After enjoying our repast of Iberian ham and cheese from the supermarket as our breakfast we said goodbye to Peter and Nice, and posed for a Bonaire Reporter ’shot’ (holding up a copy of the bi-monthly Bonaire Reporter newspaper in an exotic locale) to send back home to Bonaire. The Lensvelts were great hosts and we regret only having been able to spend two nights at their place. However, as Peter so eloquently put it, we are on a ‘Tapas Tour’ - one where we taste a little bit of each place to see where we might like to revisit in the future. I see it as a sort of self-designed ‘tasting menu’ myself.

We headed out through Alozaina in The Beast, along twisty turning narrow roads high above deadly precipices (no joke), surviving the trip along route A-366 with nary a scratch but a lot more adrenaline in our systems. The scenery was gorgeous - changing from hilly and verdant to mountainous and stark and then back again. The most curious thing we saw along the way was a flock of vultures on the ground in a field - probably about 30 of them, hopping about (they don’t walk, they hop). Alas we were not quick enough with the camera.

We also learned - actually, we confirmed - that our GPS has a sense of humor. We have it set for fastest driving time mode, and somehow it has determined, incorrectly, that this means the most direct route should be chosen. Yesterday we found ourselves in a maze of narrow streets in La Linie near Gibraltar that The Beast barely made it through, and today the GPS took us up a thousand year old footpath the back way into Ronda. We managed to avoid damaging any tourists or The Beast along the way, but it was a very close thing.

Amusingly, we later saw several other GPS users coming up the same way. Someone at Garmin sure has a strange sense of humor.

Ronda was beautiful, with an ancient bridge rising hundreds of feet above a water filled gorge still in active use today (we drove over it in The Beast and walked over it a couple of times too).

After locating a parking facility - and let me tell you, parking in old cities and villages, especially with something as large as The Beast, is miserable - we made our way to the Bull Fighting Arena (see photo above), which serves as a museum when there’s not a bull fight going on. The kids were not wild about the idea at first, but I think they gradually came to understand the cultural, and dare I say artistic, roots that make up Spanish bull fighting. They are understandably still perturbed by the thought of killing a bull for entertainment, but also understand it’s not nearly as simplistic as it seems. In a way, it’s a performance and show, where almost always the bull dies, but not before making a stand of his own (and yes, a matador has actually been killed by the bull in Ronda, but it was a long tim ago - and matadors do get hurt too, although the odds are weighed pretty heavily against the bull, of course).

We then had lunch (the kids had a mixel grill with beef, ironically) at a posh restaurant outside the Arena, and went on to spend several more hours exploring Ronda’s history and quaint streets.

By 7pm we were on our way to Seville, dropped our rental car off at the train station - Good riddance to The Beast!, and took a taxi to our hotel.

Our plan for tomorrow is unclear for the most part. We are booked to see an authentic Flamenco show in the evening (with Tapas), and may go visit the Alcazar - a Moorish castle across the street from our hotel. But most importantly, we are going to try and sleep in!

As the villa here at Finca Morelajo is self-catered and we had not planned appropriately yesterday, we found ourselves a bit shy of breakfast supplies. So we hit the first restaurant we found on our way south past Tolox and had a great country meal consisting of fresh sandwiches and eggs and bacon.

The drive to the country of Gibraltar took about two hours, part of which involved navigating ‘The Beast’ (my pet name for the Mercedes family delivery van we’ve been saddled with) through some very narrow alleys and streets. The Beast survived unscathed, but my adrenaline levels were beyond safe levels most of the time.

We parked at a secure underground parking garage in La Liene - just north of the crossing into Gibraltar, and walked across the border. On the other we signed onto a taxi based tour of the island, and our driver Jaydon, a Gibraltar native, gave us a bit of history of his country and then took us to see St. Michaels caves (where an underground wedding was being set up), the macaques monkeys native to the island, the top of the ‘rock’ from where we could see the north coast of Africa (specifically Morocco), only about 23km away, and the great siege tunnels dug as part of the defense of Gibraltar.

