January 19, a sea day and January 20 Bonaire

A beautiful day at sea with very smooth water.  Sea days are always loaded with plenty of activities including games, lectures, things like wine tasting or food demonstrations and special lunches.  Today we had "Tex Mex" served on the pool deck.  In the afternoon there was a special tea time in the Observation Lounge for passengers that are on the full cruise or multi segments.  We learned that there are about 130 passengers doing the full cruise, Miami to Miami.  We really missed having the pre-cruise evening event that was held when we did this same cruise in 2012.  It had given us an opportunity to meet other full cruise passengers.  We watched another movie in the evening "a Bridge of Spies" really enjoyed it.

We arrived at Bonaire at 7 am.  Since our scheduled tour is not until after lunch we decided to just take a quick stroll around the downtown area.  It is very nice and the currency is the US Dollar unlike the other Dutch islands, Aruba and Curacao.

Our tour was a drive around this low lying island that is made of limestone and coral.  The north end of the island is nothing but cactus and other scrub vegetation.  The cactus looks similar to organ pipe cactus and it is used to make liquor and fencing.  The fences are interesting as they are woven through wire fence from both sides.  Our bus driver showed us how they do it with two sticks, one shaped like a "y" and the other like a hook. We were told how they cut a piece from an existing plant with a chainsaw or machete and then grasp it between the two sticks to plant it in the ground.

Very dry scrub and cactus on north end of island

an example of the cactus fencing

The southern end of the island is mostly salt flats and we did see a few flamingos in one of the ponds.  We were told that there used to be thousands of them but they do not come any longer as the brine shrimp population has declined. There are feral donkeys and goats all over the island and we even saw a large number of goats in the parking lot of the airport!

Tom standing next to one of the small buildings where slaves that worked the salt production would spend the night.  We were told that fix or six persons would fit into the small space.

A couple of flamingos feeding in the salt flat

Huge mounds of salt ready for export

Our team finished second in trivia, not bad for only having four members today.

The highlight of the evening was to be the "Barbeque Under the Stars".  The culinary team spent almost four hours setting up the pool deck with different food stations with elaborate decorations.  About 20 minutes before they were to start serving it started to rain.  We had a table under the overhang so we were dry but the crew had to hustle all the food laden tables, barbeques, ice sculptures, plus the musicians had to move their microphones and instruments under cover.  They did an amazing job to reset everything and were ready to start serving only about 20 minutes late.

The pool deck set up for the barbeque.  In about ten minutes after the photo it started to pour rain!