From incredible island hiking to world-class windsurfing, Bonaire is an all-around outdoor paradise. Better yet, unlike neighboring Aruba and Curacao, there’s not a chain hotel in sight and its easy roads and well-marked attractions make it eminently explorable with or without a tour guide. Throw in super-friendly, Dutch-infused locals with an infectious love for their natural landscape, and you’ve got the DIY traveler’s trifecta.

Explore Bonaire for yourself with this lineup of the island’s top five outdoor adventures—no scuba tanks required.

1. Washington Slaagbai National Park

With rolling desert hills and towering cactuses dominating the landscape, the rugged Washington Slaagbai National Park feels more like the American southwest than the Caribbean, except for one thing: You can’t turn the bend of a dusty West Texas trail to find a deserted white-sand beach where rolling waves beg you to body surf. From hiking and mountain biking to bird watching, kayaking and cliff jumping, this park has adventures to top any visitor’s must-do list. Car- and bike-friendly roads run alongside hiking trails that include a flat walk through the prickly pears out to Chikita Beach and a not-so-flat climb to the top of Branderis, the island’s highest point. Aside from the visitor center at the entrance, the only facilities are found at Slaagbai, a white sand beach on the west side with a food vendor and picnic area among historic harbor buildings.

2. Cave snorkeling

You could be forgiven for thinking the only place to get wet on Bonaire is the ocean. That’s because its most secret snorkel spot isn’t at the beach, but rather beneath a blanket of desert scrub brush. Like many Caribbean islands, subterranean springs have eroded parts of Bonaire’s coral limestone substrate, leaving the island pockmarked by caves. Protected as natural and cultural resources (they were used by native Bonaireans), these caves require local guides. Clay Davalaar—of Jentis Tours—will bring the lights and ropes needed to reach the heart of a particularly impressive, spring-filled chamber just a short drive from Kralendik. Heat up during the climb down, then you can slip on a face mask and cool off in the crystal-clear water swimming among a maze of rock formations.

3. Harley Tours

While they might seem mutually exclusive, the Venn diagram of scuba divers and Harley riders has a big intersection, and true to form, a passionate group of dive-crew-turned-motorcycle-junkies recently launched both a booming local motorcycle club and laid-back custom tour company from the iconic Captain Don’s Habitat dive resort. With its wide open spaces and relatively long stretches of empty road, Bonaire seems built for motorcycle riding—just watch for goats—and there’s little that compares with saddling up a rumbling Harley to sightsee along the salt pans and old slave huts on the island’s south end. Custom rides can range from a couple hours to a full day, and a favorite route passes through the Sorobon area at Lac Bay, with a stop for some fork-tender kabritu stoba (goat stew) at the Maiky Snack local-food shack.

4. Windsurfing

While Bonaire’s west side supports the bulk of the island’s hotels, shops and watersports, the eastern side is all about the wind. Buffeted by tradewinds year round, Lac Bay is the everyday surf turf of local pros that tear up windsurfing competitions throughout the Caribbean. But it’s not just for experts—aquamarine Lac Bay stays shallow and flat calm far offshore, which makes it the perfect spot to get your sea legs. And situated right on lively Sorobon Beach, Bonaire Windsurf Place has board rentals and lessons taught by championship-winning windsurfers that’ll have you standing and sailing in no time.

5. Mangrove Kayaking

The reefs of Bonaire boast unprecedented numbers of marine life, and they owe their diversity to the robust nearshore mangroves that act as protected nurseries for young sea creatures. To see this delicate and vital ecosystem, take a kayak trip into the winding channels of mangrove trees and sea grass beds from the Mangrove Center, a dual-purpose research facility/paddling operation on the outer edge of Lac Bay. After weaving from the mangrove tunnels to the ocean and back again, you can tie up in a protected cove. Slip gently into the water to swim among juvenile reef fish and look for the flower-like Cassiopeia, aka upside-down jellyfish, that plant themselves headfirst in the silty seabeds.

On the one hand, there’s obviously something wrong with groups of tourists peering through the tinted windows of a bus as it makes its way through the grotty streets, but from what I can find, the growing “poorism” trend is not about passive voyerism. It seems that the demand itself is for the tangible experience of wading through the trash, interacting with the people and getting out of the comfort zone at least a little. One could argue that exploring a city on one’s own would prove the most rewarding leap out of the comfort zone. Nix the tour guide altogether. But anyone who has been abroad knows this is an insurmountable hurdle for the vast majority of travelers. So, maybe this is the next best thing.

Photo used under Creative Commons, taken from Flickr.

It takes mere seconds of web surfing to realize I’m far from the only one to take offense at the rebranding of “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher as some sort of war correspondent, currently making his way through the Holy Land with the sort of ignorance that would fit perfectly into the classic wit of The Innocents Abroad if it wasn’t so genuine.

In his made-for-the-web coverage at Pajamas TV, Wurzelbacher repeatedly insists that he is not a journalist, proclaiming that his superiority over predatory media folks stems from his simple mission: To hunt down the facts and present them to viewers so that they can make their own judgments. Last time I checked, that IS journalism. But his self-described hunger for truth doesn’t really jibe well with his statements in the video above, essentially that it is “asinine” to allow journalists access to operations and atrocities of war because “you report where our troops are at, you report what’s happening day-to-day, you make a big deal out of it.”