Gibraltar is of key strategic importance as it is the closest point of Europe to Africa, and it is said that whomever controls Gibraltar controls all traffic in and out of the Mediterranean.

We then walked down to see the Moorish Castle (the above photo was taken along the way), wander about the downtown, and have a very late lunch (around 5pm) at a British pub.

We then walked back to our Beast, crossing Gibraltar’s airport runway (which is between the border and the rest of Gibraltar), survived narrow roads again, and after a terrifying (because of the driving issues) but succesful attempt to purchase breakfast supplies in the town of Coin, we got back to our villa, still in one piece.

Dinner was at the Bar Canario in Alozaina, where we had the only two meal options available - pork or rabbit with eggs and french fries. The fries were limp, but the eggs and meat were excellent. We had a bottle of Rioja (still a bit green, but a reasonable red table wine) to accompany the meal.

The plan for tomorrow is to visit Ronda and then drop off The Beast in Seville before checking into our hotel there.

We arrived in Granada Tuesday night, and tried to take a taxi to our hotel, the Hotel Guadalupe. However the taxi driver we spoke to sent us back towards a bus (or so I thought - Linda later suggested he waved us to a different taxi stand).

The bus driver told us the closest stop to our hotel was Cathedral, so there we got off even though our GPS (love that gadget!) told us it was still a bit of a way off. Turns out our hotel was adjacent to the Alhambra, the old Moorish palace we had come to Granada to see. And the Alhambra is on top of a rather tall hill. To us it felt like a mountain. That’s because it was 11pm at night, we each our one piece of luggage and our carry-ons and had to lug all that and our sorry, tired selves up all the way.

It was a very pretty hike, but still unanticipated, and rather tiring. By the time we got to our hotel I had somehow ended up with three of the four pieces of luggage, and it was only thanks to our GPS (a battery-powered Garmin Nuvi 350) that we actually found our hotel, almost 2 miles away, all uphill.

We ultimately collapsed in our beds at 1:30am.

The next day, Wednesday (yesterday) was beautiful. After dining in the hotel restaurant we headed to the Alhambra - the entry gate was only a 5 minute walk away (all downhill), and we had wisely prepurchased/pre-reservered our tickets on-line otherwise we would probably have not gotten in - the line was huge and day-of tickets were in short supply. Next tip, get your physical tickets from your on-line ticket order at the automated kiosks to the far right of the purchase line.

With tickets in hand we spent the next six and a half hours tourings the Alhambra, including the Alcazaba (featured as the backdrop for the above photo), the palace of Emperor Charles V (Carlos V), the Nazarid Palace (your ticket provides a specific time of access and you cannot miss this part of the Alhambra - it is the most stunning and splendid!), and the Generalife.

We also had a late lunch during our visit at the restaurant at Hotel America, where, ironically, they don’t take American Express, but served excellent food included pheasant, hare, and garlic Gaszpacho.

While it involved a lot walking we were all pleased with our visit and found it to be very worthwhile, long uphill walk to our hotel notwithstanding.

After getting a taxi from our hotel to the train station, we picked up our rental vehicle. We had prepaid for a minivan (family vehicle). We got a Mercedes mini-van, which Europecar swore was a family vehicle because it could seat six people even though it was basically a retrofitted delivery van with no back window and bare metal floors. All for about $300/day not including the expensive insurance we declined. Ouch! And the vehicle handles like a donkey in heat (or at least how I imagine that would be).

With our wonderful GPS guiding our way, we drove for about two hours, finally going past the village of Alozaina and ending up at Finca Morelajo, a set of villas and apartments operated by Peter and Nice Lensvelt, old friends of ours from Bonaire who moved here to Andulusia six years ago to start this new business.

We had reserved a small villa for our two nights here and Peter put us into the Vincent villa, named after Vincent van Gogh, whose is (not the originals though) is featured throughout.

We spent the rest of the evening reminiscing and trading stories and rumors over a fine Rioja and food Nice whipped up for us.

The main purpose of this post is to see if I can post images in this blog via e-mail using Yahoo! Flickr.

