We’ve been fortunate enough to travel to Bonaire a couple of times now, since our first trip during the  2005 Holiday season. 

Why Bonaire? It came as a recommendation from friends who travel there annually, so we took their advice and sailed forth.

We stayed at the Bel Mar apartments, really condos,their that offer water views, on site diving, pool, dive shop, and their own rental fleet of small trucks. Bonaire is known for it's shore diving, and the trucks are necessary to get the full taste of the wild life on the island. The Bel Mar was reasonably priced, even as we were there for high season. We had a single bedroom unit That was more than enough space for just the two of us.

The Bel Mar apartments are located south of the Airport, about 5 or 6 miles from the center of town.

As much as we liked it there, other friends who also travel to the island suggested another complex that is just north of town, The Sand Dollar resort. We’ve now stayed there twice, and prefer it’s location (only a 30 minute walk to the town pier, and near the northern dive sites).

Bonaire has become our favored destination due to the quality of the diving/snorkeling, weather, lifestyle, and cost. The fact that this is primarily shore diving means no boat schedules and no extra fees. The food on the island is not that great, so there is no need or incentive to spend a lot of money on it - we normally just hit the grocery store when we arrive, and make lunch and breakfast in the condo.

In the past we’ve flown American through San Juan, but they are cutting that flight (2009), and instead we flew with Continental . The flight we took went though Houston, which made the trip a lot longer than it needed to be - 4 hours from Boston to Houston, and than another 4.5 hours to Bonaire. We’re not sure why this takes so long to fly to Houston; you can fly to Las Vegas in 5 hours flat, and in fact the return trip from Bonaire to Newark, direct, was under 5 hours. Forget the Bermuda Triangle, it’s now shifted to the East coast of Texas.

We noticed a fair amount of damage in our 2009 trip to the reefs from the summer hurricane season; the North coast in the Washington Park was pretty tore up. Our weather was, from most local comments, also unusually windy and rainy. The high winds led to some less than perfect under water visibility.

Our former favorite restaurant , Vespucci’s,  located in Harbor Village has closed. We were delighted to find that there is another very good Italian restaurant on the Island, Donna Gorgio, who’s chef hails from Sardinia. We’d recommend it strongly, he makes a great sugo, and the calamari we had there was fantastic.