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THE ABC ISLANDS: Simple, but not always easy

Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao in the Dutch Antilles have their natural charms, but getting to them has its challenges

BY TONI STROUD SALAMA | CHICAGO TRIBUNE

January 22, 2006

I was taking what seemed like a country back road, dodging wide puddles left by the previous day's downpour. The scenery included barbed wire, prickly pears and darned if there wasn't a windmill rising above the scrub. It was the typical springtime drive in Central Texas - except that I was on Bonaire in the Dutch Antilles.

There was a similar moment on Curaçao, where the rural vegetation coagulated in a weird coming-together of Baja cactus and Yucatan jungle so thick only lizards can penetrate it. Over on Aruba - Aruba being the best-known of these three islands - the landscape struck me very much like Southern Arizona, except for the distractingly brilliant turquoise of the Caribbean.

These, then, are the ABCs - Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao, the desert isles of the Dutch Antilles:

Due south of the Dominican Republic.

So near Venezuela that they're sometimes absent from Caribbean maps.

Small and off-track to the point that Caribbean guidebooks struggle to fill three or four pages apiece on them.

Bonaire and Curaçao are known mostly for excellent scuba diving. Aruba is known for its beaches. I'm going to assume that if you are a diver, you know what to do in the water, and that if you are a sand hound, you know what to do on the beach. I'm here to tell what to do on solid ground.

Just getting there, and then traveling from one to another, is a feat of aerial timing worthy of the Flying Wallendas. Flights from Puerto Rico or the U.S. mainland depart from different airports to different islands on different days of the week. Once you make it to one of the ABCs, you're dependent on the local airline, Bonaire Express, to reach the others - and that's not easy, either (see If You Go).

I went first to Curaçao.

Curaçao

There are spots on Curaçao that, if not for the roofline of red tiles, you'd never know where the blue of the houses ends and the blue of the sky begins. Golden-breasted birds flit through foliage, but their plumage fades in comparison to the saturated pigment of historic buildings. Curaçao, pronounced kur-a-SOW, is a bright and painted place.

Capital city Willemstad, a many-colored Amsterdam, straddles either side of St. Annabaai, a long channel that accommodates cruise ships and guides freighters and oil tankers to the industrial docks of Schottegat Bay. Despite its traffic, the channel water is so clear that when I took the two-minute passenger ferry from one side of town to the other, I could easily see variegated fish swimming below. I suppose I probably could have seen fish equally well from the 700-foot-long Queen Emma Pontoon Bridge, reputedly the largest floating pedestrian bridge in the world, but it was dismantled for repairs when I was there.

For Willemstad, skimpy guidebooks instruct you to do a walking tour of this, that and the other mossy old monument. But unless you came all this way especially to see the Curaçao Postal Museum, I'd rather you just start walking.

On the Punda side of the channel, your feet will find the way to the floating fruit and vegetable market, waterfront karaoke cafes and duty-free perfume shops that characterize this neighborhood. Before you know it, you'll come upon Mikve Israel, recognizable for its blushingly modest architecture in a neighborhood of painted hussies. Founded in 1732, Mikve Israel is the oldest synagogue in continuous use in the Americas and displays religious items of even earlier vintage in the adjacent Jewish Historical Cultural Museum.

On the Otrabanda side of the channel, all foot traffic flows irresistibly to Breedestraat, where locals shop for discount clothing, cheap curtains and cut-rate washing machines among the mom-and-pop storefronts of Curaçao's main-est street. In this area, you'll want to stroll the grounds of Kura Hulanda, a place that takes some explaining.

Kura Hulanda is a historic neighborhood restored to its former glory - so well, in fact, that it has become a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It's also a gated boutique-hotel village whose rooms occupy what were shops and homes back when; I stayed four nights in one of them. And it's a complex of fine-dining restaurants. Best of all, it's home to one of the finest small museums I've ever visited, the African History Museum, where exhibits celebrate African art on the one hand and graphically chronicle the Caribbean slave trade on the other. I slipped my wrists into rusty manacles and descended into a re-created hold of a Middle Passage slave ship.

You'll need a car to explore the rest of this 36-mile-long, 8-mile-wide island home of 170,000 people, starting with a skirt along Schottegat Bay. It's the island's industrial center, dominated by the vast and surprisingly tidy Isla Oil Refinery. You can get a good view of it, and just about everything else on this part of the island, over drinks, lunch or dinner from the bar and restaurant at Fort Nassau. Except for the food service, the coral-stone fort hasn't changed much since it was built in 1796. Even the historic toilets - square holes cut in an overhang - are still intact.

East of Fort Nassau, there's an Amstel brewery and, a bit farther on, the former manor house of Chobolobo, where they distill the world's only authentic Curaçao liqueur, Senor & Co.'s Curaçao of Curaçao Liqueur.

On this eastern end of the island, you can drive on down to the marina at Jan Sofat if you like. The bay scenery there is pleasant enough. But skip the Curaçao Seaquarium. The approach is so shabby as to be offensive. I'd also spare you the search for the Ostrich Farm. If and when you do find it, you'll discover that the warthogs, which appear to have free run of the place, have left droppings behind on the concrete "floor" of the open-air restaurant.

When you exit the distillery, I'd sooner see you head to the western end of Curaçao, provided you haven't sampled too much of the product. I guarantee that at some point along the drive you'll need to dodge a herd or two of stray goats, perhaps half a dozen iguanas and innumerable ordinary lizards of varying sizes, not to mention other cars.