Bonaire - November 2002 As the planned trip to Bali was cancelled shortly after the bomb attack to Kuta, the team of Dive-In offered an alternative trip to Bonaire. (Detailed Bonaire Map here) I wanted to go to either Aruba or Curaçao with a friend before, but I only made it so far that I bought the travel guide. So I was pleased to hear and read about Bonaire. The island can be reached from europe with KLM-airlines from Amsterdam/Netherlands within 10-11 hours. The flight was ok, but I never manage to fall asleep so I enjoyed "Men-In-Black 2" and "Bend it like Beckham", two not bad movies. Landing at the Flamingo International Airport is like landing on any small tropical airport, probably comparable to Male or Hurghada. Check-out and customs was no problem, only the time we arrived (~4am) was bad but everyone could sleep the next morning. We had rented three pickup trucks for our group of nine people, the trucks transporting our diving equipment throughout the island for the following fifteen days. The apartments lay just north of the Kralendjik city, a bit too far to walk, but nicely at the ocean and very clean. The apparments of Hamlet Oasis offer a small central pool for the first checkdive ;-) and one local divesite called "Cliff" which is astoundingly beautiful. Second day we picked up the cars, relaxed a bit and checked in at the dive resort "Buddy Dive Resort", where we got the tanks and did a first check dive. The resort offers "drive-through" tank service and all unlimited, meaning you pick up the tanks almost any time you want, return them any time and dive any time. We had twelve days of diving which meant that there were two days off, reserved for visiting the national park Washington Slaagbai. All pictures above water have been taken during our days off, as leaving the camera in the car during diving is not such a good idea. Warning: Do not leave anything in your car, not even empty backpacks. Do not hang any stuff outside your apartment during the night, there are many thieves ! The underwater pictures are all taken with Nikon F50 in a Hugyfot Housing with 35-80mm and 19-35mm zoom lenses and one Hartenberger 250TTL strobe. It´s been the first time with that equipment and I had some problems first, but in the end everything stayed tight. All pictures scanned from film with Nikon LS-2000 and processed in size, color etc. Enjoy the pictures ! Feedback