I'm gearing this “trip report” a bit more towards "newbies" to Bonaire (which I was before this trip). I’ve never seen a trip report from the perspective of someone who has never been to Bonaire and I would have liked one before I went, so here I go. For those of you not in the know about what Bonaire is, check out this site. At the recommendation of others, I stayed at Captain Don's Habitat. Be sure to check out the links to photos at the end of this post.

The Dining

To be honest, the dining was decent but not spectacular at most places. I’ve included the places that I felt were worth mentioning (either because they were worse than airplane food or because you would seriously consider cutting off an arm for another plate).

Zeezicht: It’s too bad you can’t legally burn this place down and save people from having to experience this.

ZeeZicht is, without question, the worst restaurant I've ever been to in my life. I asked the waitress what she suggested and she recommended the lobster. Having had a huge excellent lobster two days earlier at another restaurant, I decided to have it again. My girlfriend chose the ZeeZicht Special II - a variety of different fish - something like a sampler. The lobster was tiny, served with two wedges of iceberg lettuce and a slice of tomato. $35. Don’t believe me? I’ve got a picture. The tail was, quite literally, a single bite. When I mentioned it the waitress said "Well it's not the season for lobster". Then why recommend it? And anyway, I had a lobster the size of Captain Don’s ego (if you don’t get it, just go visit his “museum” or “shrine to the lord himself”) two nights earlier, so that was a crock of !@#!.

Have you ever spent any time in a federal penitentiary? Me neither. Apparently, the owners of ZeeZicht must have. Have you guessed what my girlfriend was served on? That’s right ladies – the legendary classic, romantic, one of the kind, stainless steel prison style tray complete with various “grooves” for exotic food items. I honestly expected to see a local prison stamp on it or something. The spectacularly presented $23 sampler she included on the menu "Fish, Shrimp, Crabmeat and Squid in a curry sauce." The crab may have died by eating the sauce it was placed in, I’m not sure. The squid was pretty bad, the fish was very oily. Ok I’ll be fair - the shrimp was supposedly good. I wouldn't know it though, because she only got ONE shrimp. Have you ever been served one shrimp with a fish platter? It was nicely placed in a square indentation on the prison issued tray that looked like it might be for “Jello”. $70 dollars total. Stay away at all costs.

If you must come here, I suggest you get a ladle of hard acholohic beverages, drink them and then proceed to complete a deep dive to the WindJammer on an empty tank. If you are lucky, you might cause permanent brain and tissue damage that will allow you to eat here without remembering it later. The locals say this place used to be excellent but has gone way downhill - they are right. Whoever it was that suggested this place - put down that crack pipe, go bang your head against a wall and then go have your head examined.

Lions Den: 5 stars, $$$$$

Lions Den Tuesday Night Lobster special - not cheap, $106 including two orders of lobster, lobster bisque, two pina colada's and a crabmeat appetizer. The food, while not cheap, was excellent and the lobster was huge. Served nicely with several shrimp on top and a side of fries it will fill you up.

On our final nite we had the special pasta bowl including pasta mixed with grouper, shrimp and lobster mixed with a puttanesca sauce (not exactly a real puttanesca, but thats what they call it). I believe it was about $30 - and was very good. Comes with a choice of soup or salad. The Cajun calamari are surprisingly light for being fried and were very soft - clearly relatively fresh. The service was also easily the best we had on the island. One note: They add tip automatically to the bill but they seem to only add 7.5%. The view of the ocean is also great here. Reservations on Tuesday suggested – In short, I highly recommend this place despite the relatively steep prices.

It Rains Fishes: 3.5 stars, $$$$

Good food, but somewhat heavy. Be sure to ask about the sauces before you order - some are very thick and heavy. The shrimp termidor (I'm not sure it was supposed to be called thermidor or not, but it's listed as termidor) is very good but covered in oils, sauces, cheese and other items that remove much of the "flavour of the sea". They could have probably substituted one of the stray dogs on the island for the shrimp and I wouldn’t have known it. Not a light meal, but a good meal.

Rum Runners: 2 stars, $$$

The service here was the worst. It was not uncommon for me to have to get up and get our own menu's, or remind the staff that I wanted to order. Often I had to go get my own water. Forget waiting for the bill - they won't bring it unless you get up and walk over to them to ask for it. I’m convinced some of the staff would be diagnosed as catatonic.

Don’t try anything complicated on them either – for example, don’t change from paying cash to charging. The over exertion of a firing of one of the neurons left in their brains might cause them to keel over and die. Jokes aside, the service was pretty abysmal.