The picture here is from a drive-by photo shoot on my way to Reagan National Airport on Monday, March 31st. The fabled cherry blossoms on the 1000+ cherry trees in and around Washington DC had hit full bloom a few evenings prior, and this was my first chance to see them in person.

The sky is drab, but the blossoms were beautiful. They came in three different shades: white, light pink, and pinky-red (seen here).

We’re now in the final throes of getting ready for the next expedition of The Traveling Richters. We depart Bonaire on Friday, April 18th on a five week journey which will take us to Spain and then Morocco.

We start in Spain in Barcelona for several days (which including meeting up with our friend Martin and his father), then fly to Granada to see the Alhambra. We then rent a car, drive south to the mountains of Andalusia to stay at villas managed by Peter, an old friend from Bonaire. We’ll use his place as a base to visit Gibraltar for a day, and then when we leave, go via Ronda to then spend several days in Sevilla before flying south.

In Morocco we join up with a group as part of a Lindblad Expeditions tour which includes academic lectures on culture, history, and sociology, as well as hands on work with a National Geographic photographer.

After a few days in Marrakech and the Atlas mountains visiting with Berber tribes, we board the National Geographic Endeavour in Safi, visit Kenitra and some historical sites there, and then head up to spend three days learning about Portugal (including the making of port wine) and then visit the largest and most revered cathedral and third most visited Christian pilgrimage site at Santiago de Compostella.

Then, after a couple of days at sea, we will go to Mont St. Michel off the northern coast of France, then Sark in the Channel Islands the next day, before finally arriving in England. After a private tour with the curator of the HMS Victory, we spend three days in London. On the night of May 13th, we take part in a BonaireTalk mini-meet in Surrey - if you’re in the London area that night and want to join us, drop a note on BonaireTalk.

On May 15th, courtesy of the TGV high speed train and the Chunnel, we head to Paris to finish off our trip with non-stop tours of museums, galleries, and restaurants. Our friends Martin and Angela will join us over the weekend we’re there as well.

And, assuming flights all work out, we’ll be back home sometime on May 23rd!

The itinerary, by date, is here.

Day 42 of our Pacific Journey - Diving With Sharks

Friday, November 30, 2007

Getting Our Days Straight

So I finally got around to counting days on the calendar and my previous entry below marked as Day 40, should have really been Day 38 (or technically Day 37 due to the fact we crossed the International Date Line, but I’m not going to deal with that issue). That makes this day I am chronicling about next - November 30th, our 42nd day of travel and excitement.

I need to mention I would have had this posted in a more timely fashion except for the fact that our somewhat pricey but decent Internet connection at the Outrigger On The Lagoon in Fiji went dead on the 30^th at 11am, and as of when we left for the airport at 6pm on December 4th, had still not come back to life. So here we are almost a week late, again. Sigh.

Back to our story…

A Diving (for Sharks) We Go…

Linda and I awoke around 5:45am this morning, and at 6:20am, Luci, a nice Fijian woman, showed up to take charge of our young ones. Neither Bas nor Krystyana were inclined to join Linda and I on our great adventure today, and in retrospect, it’s probably a good thing too, as the challenges of our journey would have exceeded their physical limits.

Our great adventure was going on a pair of shark feeding dives in the Beqa Lagoon.

Beqa is a small island atoll located due south of the Pacific Harbor area. The atoll forms a natural lagoon which is reportedly a great place for diving.

Another detour here - when people, especially non-divers, hear that someone is going shark diving, they get all sorts of images, typically ones derived from having read or seen Peter Benchley’s epic, Jaws. Those images involve menacing and calculating sharks looking to sneak up on hapless divers, ready to bite them in half, with blood and carnage everywhere. The reality is that dives where sharks are regular fed by trained feeders are quite safe, and for divers the biggest rush is how cool all the sharks are, and not “I hope I don’t get eaten”. And Peter Benchley himself realized this too, well after the hysteria and fear his works had induced. In the years before his death in 2006 he attempted to fix some of the damage Jaws did to the perception of sharks by working to protect them.

