The Majority of Travelers to Bonaire

Bonaire is an island without even a single set of traffic lights. Here, fish and flamingos outnumber people. Bonaire has largely avoided the kind of development that blights other Caribbean islands, the glitzy resorts and malls, jet skis and beach-side discos. This island, the least populated of the so-called ABC islands of the Leeward Antilles (the others being Aruba and Curacao), prides itself on pioneering sustainable tourism, the first nature reserve and marine park in the Caribbean were founded here exactly 40 years ago. It helps that the beaches aren’t big enough to accommodate mass tourism, and also that the majority of nightlife here is underwater. That underwater activity is exactly what draws the majority of travelers to Bonaire. With over 500 species of fish, visibility up to 50 meters and calm waters, the island is considered one of the premier dive sites in the Caribbean, and it is certainly one of the best managed.

Bonaire tries hard to educate both visitors and residents about the fragility of the reef, its major asset. Regulations “it’s forbidden to dive wearing gloves”, for example, are aimed at minimizing damage. Yellow stones mark the island’s 62 diving and snorkeling sites, plus 24 more on the neighboring islet of Klein Bonaire, and all of them have fixed moorings to protect the reef. So glorious is Bonaire’s marine life that you only have to walk a few hundred meters from the airport and don a mask to enter an astonishing, through the looking glass world filled with brain-jolting colors and psychedelic patterns, where purplish blue tangs nibble at algae, while clouds of yellow-tailed jack fish and blue-striped grunts weave through luxuriant blooms of coral. Vividly pigmented parrot fish, in glowing shades of blue, yellow, green and red, seem to be everywhere. Not much further away, off Klein Bonaire, turtles wing alongside you, seemingly without fear, above an ocean floor carpeted with colored sponges and Daliesque coral forms.

Above water, the island landscape is equally surreal. With its arid climate, Bonaire is a true desert island. In the national park of Slagbaai, the hilly terrain is densely forested with giant candelabra cactuses, some five meters tall, like fantastically oversize pot plants. Between them is a dense blanket of thorny foliage, prickly pears and fat, round Turk’s Head cactuses. The landscape rustles, whistles and screeches with life, with lizards, iguanas, parakeets, tropical mockingbirds, scarlet and black trupials and yellow-shouldered parrots. See them flying overhead, in perfect formation, and their grace surprises, they look so clumsy and ungainly on the ground, picking the shrimps that give them their rosy tint out of the briny waters of Lake Gotomeer. At its fringes, the island gradually morphs into a barren moonscape of bleached rock, with here and there a twisted divi divi tree, bent at a 90 degree angle to avoid the ever present trade winds and just about clinging on to land and life. The white rock bears the recognizable imprints of brain corals and sea fans, a reminder that the island, actually, the peak of a huge underwater mountain, is still rising out of the sea as the earth’s tectonic plates continue their inexorable drift.

Here and there are signs of Bonaire’s mysterious past, rock carvings left by the island’s first inhabitants, Caquetio Indians who sailed here from Venezuela. There are the lighthouses built by the Dutch, Bonaire’s longest-ruling colonial masters (the island remains a part or the Kingdom the great outdoors in of the Netherlands to this day), and the bleak little huts, not tall enough for an adult to stand up in, where slaves brought from Africa lived while they labored in the southern salt flats. The salt flats are still here, stretches of blue, pink and purple water that, over an eight month period, gradually turn into thick crusts of snowy crystals, which is actually the island’s only export product.