The food, somewhat made up for it. The anchovy Caesar salad ($4 I think) is a good choice for a light lunch (if you like anchovies of course). The pizza (served 3-10pm, and it's the only thing served from 3pm to 5pm by the way) is far too greasy. I might seem like a health nut since I keep harping on this kind of thing (I'm not), but take it from an Italian who hand makes his own dough and pizza - this is not particularly good stuff. It's better than Dominos (not that that's saying much), but don't expect to be blown away.

If you are staying at Captain Don's, don't expect too much from the all inclusive breakfast. It never changes - all week it's the same set of food. It's good for two days and then you begin to long something – anything different- a bacon and pig ear dog treat or a grilled Goodyear tire sauted in diesel fuel. The omelets are pretty tasty – and made to order. If you stay at Captain Don’s and eat out every other day, I’d say expect to spend roughly $300-$600 on food and drinks at Rum Runners and the Deco Bar for two during a one week stay.

The Lost Penguin: 2.5 stars, $

A good solid choice for a quick lunch - and the only place I could find that didn't have a heavily reduced menu at 3pm in the afternoon. The fish sandwich was, I think, $6, and was pretty tasty served with some kind of dill sauce (on the side - smart). Lunch for two can easily come in under $20. This won’t be “write home about” food, but you will be fed.

In general, on dining:

I had two general complaints about food on the island - 1) I found it difficult to find fish that was not somehow drowned in some overpowering sauce and 2) service quality varied significantly – not always inversely with price, but sometimes. Don't be surprised if you get handed a menu and no one cares to tell you what the "fish of the day" is, or the "soup of the day". At Richards, we were brought to our table, put in front of a hand written menu on a chalk board which was mostly smudged and illegible and left to our own accord though most of the dishes were labeled "Fish Mix" or "Catch of the Day", "Seafood Grill" - not exactly clear. After waiting a while for someone to come back we just left.

The Diving on Bonaire

Depending on what you are looking for, the diving is either the worst you've ever run into or the best you've ever run into. Bonaire is most definitely not the place for any kind of pelagic life - turtles, dolphins, sharks, big grouper - forget it. It is also not the place for great vis. I'd say the vis ranged from 40-60ft. If, however, your goal in life is to photograph a juvenile spotted drum, Bonaire will grant you your wish. Eels, Frog Fish, Spotted Drums, cleaner shrimp are all very common. The coral is in good to great condition on most sites. The Town Pier is an excellent dive which I STRONGLY recommend as a day dive or twilight dive. I think it’s a fun and unique dive. During the day it's very easy to find the various frog fish and the sea horse that has been in the same spot for ages. As a night dive, the pylons are amazing - bursting with colors.

However, I really don't suggest the night dive for any new diver - at least not without doing the day dive first. The pier can be very disorienting at night and it's easy to loose your sense of direction. Mix this in with the fact that the night dive is popular - and it's not out of the question to have numerous other dive groups in the water at the same time and it can be very easy to end up following the wrong group. Finally, do the night dive as a twilight dive. Get in the water around 7.15 or 7.30 - by the time you get out it will have turned dark and you will see 30 other divers getting ready to silt up the whole place.

On my night dive on the way back in, I ran into a group of roughly 20 divers. The divers were busy kicking each other in the face, knocking one another into pylons, investigating the physics of “silt out”, pushing each other out of the way and helpfully shining their UK 1000 dive lights into each other's faces to see if their buddy was the one holding the fire worm or the one poking the scorpion fish. I’m still not sure if someone provided some kind of psychoactive pharmacopoeia to a bunch of mildly retarded epileptic monkeys causing their synapses to fire at random and then threw them into the town pier as part of some demented experiment. We may never know, but hopefully the people at ZeeZicht were beaten over the head with a prison tray until they participated. In other words – do the dive early or do it late. Don’t come at 8 or 9.

Town pier closing rumours - Ok, yes, it's closing July 1st. Sort of. From what I've heard it will still be possible to dive the town pier but permission will be more stringent requiring copies of passports and a minimum of a week's notice. So if you are coming down to Bonaire anytime after July 1st, I would suggest contacting your shop early.

We managed five boat dives, most out to Klein – the reef out there is nice but not particularly better than the reef on Bonaire itself. I would suggest removing boat dives from any included packages and maybe doing a single tank ($30 or so bucks) to Klein if you really want to.

