Bonaire 2: Breathing underwater

Our month of Bonaire has come to a close. It was so nice to be in one house, one neighborhood

and one island for this long. Bonaire is not a lush, tropical island, it's arid, mostly flat with a coral reef surrounding it. The water has been the reason to be here.

The diving has been sublime. So easy. So tranquil. It is difficult to describe the sensation of breathing underwater. Once buoyancy is figured out, gravity is mostly gone and you feel weightless. It's the closest thing to space travel I will ever need. The effortless movement, a flick of the fin, a wave of the hand, and your facing a new direction. Also, adding to the Bonaire ease is 82 degree water that doesn't require a wetsuit.

Breathing underwater means limited sensory input. Smell and taste are mostly gone. Underwater, you hear only the sound of your breathing through the regulator and your bubbles. There is the occasional scraping of a parrotfish on coral and the snaps of a mantis shrimp, but other than that, the teaming life of a coral reef happens without a lot of auditory stimulus available to our ears over the dominant sound of breathing.

Giant anemones always house an interesting find.
A cleaning shrimp in this case. A fish can pull up
and signal to be cleaned, parasites be gone! 

Visually, all the eye candy is outrageous. Where to look first? Poking along the reef and looking through cracks and crevices in the reef for surprises: maybe octopus, odd fish behavior, an eel, you just never know what might show. Then the constant swish out of the corner of the eye distracts you away and onto something else. Some of the outrageous colors and shapes move while others stand still and hope you won't see them. All the while remembering to look out from the reef to see the turtle, tarpon or ray that might happen to swim by. Everywhere so much to look at with millions and millions of living beings within my field of vision. They may be very simple life forms like a coral polyp but the additive factor is stupendous.

So 12/5, we dropped off our rental car at Bonaire's Flamingo Airport. This rather well-used island ride dutifully served as our dive boat as well, taking us to the twenty plus dive sites that we visited out of the over 100 around the island. We did the easy diving and returned to our favorites multiple times. Now we are in Atlanta visiting LuAnne, collecting our things and preparing for the cross country drive. We need to be on Vashon by 12/16 to take our wonderful house sitters, Dan &Matt to the airport and settling back into our house until 12/29, then we fly to Aukland, New Zealand on January 7th. The fish and flamingos seem a long way from here and such is the hard part of travel, when you have to leave those really sweet spots. Savor and move onward. In the meantime, there's always hotel swimming pools for breathing underwater.