is the Kebrahacha tree only found on the ABC Islands.  The natives say it is good luck for the island when these bloom every spring.  These trees cover the island in yellow blooms.

This Century Plant is blooming next door. 

It is also Easter.  The island usually goes all out for Carnival with parades, passion plays and festivals.  Except this year.

Roman Catholics make up 60% of the island. So the island observes the religious holidays related to Catholicism. There are also a Mosque, LDS (Mormon), Pentecostal, Seven Day Adventist, and Presbyterian churches.

In addition to closures because of Covid, everything closes on Good Friday and Easter Sunday.  Everything...grocery stores, Chinese markets, restaurants (only opening in the evening serving fish for all the Catholics), government offices, banks, service companies...I mean everything closes.  Sundays are usually very quiet on the island.  Easter with Covid makes the place a ghost town.

It's tradition here to go camping for "Spring Break".  The schools are closed for a month and everyone heads to the hills and the beaches to relax. However, the lockdown does not allow for drinking in public places or gatherings of unrelated people.  This has put a damper on outside activities. The beaches are quiet and the roads are not loaded with vehicles. Everyone is staying home.

After snorkeling, we observed good Friday with a red snapper fish sandwich from Pablo's downtown.  We took our meal to the boulevard (across the street from Pablo's) and ate seaside.  We ended the evening on the beach in our lawn chairs watching the sunset.

Happy Easter Everyone!

  

 

April Fools

Oh no, it snowed in Bonaire.  

I had to trade in my flip flops for boots.

 

April Fools 

Bonaire is still as sunny, warm and beautiful as always.

Plants

I was brought up in the western United States and know about plants that grow in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.  I had a sunroom where I grew orchids and jade plants.  I had bulbs that came up every spring and flowered.  I knew how to trim, fertilize, transplant and root new plants.

Bonaire is very different.  It seems I will have to learn a new skill set.

In my yard, there are orchids that grow on trees without soil, bark, charcoal or pots.  They look awful and dry.  But they bloom and live with little or no care, as far as I can tell. 

The flowers in my yard are exotic, unusual and colorful. They grow from palm type plants, trees, and bushes.  I have no idea what they are or how to take care of them.  It seems they do fine on their own.

My neighbor gave me some plants that I know how to grow. She has a 3 foot tall basil plant.  It's the biggest herb plant I have ever seen.  I have a cutting from that beast that is doing well.  I also have a cutting from her coleus that is also in a huge pot and is 4 feet tall.

I have some giants of my own.  This beauty is about 30 feet tall.  It has big beautiful leaves and never gets watered.  It lives on the sparse rain we get.  When we trim these giants, the big leaves go out in the street for the wild donkeys and goats to eat. Trimming is a constant activity as things grow so fast here. 

We also have two golden mango trees that produce fruit. Once again, we know nothing about fruit trees in general and even less about mango trees. We do know that the Lora Parrots love mangos and we are happy to share.

We spend time on the internet to learn about the plants in our compound.  We are also planning a garden. The constant year round temps mean that we can start growing any time as there really aren't seasons.

 

Radio

We keep looking for a radio station(s) in English.  So far we have found radio stations in all sorts of languages, just none we can understand.

We also realized that we are very ignorant of the music industry of other countries.  We found that there are top 40 stations in Dutch and Spanish that have nothing to do with the American top 40.  Imagine that!

There are religious radio stations on Bonaire. Trans World Radio Bonaire constructed a superpower broadcasting site on the island in 1964 to broadcast Christian programs to Latin America. They try to reach millions of people living in Cuba, the jungles of Brazil and the surrounding Caribbean islands.

These are the towers for Transworld Radio.  They are visible from our house at night with red lights and you can see them in the southern part of the island.

Christian radio is not our cup of tea so we continue to search. In the mean time, we are happy to listen to our iPods on our little speaker or our laptops.

 

Lockdown

The government has put the island on lockdown. The Covid cases jumped from 10 to 600+ as a result of one super-spreader, after hours party of young restaurant/bar workers. They were drinking, singing and dancing.

So now we all have to act like Baptists. Everyone is encouraged to stay home.  So you seldom see anyone walking the ocean front street. No large gatherings, only one family member can go to the grocery stores, all the liquor stores are closed, and there is no singing or dancing allowed. There is also a curfew from 9:00 pm to 4:00 am.

