Bonaire and Aruba

After Jamaica on our Christmas cruise, we sailed to the island of Bonaire for Christmas Eve.  Bonaire is a tiny island I had never heard of, but it sits in the Caribbean about 50 miles north of Venezuela, and therefore on the South American continental shelf.  Our kids were excited to cross another continent off their list and now only have Australia and Antarctica left to explore.  They managed to visit four continents in 2025 (North America, Europe, Asia, and South America).

Bonaire is a Dutch municipality within the Lesser Antilles.  We found many European looking people there and I assume they were speaking Dutch among themselves (though they spoke in perfect English to us).  Bonaire is most known for its coral reefs protected within the Bonaire National Marine Park.  Tanja found us a snorkeling excursion to do in port, so we disembarked and wandered a short distance to a resort that housed the snorkeling company to meet up with our crew that would take us in a large group out to the reef.

The boat ride was relaxing; our cruise ship is in the background.

 

The picture above proves Derek is able to smile and was having a good time, despite his efforts to prove otherwise in this family shot.

 

The trip had a photographer who took pictures of everyone and the fish underwater.  I think this is a parrotfish; we saw many different varieties of fish, coral, and other sea life.

A picture of our boat as we were swimming around it.

 

 

We were hoping that all the kids would get the hang of snorkeling as breathing through a tube isn't the most natural thing (and I still am not great at it, so I brought my own full face snorkel that lets me just breathe into the mask).  It took some practice, but everyone got comfortable with it and had fun.  I think snorkeling might be a future activity we can do together as a family.

Having the photographer there was great for the novelty of the pictures.  I do wish we were more photogenic in the shots though.  If we get this kind of an opportunity again, I want to get pictures of us where we are all the way underwater and the photographer is taking a picture of us straight on instead of looking up at us floating on the surface.  I think the lighting would work better that way.

Here's Karina exploring.

 

Derek and Tanja were snorkel buddies.

 

Lydia (and Karina) both had prescription masks.  I think Lydia especially liked it because she was able to see the fish clearly.

 

Underwater family photo!

 

 

I enjoyed this excursion so much that I kind of snuck a few extra minutes in the water unintentionally by swimming and drifting a little too far away from our group.  But I am glad I did, because on the way back to the boat, I managed to see a barracuda just chilling and relaxing all alone near the line for the anchor.  I had never seen a barracuda that close in the wild before, so I thought it was exciting.

 

 

On the way out to the first of two dive sites, we were sitting on top of/up against the wheelhouse where the captain was to steer the ship.  We were jealous of other families in our tour group who were on the hammocks in the bow of the catamaran ship, so we hurried and claimed our spot on them for our return trip after we were finished snorkeling.  We found them very relaxing to lay down and stretch out.

We were fans of the juices they had on board.

After snorkeling, we still had some time before we needed to get back on the cruise ship, so we wandered over to the beach.  Strictly speaking, the beach was private for the resort that housed the snorkeling company, and I noticed some people that I assume were guests of the resort looking irritated at us being there since our Holland America branded bags and towels made it clear we weren't guests of the resort.  No one asked us to leave or anything, and we were paying customers of a business on the resort, so I figure we had as much right to be there as guests who were staying on the resort, but it was a sign of poor reputations cruisers have in some circles of the tourism industry.  Lydia and Derek enjoyed looking through the rocks for crabs and finding several, as well as making sand castles.

Lydia wanted to bring this piece of coral home, but I convinced her it belonged in Bonaire so we don't introduce invasive species anywhere and the sea life could make more use of the coral if we left it.  She accepted that as long as we got a picture of it, along with the drink mixing stick that she found and marked it with.

Here are the kids in front of our cruise ship after snorkeling in Bonaire.

 

 

On the way back to the cruise ship, we walked past Kralendijk Lighthouse (built in 1932) on the grounds of Fort Oranje that was built in the 17th century (the walls around the lighthouse were part of the fort).

 

 

 

Christmas Day, we visited Aruba.  Until this trip, I didn't know that Aruba was a desert.  I was well acquainted with the Beach Boys song Kokomo having sung the chorus repeatedly as a child and my mind had conjured a lush tropical paradise.  We found Aruba to be tropical obviously by definition, and paradise is in the eye of the beholder, but no one could claim that the desert landscape there was lush.  Since it was Christmas Day and we didn't have any sense of what would be open, Tanja planned ahead and found us a rental car and we set off to explore on our own.  Our first stop was Baby Beach, so named because the waves were less dangerous than other places on the island.  It was beautiful and relaxing to play there in the sand and in the beautiful turquoise water.

Derek of course explored looking for crabs and other creatures.

 

 

We got a lot of use out of this driftwood that made a great prop for photos.

Because I am a father and by nature love dad jokes, I had it in my mind that I wanted a white Christmas.  We were unlikely to get one in Maryland as snow usually doesn't come until January if it ever really comes at all.  But I could have a white Christmas on the white sand beaches of Aruba.  Karina helped me find supplies for my snowman sandman (bottlecap button, seaweed scarf, twig arms and nose, and pebbles for eyes and mouth).  Then she helped me with some "snow" falling down from the sky on my wintery white Christmas scene.  I'm quite pleased with the result.

After the beach, we drove to the Bushiribana Gold Mill ruins.  The Aruba Island Gold Mining Company built this smelter in 1825 to process the gold ore that was being mined nearby, and it was in operation for 10 years.  Now it is ruins in a scenic spot in the desert up against the Caribbean Sea crashing against the rocky volcanic shore.  It was a fun place to explore and take pictures though.

The ruin walls are pretty tall.  This picture was taken from the top of one of the walls looking down into what used to be the main floor of the structure where Derek and Lydia are exploring.

 

 

The windows made for good framing elements in our pictures.

The waves crashing against the lava rock that formed the coastline in this section of the island were much larger than at Baby Beach where we relaxed on the sand.  I also didn't realize that Aruba was formed from volcanic activity, but the rocks here left no doubt of its origins (all volcanoes there are long dormant now and were last active millions of years ago).

If we were out swimming in this water, we would have been ripped up by the waves crashing into the sharp rocks.

The barren desert landscape was otherworldly.

One of the popular activities in Aruba is riding around the desert in ATVs like these.  They seemed to kick up a lot of dust.  My parents enjoy driving around in similar vehicles so I recommended if they ever visit Aruba they should do one of these tours.

From our vantage point in the gold mill ruins, we noticed ATVs and other tourists congregating a few hundred yards away from us and close to the shoreline, but we couldn't see what the tourists were doing.  We wandered over there and noticed they were climbing down the cliffs.  We were up for a little adventure to see what we could see, so we carefully walked down among the sharp lava rocks too.

 

 

At the end of our walk down the cliffs we reached a small step ladder...

...which led to this beautiful swimming hole tucked into a cave (listed as Cave Pool Aruba on maps).

Lydia was the bravest and first one to go down to the water.

Some people were jumping from big boulders down into the pool, but we were safe and just walked down into the cave to relax and splash and explore.  The water was so colorful and beautiful in this section of the island.

Then we had to make our way back up the way we came (including this ladder) to get back to our car.

I wanted to get pictures of us by one of the many saguaro cacti we saw.  It was hard to get next to them though as there were other smaller cacti and other thorny plants surrounding them, so Derek went piggyback to get there.

 

Overall, this was quite different from our usual Christmas at home, but I had a great time spending Christmas Eve and Day on two different islands and our Christmas break cruising around the Caribbean.  I would be perfectly find doing something similar again.