Back to our adventure. To get to where our dive was to occur, we had to drive more or less west for well over an hour to a place called Pacific Harbor, and hook up with Aqua-Trek, a dive shop which does a two-tank (two dives, one scuba tank per dive, hence two tank) dive trip south to the Beqa Lagoon three times a week - Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays.

We arrived at Aqua-Trek around 8am in our AVIS rental car, checked in, set up our gear on board the Aqua Sport dive boat, and watched (and smelled) days old fish parts and chum being loaded on board. Just before 9am, we and our seven other dive companions were off to the Bistro dive site. One couple was from Vancouver and traveling about the world for a while. Another was a younger couple from San Francisco on a six month world tour. There were two Japanese guys, vaguely reminiscent of Hiro and Ando from the series Heroes, and a young Australian guy who was in Suva on business and managed to work the dive into his schedule.

It was a very short boat ride, perhaps 15-20 minutes, and we found two other dive boats already there - apparently Friday was the day that the Aqua-Trek dive shop ran the shark dive for two resorts located in the Beqa Lagoon as well, so that put us at around 30 divers for the dive, plus a half dozen or so divemasters and handlers.

Entering The Watery Depths

After a briefing where it was explained that we’d be watching the first feeding at a depth of around 30 meters, we all made our way into the water. The current was ripping, and I lost track of Linda for a while as I struggled to get down to the target area - I finally saw her behind me, swimming for all she was worth trying to make headway into the current. We helped each other over a ridge and finally made it to the feeding area, breathing hard. Good thing they gave us generous fills on our tanks (for our fellow divers, tanks were filled to around 3400 psi).

We joined other divers along a rope that had been set up to mark off the viewing area, and watched as ever-increasing numbers of fish of many species mobbed the diver who was dispensing the yummy fish parts. Among the fish we saw were a variety of fusiliers, giant trevally, rainbow runners, butterfly fish, smaller jacks, groupers, and more. And then Linda started hitting me to get my attention - a tiger shark had appeared to our right and was regally swimming through the parting hordes of smaller fish to scope things out. The tiger shark was a female as evidenced by the lack of claspers, a clasper being a shark penis - and most male sharks have two of those, incidentally. She was also around 12 feet long. A big lady indeed! This was a major rush for us, as tiger sharks are rarely seen by people, especially in non-threatening situations. Their name stems from the white tiger-marking-like patterns on their backs.

It should be noted that tiger sharks are the second most dangerous shark (to man) in the world, but mostly to surfers, not divers. And this tiger shark had been acclimated to divers and being fed (and even touched), so we were not in any real danger at any time. However, just in case, a number of the dive guides had aluminum prods (looked a bit like walking canes) which were used to keep sharks away from the paying divers. They must have been doing a good job because we don’t think any divers were lost on our dives.

At one point during the feeding a male nurse shark got in the way of the tiger shark and was almost bitten in half for his insolence.

The tiger shark stayed with us for the entire dive, getting as close as a couple of feet away - I was glad I had my camera system equipped with a wide angle lens - both to capture the full shark even at that distance, as well as a barrier between myself and the shark, just in case this was the one time the tiger shark decided the nearby blond diver might make a good snack.

This was our second tiger shark view on this Pacific journey of ours - but the first was behind glass, however, at the Maui Ocean Center a few weeks ago (more on that at some later point). Much better and cooler to see it in real life right in front of us. There’s also no question that the tiger shark was the queen of these here waters. Where she swam, most other fish rapidly made way for her (except for the stupid nurse shark, and he certainly did not get in the tiger shark’s way again).

As the food ran out, and we were getting close to having to do a decompression dive, we were ushered to head up to the boat. The tiger shark was still prowling about as well, making our handlers a bit jumpy. However, ascending was not quite that simple for me. As I tried to get up from my kneeling position, I found that one of my fins had gotten lodged in under a rock and I could not extract the fin - I was effectively stuck at 80 feet under water. Linda tried to help, but it required the assistance of one of the dive guides to finally dislodge it (and it ended up breaking the rock too). Mind you, I wasn’t too nervous, as I knew I could always take the fin off and either leave it there, or at least have better leverage to get it out without my foot in the fin, but it was nice having the additional assistance. We finally managed to ascend to do our safety stop and then got back on board the boat for a decent surface interval.

