From Donkeys to Parrot Fish : The Island of Bonaire
by Mermaid
March 2004
You really know you’ve left the urban world when you find yourself in an airport that has donkeys wandering around the parking lot. After JFK (New York City) airport’s endless slick expanses of polished stone and glass and Montego Bay (Jamaica) Airport’s cacaphonous jumble of video adds, bars, and candy stalls, the dusty basic concrete structure of Bonaire’s Flamingo Airport seems like a portal to another world. As indeed it is.
My partner and I went to Bonaire, part of the Dutch West Antilles, north of Venezuela, in March of 2004. The glitzier side of Caribbean tourism with its nightlife and shopping attractions has bypassed Bonaire and settled on its closest neighbors, Aruba and Curacao. Bonaire has instead capitalized on its pristine water resources, achieving a world class reputation as a haven for divers, snorkelers, and wind-surfers.
Pushing our luggage on a handcart past the donkeys, we walk to the car rental area a few yards from the airport’s open-air front entrance. A fleet of mini-vans and jeeps serves Bonaire’s visitors, self-sufficent free spirits who savor having their choice of sixty shoreline snorkel spots to which they can drive in 30 minutes or less from a central island location. As a New Yorker who rarely takes her transportation destiny in her own hands, I am having an attack of nerves over the prospect of driving a stick shift for the first time in 9 years. With typical Bonairian kindness, the car rental agent drives ahead of us to show us the way to our hotel, the Divi Flamingo.
The Divi Flamino hotel turns out to be an intimate Caribbean pleasure garden: low concrete buildings painted bright yellow and pink and decorated with starfish and mermaid shapes. Palm trees, palmettos, and candy-colored flowers waving in the trade wind that provides Bonaire’s shoreline with natural air conditioning year round. A freshwater pool with no loudspeakers, no radios, no karaoke, and no bingo games going on nearby shimmers in the center of the garden. Our room is a “deluxe,” an ocean-view room with a balcony that costs about half what a third rate hotel in Manhattan charges for a view of the air shaft. At the Divi, “ocean view” means not just a glimpse of blue in the distance, but turquoise waves breaking on rocks right underneath our balcony, and a view not only of water but of the parrot fish and tarpons swimming in it.
The quiet ambience of the Divi is reflective of the kind of tourist that comes to Bonaire. People don’t come here to drink, shop, or party. Although there are opportunities for massages at the Divi Flamingo’s spa, few visitors seemed to be interested in doing that. The Bonaire visitor does not expect pampering, and it’s as well that they don’t, because like any close encounter with nature, exploring the underwater world of Bonaire involves a effort, initiative, and some physical strength.
Bonaire’s snorkel sites are not sugar-sand beaches replete with umbrellas and palm trees where you can drowse away the day reading and swimming. They are shadeless rock-hard coral rubble. You pick your site, load up your gear, drive there, park, leaving windows rolled down and doors unlocked to discourage the vandalism and theft that unfortunately plague many of the snorkel sites. You haul your gear to the water’s edge, put it on, and then negotiate your way into the water. Getting in and out of the water is an art unto itself in Bonaire. You have to climb, crawl, or scoot over the slippery coral rubble, trying to pick the smoothest looking bunch of rocks and hoping that the vigorous tug and pull of the waves won’t maul you too badly. We saw a number of muscle-bound divers striding in and out of the water like sea gods, and we wished we could look like them instead of circus clowns!
I don’t want to gloss over the formidable issue of snorkel gear. We bought heavy soled dive booties so we could walk on the coral rubble and snorkel fins to snap on and off over the booties. Snorkel fins were created with the express purpose of enhancing people’s clumsiness as they enter and exit the waters of Bonaire, and ours worked superbly well in this vein. The mask and the snorkel (the tube through which you breathe) also have their own specialized lore. You have to learn how to put it on the right way so that it doesn’t fog up in the water and so that salt doesn’t leak in and sting your eyes.
If the booties, fins, mask, and snorkel aren’t enough to make you feel that you’re cutting quite a figure on the beach, you can also get a wet suit to keep you warm in the water. I tend to be very cold-sensitive (in other words, a wimp), so I rented a “shortie” suit the first day, a diving suit with short arms and legs. It kept my stomach and chest just under freezing temperature while my limbs turned to solid icicles in about 5 minutes, so the next day I went to a dive shop, held out my credit card, closed my eyes tightly, held my breath, and signed the credit slip to buy a full length diving suit. About 15 minutes of huffing, puffing, pulling, hauling, praying, and swearing got me zipped into it, and it did fend off hyperthermia for as long as 45 minutes at a time. An account of getting out of the suit would not make pretty reading for a genteel reader.
By now readers are probably wondering what, besides a cute hotel and donkeys, attracted us to Bonaire. Let us now move from the coral rubble, past the breaking waves and the water-entry escapades to the actual snorkeling. It was fantastic.