Excuse me?

Of all the things to make a big deal of in this world, war seems like one of the most vital. Wurzelbacher wishes we could go back to the way it was during the first and second world wars, but he seems ignorant of the parabolic downturn to the numbers of American deaths in major U.S. conflicts as they relate to the amount of access given to the media. The Vietnam War is when the horrors of war really became visually accessible to the public via television and photographers and print journalists reporting from the field. Is it any wonder that there was such a public outcry over the violence? Jump forward to today and the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Public opinion has far less tolerance for American deaths, abuses of power and years of unnecessary bloodshed when it’s in our face, visible 24/7 via the media.

While I’m at it, I’d like to point out another nitpicky bit of hypocrisy in Wurzelbacher’s coverage. As I remember it, Joe the Plumber’s entrance onto the public stage centered on his wariness over Obama’s “socialist tendencies.” He was the “Average Joe” who didn’t want to risk sharing his potential wealth. But as part of his ass-hole’s tour of Israel, in which he blindly professes the strength and wonder of the “Israel people” without providing any evidence that he has even a basic understanding of the history and struggle that brought the country into existence and created the on-going conflict, Wurzelbacher heads north to the Golan Heights to hang out on a Kibbutz.

Kibbutz: A collective farm or settlement owned by its members in modern Israel; children are reared collectively
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

That’s right Wurzelbacher. A Kibbutz is an Israeli commune, chock full of socialists working collectively and sharing the wealth. But that didn’t stop him from lauding the Kibbutz model as exemplary in the region, a place where men and women; Muslims, Christians and Jews alike could come together for the common good and live together in peace. “That doesn’t happen in Iran,” he explains, but technically, his political leanings as spouted during the McCain campaign put him firmly in the unsharing, divisive (Iran?) camp on that one.

Now, I realize there’s not much unique about this “epiphany.” It stands to reason that someone–i.e. me–who had grown used to cranking out service content on cue, forced to quit cold-turkey, will feel not only relief from the day-by-day, hour-by-hour flow of words but also pangs of withdrawal at the loss of a dedicated audience. And these simultaneous reactions complement each other, coming together to inspire new creation, and the discovery of a new audience.

Of course, that new audience, at least when it comes to my online ramblings, is limited to the very few people who either look at this, or my other blog, or those who happen to stumble upon them. But rest assured, within my own mind, I am writing for millions who will never see, and if they did, never like, my writing. But whatever. Hidden from view means liberated from judgment. And that the words come this easily–much more easily than the ones I’m supposedly being paid to write at this very moment–is likely a testament to their unpreparedness for the public eye.

So, the following day, it was with a mixture of surprise and, well, non-surprise that I listened to the company president’s voice over the conference phone say, “We are selling Scuba Diving magazine to World Publications (the publisher of our number-one competitor, Sport Diver), and the office will close on Friday, two days from now.” All just a week before Christmas.

I was one of the lucky (I suppose) few offered a “opportunity” to go with the magazine and the new owners. The offer, in short, was that I would keep my current salary and title, and within a reasonable time, I would have to move to Orlando and help with whatever it is they plan to do with the magazine. Considering that no one could give me more than an ethereal explanation of what that plan would be, and even less about my actual responsibilities with the new incarnation, I was not terribly inclined to accept.

My ultimate decision and counter offer is one I have contemplated often over the holiday vacation still in progress. I indicated that I would be willing to “help with the transition” as a contract writer. My win-win reasoning being that the new owners could avoid hiring a new employee for a publication they have yet to establish a long-term plan for, and I could avoid opening myself up to an unlimited workload and an uncertain level of responsibility in a city with a higher cost of living, all for no change in my salary. Simply put, if the middle ground is accepted, I get to maintain some control over my workload, while commanding a reasonable rate of pay for myself. If this best-case scenario actually works out, I suppose I could come out just as well, if not better off, than I was as a full-time editor. I could devote a finite amount of time to Scuba Diving, and pursue new freelance work as well. But that remains speculation until all the cards are on the table. More to come…

I’m not much for unbridled product endorsement, but a recent addition to my productivity suite has provided me such pleasure that I feel inclined to make mention of it. Evernote goes beyond simple list making, though it performs that task quite well, offering easy note taking via text, email, voice record and camera phone. It also allows for quick, easy archiving of webpages, or sections of webpages, including their embedded links, with a simple click. All of the above pieces of remeberance, once imported to Evernote, can be quickly organized into various folders and further catalogued by Gmail-style tags. And the whole heaving mass of personally useful information can be keyword searched, and any notes that incorporate images, whether downloaded from the web, a digital camera or shot with a camera phone, mesh with Evernote’s text recognition capabilities so text within the photos is subject to the search function as well. And the kicker, the function that makes Evernote the best of its kind in my mind, is it’s ability to work and sync across all my platforms, i.e. iPhone, home and work desktops and the web-based application. Did I mention that it’s free? Check it out: evernote.com