The Second Dive - Amusingly, Most Divers Unaware Of Sharks

The weather had gotten a bit sunnier, so we tried to warm up before the next dive. For this one we were going to a shallower feeding ground at only around 15 meters deep. The current was much weaker, fortunately, but even so, this time we used the descent line to get down instead of free swimming. We found the line of divers too crowded to get situated comfortably, and I had to bonk a small moray eel on the nose a few times with my camera strobes to have him give up his perch near where I was trying to kneel. Linda ended up sitting on a rock behind me. However the feeding this time was rather boring - lots of smaller fish, and no sharks, so I left the line of divers with the intention of taking some pictures of other fish in the area.

As I managed to free myself from the other divers and started looking around, I realized that there were a fair number of sharks cruising around behind all the divers, right near me. Linda and I signaled our amusement to each other about how all the divers were focused on watching small fish, and meanwhile the big ones with big teeth were mere meters behind their backs. We ended up seeing up close (within a few feet) a sicklefin lemon shark with her entourage of bright yellow juvenile golden trevally - acting as a type of pilot fish, as well as a silvertip shark. Further off in the distance we also saw whitetip, blacktip, and bull sharks. Quite the shark menagerie, and most of the divers had no clue until the very end as they ascended in a chaotic jumble and saw sharks all around.

As we surfaced from our second dive and got comfortable on the boat, we all had a chance to share our favorite shark tales.

Once we arrived back on shore, we got cleaned up, ordered a DVD of our dive (which featured about 15 minutes of footage from our dive and another 15 minutes of filler about the dive shop and the sharks and other fish we had seen), and then set out in search of lunch.

Lunch, Low Tourism, and Traditional Song & Dance

We found that at the Oasis Restaurant at Arts Village, also in Pacific Harbor. Art Village was supposed to be a recreated old-style Fijian village with additional shops offering local handicraft, but we found it rather quiet and deserted. Another victim of the bad PR created by last year’s coup. Occupancy at the hotels in the area was also way down, just as in the Coral Coast area where we were staying.

The food at the Oasis was excellent, and reasonably priced. I had a local fish soup with some hot sauce they made for me, and Linda had a Thai salad with mango and tamarind dressing. We followed that up with spicy ginger noodles, and a ginger pork dish. Everything had incredibly fresh and crisp, not overcooked, vegetables. It was more food than we could finish, so we skipped desert. And one of the highlights of the meal was our dining companion, a calico cat which belonged to one of the staff. The cat was very friendly and reminded us of our pet family members left back at home.

After the late lunch we checked out some of the shops at Arts Village, found nothing truly worthwhile, and then made our way back to the Outrigger, arriving sometime after 4pm. Luci had taken good care of the kids, and both were in good moods, as was Luci.

After some quiet time, and room service for Bas, we had dinner at the Ivi restaurant with Krystyana while Bas went to the kids’ club. It should be noted that both Bas and I wore a sulu for our evening activities. A sulu is a type of wrap worn by Fijian men. Very comfortable, and it even has pockets. We also wore matching Hawaiian shirts we had picked up at Hilo Hattie’s in Hawaii. Here on Fiji they call them Bula shirts, incidentally.

We hooked up with Bas during the performance of the Meke - a traditional native song and dance ritual. After the Meke we were invited up to dance. I joined in in the hopes of getting Bas to participate, but he weaseled out on me.

We had a fine time, and closed the evening with the nightcap left in our room - one of the benefits of the type of bure (hut) we’re staying in here at the Outrigger. We also get a glass of champagne each with canapés earlier in the evening each night - another nice benefit we have been enjoying regularly.

More photos from this day, including lots of shark shots can be found here.
Thus ends Day 42 of our Pacific Journey.