Restaurants (they only allow take-out) have to close by 8:00 pm.   So the KFC closed at 8:17 and the police gave them a citation, fine and closed them down for two days as punishment for non-compliance. 

We think our liquor store got caught by the police for selling liquor and they closed the store. We hope it is not permanent.  We did however, find a liquor store that we could order online and they would deliver....thank God! 

The authorities also cited some beach partiers for curfew issues and drinking.  They were fined $150 each. For a tourist island and spring break time, it is really a hard lockdown.

These people are serious about lockdown measures. The small hospital has been over run.  They have 7 people in ICU unit which is all they can hold.  They have shipped people off to Aruba and Curacao that need special care. Also 10 people have died. So for a population of 20,000 that's a lot of death.  They have vaccinated just over 3,500 people with the first shot.  They have opened up vaccinations for 18 and older as they were just doing oldies and medical professionals. So they have a long way to go.

This isn't much different than lockdown in Colorado.  Only we are in a sunny, warm place and we can still go to the beach everyday and swim in our pool.

Stay well everyone!

Sunday Drive

I don't think Rick will take me for a Sunday drive again. I wanted to go see another light house that is on the sea about mid-island.  I told him it wasn't far and we would make an afternoon of it.  So we set out for a new sightseeing adventure. We packed water, sunscreen, hats and towels and a worthless tourist map.

This is what the landscape looked like.  This is also what the road looked like.  The road was a rock strewn, rutted, bumpy area that never really looked like a road anywhere.  It was 3 km of this until we got to a turn off.

We came to this ominous sign and concrete columns. It says "you have the right to enter" in English, Dutch and Spanish. The columns were barely wide enough for the Kia to enter.  We saw a pickup truck drive through so we thought we could too. We had no idea where we were, only where we were going.   

As you know, it is impossible for me to get close enough to get a decent picture of the flamingos on this island.  You can see a couple of sticks with pink blobs on top in the middle of a pond.  Those, my friends, are flamingos.  Big pink flamingos.  This is probably the best picture I will ever have of them.  They are illusive and we are not allowed to get close to them.

Spelonk Lighthouse is on Bonaire's eastern coastline.  We could see it as we drove across the Moon-like terrain.  It guided us through the desert, gulleys and rocks because there was no actual road to follow.  From both land and sea it is a beacon.

We could feel the spray of the sea as we walked the property.  This is on the windward side of the island and the seas are rough but beautiful.

There is an abandoned, spooky, rock building that served as both a lightkeeper house and fort.  It's abandoned now but still has window frames and a roof and some floors.  We think it serves as a party place for weed smoking, drinking, partying young adults, as we saw several, fitting this description  coming in as we were departing the site. 

The seas are really rough on this side of the island. Just looking at the 3-4 foot waves makes me nauseous. The land is moon-scape coral that has been sprayed with saltwater for eons.

This was the roughest road trip we have taken.  We drove 10-15 kmh the whole way.  Next time, I will check the route and road conditions.  


 

Night Time

We have not watched TV for two months. We have a TV in every room but we haven't turned them on.  I am sure the programs are only in Dutch or Spanish. We haven't missed TV and have found that we have lots to do in the evenings.

This dive site made me think about how well we sleep here and how our evening routine has changed.

Many evenings we pack up our chairs, and cooler with adult beverages and go to the beach to watch the sunset.  This is a big tradition at every island we have visited.  Everyone comes out to watch the sun setting.  Families bring dinner, everyone plays in the water and watches the show.  The sun sets at about the same time every night and it is always beautiful.

This is the harbor at sunset.  There are lots of sail boats in port these days.  I think it is a stopping point on the way to South America. The clouds make for a beautiful sunset.  this photo was taken by a local...the woman that owns the KFC in town.

We often sit by the pool and can't believe we actually made the move to Bonaire.  We feel lucky that we slipped in between Covid lockdowns and now live in a beautiful home on an island. Our dream came true.

Star gazing at home or on the beach is a favorite of ours.  We were so used to seeing the stars and planets from Colorado, that we don't really recognize things in the southern skies.  There is no big and little dipper or north star.  We do have Orion and Orion's belt, Gemini, and what we think is Mars. The moon is one of the only familiar things we see.  So it's a whole new world to learn the constellations from this view point.

These are the prime lounge chairs for star watching at home.  When there is not a curfew we often go to the beach to see the moon rise or moon set. Also a big deal with the locals.  We have seen lots of people at the beach watching the stars and the moon.... and doing other things.