Imagine you are finally in the water. All that hassle, hauling and donning your gear, struggling into the water, all of it suddenly disappears. You’re no longer earth bound. You’re floating in pure clear water, sun shimmering against the bottom, weightless, cool, and serene. Immediately you start to see the fish. White, blue, yellow, green. Then you see the corals. In a few moments you’re suspended sixty feet high over an endless enchanted forest of corals. You can see every tendril and spike moving in the water: fan shapes, tube shapes, elkhorn sculptures, rounded, pointed, serrated, fluffly, translucent, spikey, and soft. Dark green, light green, yellow, orange, black, brown, and purple. You see more fish: parrot fish, dogfish, barracuda, tiger fish, cardinals, blue tangs, wrasses, trumpet fish, rock beauties, angel fish, peacock flounder, eels. You see turtles. You swim out to the magic edge of the drop-off, where the shimmering limpid turqoise water turns to mysterious, opaque sapphire. Hundreds of little fish cyclone up from the blue depths and swirl around you. You float back to the shallows and hover over coral palaces where piscine courtiers dance and play. You swim back out deeper, your fins making your motions effortless as the flight of a bird. Divers are swimming deep below you, and you float through their columns of radiant sparkling air bubbles.
At a certain point, even in a full wet suit, my body transitions from chilly to freezing and finally to something approaching arctic tundra temperatures, and I swim ashore. Sometimes we go for a second shorter dip before trudging, wet and salty, back to the car. Then it’s back to the Divi, showers, reading, and deciding where to eat dinner.
Bonaire’s water-side restaurants make up quite a bit for the unforgiving beaches. For the cost of an average New York neighborhood dinner you can sit right on the water, watching the fish swim a few yards down from your table, and viewing spectacular sunsets over the shimmering ocean. The food was delicious, being mostly based on fish caught within a few hours ago. The week we were there a lot of Dorado fish must have been swimming by, because the fish special wherever we went was Dorado!
In between plunges into the underwater world, we turned our attention to the culture and history of the island’s land-life. Little is known about Bonaire’s earliest inhabitants. They were Arawak Indians, originally from Venezuela, agrarian, and leaving no written or material records except for inscriptions on the roof of a few caves. The inscriptions are reddish and look like Mayan writing, but are free-form in their arrangement rather than in columns. No one knows their meaning. We thought some of the figures looked like turtles and lizards. The caves where they can be seen are dramatic rock structures with stalagtites and overhangs and molten-lava shapes. The surrounding landscape is, like the rest of the inland part of the island, barren, dry, and stark, all sun, sandy soil, outcroppings of rock, cacti, scrub brush, and a big deep blue sky. In a statement of unintended irony, a large concrete plaque stands at the entrance to one of the inscription caves, completely blank.
Contrasting with the beautiful and mysterious inscriptions left by the free Indians of Bonaire’s distant past are the slave houses near the salt works on the southern end of the island. Several rows of small concrete structures, just big enough to crawl into for sleeping, face the sea in mute remembrance of the Dutch West India Company’s exploitation of humans for salt production during the 17th century.
Salt is still a major production, in operation within sight of the cabins. Pyramids of stark white salt stand out against the blue sky, surrounded by huge pools of pink and green, the color changing with the salt content. Flocks of bright pink flamingoes feed on the salt pans, an exotic yet recognizable element in this science fiction landscape.
The capital city, Kralendijk, features a museum consisting of a small Dutch style house and filled with shells, old sewing machines, paintings of sea gods, rocks, and some volumes of Dutch newspapers from the World War II era. This eclectic mix of archaeology, technological ephemera, and historical flotsam reflects Bonaire’s earnest desire to recover its history from centuries of silence and scholarly neglect.
Today, the Dutch influence is predominant on Bonaire. Many buildings are in the Dutch style, albeit painted in the colors of the Caribbean. Traffic signs in Dutch warn drivers to be careful of the donkeys. The majority of the tourists seem to come from Germany and Holland. The locals, who claim mostly Indian and African ancenstry, are dark skinned and speak Papiamento, a mixture of Spanish and Dutch. The island’s economy is based on the unlikely pairing of tourism and salt. This schizoid contrast is strikingly reflected in the harbor scene: bloated pink and white cruise ships pass by solemn, rust-covered working ships while delicate sailing boats skim, fairy-like, across the sunset.
Regarding this scene on our last night, we marvel at Bonaire’s eclectic parts: turtles, donkeys, flamingoes, cacti, coral, salt piles, ancient cave inscriptions, and hundreds of fish, gift-wrapped in blue sky and shimmering water, a huge blue and green present waiting to be opened and enjoyed by the traveller who is willing to bypass pampering in favor of endless wonder. |
By Mermaid (BonaireTalker - Post #29) on Monday, November 1, 2004 - 4:56 pm: 
