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Bonaire is a quiet, relatively undeveloped island known for its excellent scuba diving off the coast of Venezuela in the south-western Caribbean, with reasonable connections to USA (easiest via Curaçao, but also San Juan) and Holland. The languages are Dutch, local Papiamento, with some English (in the tourism industry) and some Spanish. Local culture a mix of Dutch and Spanish, with polite, slightly reserved islanders. A few reasonable beaches, also some small and remote. Primarily scuba diving tourism, barely any large hotels, but many small, independent inns and guest houses, many self-catering apartments, giving it a nice, independent atmosphere. Activities – magnificent scuba diving, some nice restaurants, a couple of small casinos, some interest in the natural life, horse-riding, day sails, windsurfing.
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Below is an article about travelling in Bonaire, written by James Henderson.
There are moments when Caribbean winds, normally an elixir, get a bit out of hand.
As I say, normally they are wonderful. They keep the islands cool. They scurry over the beach, and tickle away the cushion of tropical heat that tries to settle on you. And they make the sailboats move. In fact they are so vital and reliable that they have been given names. In logical, lumpen English they are the Tradewinds (despite the emphasis on commerce in the colonies, the ‘trade’ was actually derived from ‘tread’, an early English word meaning ‘direction’). In flighty, poetic French they are Les Alizés.
In Dutch they are Passaatwinden, or ‘passage‘ winds, and it was these that I had to contend with at the moment, on the island of Bonaire. It’s quite often windy on Bonaire, but during the three days of my visit I was in danger of being sand-blasted when I went to the beach. Arriving was almost comic. We were barely able to stand up straight on the airport tarmac. We made our way to the terminal building like a string of Charlie Chaplin mimics, leaning to the right, hoping that the wind wouldn’t drop suddenly.
Bonaire is a curious island, which brings unexpected pleasures for a visitor. It is one of the ‘ABC’ islands (Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao) which are tucked away in the southwestern Caribbean, off the coast of Venezuela, and it is actually a Crown Colony of the Netherlands. The island has had a loyal following in the States for a number of years as one of the leading scuba diving destinations in the Caribbean, but it is barely known to the British.
The nominal capital of the island, really the only town, is Kralendijk, a few golden yellow buildings and a fringe of hotels lined along the ‘coral dyke‘ of its name. I love wandering around this place, not so much for any atmosphere or architecture, but to listen to the language used by the inhabitants. It is called Papiamento, and it indigenous to the ABC islands. Like many Caribbean creoles, Papiamento is odd and surprising. Even the name has an admirably ironic double entendre about it. It has a sense of both Parliament and babble. Spoken, Papiamento has the rat-a-tat of Spanish, some wayward Portuguese vowels and then weird sounding guttural interruptions from Dutch--taca-taca-taca, taca-wow-taca-plömpf.
Bonaire is a good example of fleeting and fragile nature of Caribbean fortune. For much of its recorded history the island was ignored. The Spaniards simply wrote it off as ‘isla inutila’ (a useless island). The Dutch settled it only in self-defence, to protect the approaches of nearby Curaçao, which was one of their two hugely successful Caribbean trading ports. The only industry Bonaire ever had was the harvesting of natural sea-salt (used as a preservative before refrigeration). When both Curaçao and Aruba made their fortunes in the refining of oil from South America early in the last century, the only thing that Bonaire got was a little bunkering.
But due to tourism the island is wealthier than it has ever been. Now the earlier neglect is actually to its benefit—most late twentieth century travellers prefer seclusion and lack of development. For all their weird language, the Bonaireans are utterly charming. It is all very low key.
I spent a couple of days diving the reefs, swimming through explosions of sergeant majors, zooming jawfish (they stand on their tails guarding their holes and then pop back in when you go too close), and captivated by an octopus as it insinuated its way through the fingers of tube sponge and staghorn. It certainly is some of the Caribbean’s finest diving.
But of course you have to ‘fizz out’ before getting on a plane and so I was left with a day to explore. I drove around the south of the island and was surprised to see that the salt industry has recently been revived. Mountains of it stacked among the flooded pans that cover that part of the island. It makes an interesting impromptu visit. Sea water is let into an inland lake, the Pekelmeer, and over the course of a year or more it is transferred (powered by windmill of course) from one condenser to the next. The water evaporates gradually in the sun and wind and the remainder changed colour as it goes, from ash through lavender to fuchsia and then a rich reddish pink, the same colour as the flamingos which can be seen trawling for crustaceans in the ponds, heads working back and forth as they walk.
Finally the brine is transferred into crystallising tanks, where it hardens into a blinding white crust of rock salt twenty centimetres thick. The layer can support the weight of a car, so in the harvesting season JCBs set about it with their shovels, gouging and smashing, loading the salt into piles for washing and shipment. Close up, the crystals are as regular as clusters of miniature pyramids, as intricate as snow-flakes.
In times past the whole process had to be done with a sledge hammer and it was known to be back-breaking work. The pathetic ‘slave quarters’ can still be seen by the side of the road, a collection of two-man dormitories not much bigger than kennels. The south of the island is too barren to support much life and so in their time off, the slaves would walk ten or fifteen miles back to the other end of the island.
The north west is pretty unforgiving country itself, but you will see traditional houses of baked earth with their shaggy sorghum weed roofs, backs turned to the wind. Kadushi or candle cacti strike their exclamatory poses in the scrub. Elsewhere they are trained into impenetrable fences. There is an indigenous tree, the divi-divi, which has a slightly peculiar response to the wind. It grows a normal enough trunk, gnarled and about eight or ten feet tall, but then gives its branches up to the elements and they are swept off horizontally. It looks like a woman bending at the waist, her hair and shawl blowing off on a high wind. There were even a few sheltered spots in the north — the only place apart from underwater where I managed to get out of the wind.
But back at my hotel the wind was up again. Palm trees were tousled like untidy heads of hair and rigging wires were slapping insistently on the yacht masts. At dinner in the open air, napkins floundered and my wine glass juddered, edging its way repeatedly across the table. I had to spear all my food, but still a lettuce leaf managed to escape. It tore off the end of my fork, spattering vinaigrette, like a green tracer bullet. |
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