We also read in the evenings.  I read my trashy love novels and Rick reads his espionage or who-done-it books with an occasional historical figure biography.  This past week was a book on Elon Musk.  Very interesting.

 

Ice

Rick and I had talked about not having a fridge with freezer or ice maker in our new place. I know, first world problems.

We have a freezer located outside the main house in a storage closet.  It works fine except it is not very convenient. 

We buy bags of ice at the Chinese market  close to our house. We all know that bags of ice are always solid when you buy them.  They require a good bashing on the sidewalk to get the cubes to break up. 

Our Chinese market provides a place exactly for that purpose. They even marked it so we would use the appropriate place to break up our ice. 😊

 

Donkeys and Goats

Bonaire has a fragile environment. It's a semi-arid, coral island with little top soil and mostly scrubby trees and little ground cover.  Which means that its soil, when disturbed, eventually finds its way into the sea and coral reefs as do other contaminates that are detrimental to the sea.

One of the threats on the island are the donkeys.  They were left by the Spaniards who used them for labor in the salt flats.  They roam free all over the island. 

They have become a tourist attraction. All are very friendly as they wander the neighborhoods because everyone feeds them.  They lay in the roads, fields and poop anywhere and everywhere. They also breed with no control.

There is a  sanctuary for sick, injured and orphaned donkeys.  They take care of some 700 donkeys.  But there are herds all over the island which probably number in the 100's.

There are also goats that roam free eating everything in their path.  There are also some goat farmers that contain their herd.  Once in a while a goat is reported stolen.  But who wants a goat? Goat stew is a popular local dish.  Not for us.  We tried it once and that was enough.

The island government has developed an environmental management plan which includes bringing the donkeys and goats into a manageable number that will not destroy the island ecology.  

The plan also includes recycling.  Recycling centers have been set up throughout the island.  We are thankful for this because we had  tons of cardboard and Styrofoam from the move. And the beer and wine bottles were piling up. The island had previously discontinued one use plastic bags at the grocery store.  I am glad I shipped my shopping bags.

Limiting the number of visitors on the island is another issue in the plan. Everyone likes the income from cruise ships but the hoards of people have an adverse impact on the reef as well as the land. The island government wants "high-end yachts" with limited people.  Really, they want only a few  rich people to come that will spend loads of money. 

 

 

 

No Free Market

Our house has a combo oven/microwave.  It's okay but not great for cooking.  Our cooktop is a glass top induction model that uses special pans. So we decided to buy a gas grill with a gas burner because we prefer it to ovens with broilers and electric burners. We went to Kooiman (our favorite Home Depot type store) and got a  grill with a side burner.  

Rick puts it together on the patio. It does not come with a propane tank nor does Kooiman sell tanks.

There is only one company that sells propane and tanks at only one facility on the island.  Curoil has a monopoly on the island. Asko, our favorite food truck owner, gives us directions to the facility.  Nothing has an address here. It's just directions using landmarks. So we head to the propane company, which is located on a dusty country road in the middle of nowhere.

At the Curoil facility, we are told that they currently have no propane tanks and it will be three weeks until they come in.  It can not  be ordered and they do not take names to reserve one.  If we already had a tank and wanted to exchange it for a full tank then we could get that done on Tuesday (today is Friday) on a first come first serve basis. 

We ask if we can buy one on the spot.  No, that was not possible.  Only one per customer and you can only buy it when they come in, not before. It's a little vague, but Rick and I both may be able to buy a tank even though we are in the same family. The cost will be $30 and $9 to fill each tank.....if they had tanks.

This is what happens when there is no free market. The supplier calls the shots, does not need to provide good customer service and has no incentive to provide products or services in a timely fashion. The customer has no options to go to another supplier. We are at the mercy of the monopoly, controlled by the socialist government.

In the US, we take it for granted that we can get whatever we want when we want it.  We know that companies that don't cater to us will fail as we will go to a competitor....or order it from Amazon and have it within 24 hours.

We have this brand new grill and no propane. Its like having a cigarette with no lighter.  Three weeks....we wait for propane. 

In the meantime, we find this great BBQ place (it's really someone's back yard) that smokes and BBQ's ribs and turkey legs on Saturdays and Sundays only. "Holy Smokes" is minutes from our house.  So we will have BBQ this weekend in spite of the socialists.