Steve and Cathy's Blog

Oh my.  Another day, another beautiful Caribbean island.  This one is Bonaire, the third of the southern Netherland Antilles islands that lie only fifteen miles off the coast of Venezuela.  As we start our day at Waves with tea and coffee, we are watching Insignia make its way slowly into port.  The pilot and captain make maneuvering this 600-foot vessel look easy.  We share Kralendijk harbor with Mein Schiff 3, a 2000-passenger German cruise ship owned by that country’s largest travel concern.

We are due off the ship at 9:15 to begin our Bonaire Highlights and Cultural Explorer 3 1/2 hour excursion.  Bus 14 is ours, and it seats about 24 people.  Our absolutely beautiful tour guide is named Jackie.  Very quickly we see that Jackie has a very sparkling personality, and also an accent to her very good English that is charming but difficult to overcome for us one-language-only Americans.  Whatever.  It makes us listen harder to all the interesting information she has to give us.

This would be a good time to introduce the language situation for all three islands we have visited.  The language spoken by the citizens is called Papiementu (we anglos spell it Papiamento).  They describe it as a dialect, but regardless, it is made up of African languages brought over by the slaves, Portuguese, Spanish, English, Dutch and French.  It appears that the dominant ones are Dutch and Spanish, but that’s a guess by looking at a few of the words on billboards.  In the public schools on all three islands, the students are taught Papiamento and Dutch, but are also required to learn Spanish and English, so many, many of them can converse in four languages. The official language is different in each island: Dutch and Papiamento in Aruba (I think), Papiamento in Curacao, and Dutch in Bonaire.

Cathy, having carefully read the brochure about the tour, warns me that this is a ride with few stops.  And indeed it is.  On roads where the pavement is not as smooth as one would hope.  We will stay mostly near the coasts, and Jackie is quick to discuss the most popular tourist attraction – the one that Jackie says makes Bonaire unique among the three southernmost Caribbean islands: diving.  The island is surrounded by a coral reef, and so the surf near shore isn’t all that rough and the number of species of fish is high.  As we ride along the south for west shore, we see many people enjoying the sport.  The government puts a yellow mark by the road where you are allowed to enter the water, and there is also a yellow buoy in the water.  Access is strictly controlled in order to protect the coral.  We also get a look at a local lizard:

Again, Jackie’s accent makes it difficult for me to take in all her information, so I will randomly list some of the things I did understand.  Bonaire has 240,000 people.  They too, as are the other two islands, celebrating Carnival at this time.  The US dollar is their official currency.  They have been independent since 2010.  As were other islands in the Caribbean, the Dutch settled the island through the use of a chartered joint stock company, the Dutch West India Company.  The first product the Dutch were after was used to make red dye.  You will see wild donkeys on the island, left over from the era when they were beasts of burden.  Goats are also prevalent, used for food.

As we travel along farther from the capital city, she explains that the climate, as is the case with the other two islands, is arid, with 15-20 inches per year of rainfall.  We find our way to an area where we finally see some flamingoes, reputed to be very drawn to the island because of the salt flats where much of the plankton, krill and shrimp can be found.  Young flamingoes, by the way, are not pink, but grey.  They turn pink after a few months of ingesting the color that gives the shrimp their color.

Jackie points out that in the rural areas, water is collected in cisterns as there is no central water source (i.e., desalinization plant) from which to draw water.  Soon after she makes us aware of that, we arrive in the village of Rincon, settled by the Spanish when they arrived in 1499.

We trek to a tiny museum illustrating daily life inside the small houses in the village, and are offered bathrooms at $.50/person (We really don’t blame the owners of these small shops for charging to use the bathroom. 90% of us do nothing more than visit that facility, and it least provides them some income other than from the 10% who will buy a souvenir or drink.)  Rincon is also the home of the Cadushy Distillery which produces Cadushy Liqueur, and we are offered a taste.

Continuing along the north coast, we begin to see almost nothing but cacti.  These are actual cactus plantations, and the plant is grown to make the liqueur.  That and aloe are pretty much the only substantial agricultural products that islanders can grow because of the climate.  We dive inland toward Kralendijk but deviate southwest before we enter the city, passing the airport.

Jackie is taking us to the very largest industrial enterprise on the island: the manufacture of sea salt.  The U.S. corporation Cargill has an enormous (in acreage) operation here.  Many, many square miles of shallow areas into which salt water is pumped. The entire process is described at Cargill.com/Bonaire, I believe. I shall check it out.

We stop a couple of times. Once to see the pitifully small concrete bungalows that housed the slaves when it was their labor that produced the salt. And another time to photograph this interesting industrial operation. The salt ponds are green and pink in color, but across the road where they draw the ocean water is the beautiful turquoise color of the Caribbean.  Then you see these huge pyramids of pure white salt – at least a dozen of them, each at least a hundred feet high.  It’s really quite impressive, and beautiful in its way.  One fact that I do glean from Jackie’s comments is that most of this salt is not for human consumption but for other uses such as cosmetics as the crystals formed are not suitable for table salt.

We return to Kralendijk in time for lunch at the Terrace Cafe on Deck 9 (a very elaborate buffet) and … quiet time. Revived by 3 or so, we take the short walk into town to buy salt, of course, and postcards and to peruse the shops on the main street. It is an attractive, bright scene full of shops and restaurants. We stop by the post office just before it closes at 4pm for stamps and to mail our postcards to the grandkids. We wander back to the ship around 4:30 or so.

For a change of pace, we have dinner at the Terrace Cafe as well so we can watch the ship depart.

Cathy had cream of asparagus soup (she is mad for the soups!) and sushi and I have fried fish, escargot and a fish stew.  Everything is fantastic, as the food has been wherever we have been on the ship.

Back to the room to read and sleep.  Another fascinating day.