Saturday, December 31, 2005

Happy New Year

The new year comes in with a bang here on Bonaire. Many businesses fire off huge firecracker strings at the end of their business day. It's a major social event and one can follow the fire truck, police, and Selibon street sweeper from location to location. You quickly learn to stay upwind because the gunpowder smoke gets really thick.

The hot setup is to carry the crate on a forklift and lay out the firecracker chain. This is in front of the Napa store. Kooyman used a forklift too.



You can click on the pictures to see them bigger.

These guys lit the end with a cigarette, and when the fireworks ignited, they went off with a vengance!


The Napa fireworks lasted about five minutes and the Kooyman ones about seven and a half to eight minutes.


The smoke had barely cleared and the Selebon street sweeper was in action.
Tene Boneiru Limpi! Posted by Picasa

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Someone from Bonaire in the US for their first New Year's said they couldn't sleep because it was too quiet!

Anonymous said...

hehe! maybe they could start a new fad in the US...or maybe not. :-)

Doug said...

Ah yes, those were the days. Too bad they have the street sweepers. The real fun used to be going out the next day and finding the "unspent" ones and giving them a "second chance".