Wednesday, May 05, 2004

Bonaire from Space AND Map Talk

I'm always on the lookout for cool images of Bonaire from Space. Here is one that shows where I was on my mountain bike last week. I marked a few points of interest on the right side of the picture.
On the left side you can see the two town piers and the soccer stadium pretty easily.
There are some clouds right around where the TWR studios and Activities Building are located, so identification there is kind of iffy.

If you want to see the fine details that are visible on this image, you will probably need to go to my club photo page , click on the thumbnail and then click again on the small image, which will get you the full size image.

For the life of me, I can't remember where I found this picture. There are a few other amazing shots too. I'll have to snoop around online sometime and see if I can find the site, so I can post a link to it. They sell big full resolutions prints of their images for about $40 as I recall. Some of them might just be worth it.

After I go on an exploring Bonaire excursion, I also like pulling out my set of large scale survey maps to try to check up on exactly where I was and what I saw. A number of years ago, Sandra and Sue Felix were able to bag a set of these rare and expensive maps while on a trip to Curacao. Sue had to sweet talk the officials into even selling the maps to them. It helped that Sue is a key player in training tour guides on Bonaire etc.

Imagine my surprise a couple years ago, when an engineer with Intelsat showed up on Bonaire with one of these map pages. He told me he got it on the Internet, and sure enough, when I went to the site, the maps were for sale there. They were just as expensive as ever, but available, (as color copies perhaps.) There are also black and white full size copies of the out of print 1971 version maps for sale at a much reduced price.
Here is where to get your maps.

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