We managed to get in a total of 15 dives - it would have been more but my last dive to Pink Beach resulted in a nasty reverse squeeze issue that caused me to have to cut diving out one day earlier than planned. All in all, we found that it is possible to dive Bonaire well without any rental car – there are enough people around (all quite friendly mind you) that are more than happy to let you dive with them. It means you can’t dictate dive sites, but you do end up saving a couple hundred dollars. You do however have some shopping that seems decent – at least in the “low” season. 3 baseball hats for $20, a Citizen Dive Watch for $472 (which, I hear, is a good deal) – but you can easily do the town center in a single afternoon.

The Accommodations on Bonaire - Captain Dons & Maduro Review

I will say up front that places like Captain Don’s or Anthony’s Key Resort – anything with the word “resort”, “hotel”, “all-inclusive” are usually not my cup of tea. I’m the kind of person who usually rents a house somewhere and just makes my way around on my own. In this case, it was a bit last minute so we just booked with Don’s (Usually I’ll spend countless hours researching an island, then location, map out dive sites, dive shops, -- etc before I settle on a villa)

That having been said, Captain Don’s was pleasant, even if somewhat more “commercial” than what we are used to. It certainly helped that the resort was near dead (I’d venture maybe 15-20 guests total). It didn’t really feel like a “resort” when it was this quiet. The day we left (@ the start of the festival) the atmosphere had changed significantly – 30 or 35 people at breakfast all banging heads at the counter trying to reach the “sausage” or “bacon” (quotation marks required I think), several screaming children convinced that feeding the cats is a *grand* idea, the occasional adult who thinks pigeons and dining tables result in some kind of symbiotic love dance when joined together, one lady who dressed like she might belong on a street corner, – it *felt* like a resort then. Come during a slow week – you won’t regret it.

The accommodations at Captain Don's are comfortable and clean. The dive lockers are convenient and big enough for two sets of gear (bring a lock or you got to buy one). The general layout for gear, rinsing, access to the reef and boats is all well laid out. There is a rope that descends to roughly 130 ft on the house reef - making it very easy to find your way back.

The dive boats are comfortable. The staff quality, as in most places, varies. Rob and the photo shop guy (Wilco) were fabulous. They helped me with a console problem and adjusted my girlfriends regulator twice - all with a smile and a friendly helpful attitude.

Wilco looks like the blond guy from that chopper show on TLC or Discovery. Some of the other guys did a few things that irritated me and some of other divers - things such as dropping your camera into the ocean rather than handing it to you carefully, being rather careless with people's regulators (so I heard, but did not experience) when coming in from a dive -- things like that. In once case I asked where we were diving and I was told "The ocean". I laughed and said, "No really, where we going?" the response - "DMC - Don't Mess With The Crew". I asked again but I guess the guy didn't hear me. Maybe he was one of those epileptic monkeys from the town pier. Problem was - they went to a site 50 ft from the one they did during the previous boat dive. Had the guy answered me properly instead of trying to be cute when I had asked, I wouldn't have used a boat dive to go there. That having been said, the crew on this second trip was not the crew from the first, so they couldn’t have known.

One tip: Maduro doesn't seem to know much about Captain Don's (I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt on this one) - I specifically requested a room with a good ocean view - they pitched me an upgraded Villa Suite (or something like that) that cost $300 more. The pitch was that this was the room I needed to get if I wanted a nice ocean view. In the end, the rooms on that side (all upgraded villa suite's or whatever they are called) have SOME view of the ocean and mostly a view of the pool and restaurant area. The cheaper rooms are not only closer to the dive lockers/photo shop/etc but have an unobstructed view of the ocean that easily put my view to shame. If your primary interest is in a place to sleep with a good view, don't get the upgraded room. The upgraded room had a worse view and a tv/phone (which I could care less about).

Another little trick - if you rent a car, pick it up at the airport and return it the day before you depart (Why pay for the extra day when your flight is probably in the morning or early afternoon?). Your maduro package includes two airport transfers - you can use one to get back from the airport after dropping the rental car back off the day before your departing flight and one to get to the airport the day of your departing flight. Another interesting nuggest: First class upgrades from Bonaire to Montego Bay on Air Jamaica are $80 - depending on how much you don't feel like flying that can be a nice touch. For you Chicago people, Air Jamaica flies A320's to Montego Bay - meaning if you want an exit row seat, request either 11 A-F or 12 A-F.

Overall, I thought Bonaire was an excellent dive trip for someone looking to primarily dive and is interested in macro life. If your goal is something of similar dive difficulty but more well rounded (beaches, shopping, night life) or you have zero interest in macro life, I would suggest Roatan, Honduras instead.

For the record, all pictures shot with a Olympus C5050Z with PT-015 housing. Some shot with YS-90DX strobe, most without.