Wonderful Accommodation — Great Diving – —- But Beware!!!
First – Wonderful Accommodation — Coral Paradise Resort
Arrived at airport 5am , taxi waiting. Lovely well equipped rooms overlooking the pool. Truck ready and waiting at the Resort, found Brenda later in the morning to give us all the information we needed for our stay, Brenda is also willing to act as a guide when diving on her days off!
We arrived Thanksgiving Week and couldn’t have been made more welcome, invited for a Thanksgiving Feast, delicious and gained a few pounds.
Check out their web site for all details atwww.coralparadise.com it says it all and for us a bonus was the no smoking policy!
Great Diving…
Diving was amazing, we have dived all over the world, but here was like diving into a garden on land only this is on sand with fish, no coral bleaching here, beautiful soft and hard corals everywhere we went, lots of fish although mostly juveniles.
Shore diving was the best at our leisure, drive through bottle pick up and off you go! We had a few boat dives with Capt.Don’s to various inaccessible places and to little bonaire, but much preferred our drive and dives as much better sites!
But Beware…
Firstly we are going back, Coral Paradise was great and Diving was amazing, but for the unsuspecting traveler please be aware of a few things.
Try not to go in the rainy season, mosquito’s abound in huge numbers… we were bitten to bits even through clothing!
Diving…. was different, safety does not exist, everyone has to do a check dive when they arrive, but this is on their own, mainly to make sure your weights and equipment are ok not to make sure you can dive! The same on the boat they don’t go in for buddy diving, which did worry some people who were there on there own!
Shore diving was the same, take your truck drop in the water and off you go, I suppose if after a few days your accommodation realise you are missing it might set alarm bells ringing, by which time it would be too late!! Compounding this problem is the fact that because of petty crime the truck has to be left unlocked with the windows down and nothing left inside, so no taking your mobile phone – (nowhere to leave it unless you hide it in the undergrowth nearby) Always wear old clothes because again these have to be left in the truck and might get pinched!
All this aside we loved it, we are talking about “petty crime” and we never saw any or felt threatened in anyway, we drove all over the island, stopping to dive or just looking around.
When we go back we will take fewer and older clothes, eat in more as eating out is expensive, more jungle juice because of mosquito’s, and probably only do shore diving.
