Bonaire is a small island of the Caribbean Netherlands, off the coast of Venezuela, ringed by a coral reef that begins a few metres from the shore, so that its eighty dive sites are marked by painted yellow stones along the road and reached by walking into the sea. The reef has been a marine park since 1979, among the oldest anywhere, and the island is a desert, with little rain and almost no mud or runoff reaching the water, which is why the visibility runs to thirty metres and the coral is as healthy as any in the Caribbean. The method is the island's own: you park beside a yellow marker stone, step off the ironshore into warm shallows, and follow the sand until the reef slope drops away into blue, with parrotfish, turtles and tarpon along the wall, no boat, no schedule. A few nights after the full moons of late August and September the whole reef spawns at once, releasing clouds of pink and orange bundles into the calm water, an underwater snowstorm seen on only a handful of nights each year.
The south of the island is salt and flamingos. The coast road runs a straight line between the salt works, white pyramids of salt beside pink ponds, and the sea, past the slave huts, stone shelters barely 1.5 metres high where enslaved workers slept in the 1850s, and past coloured obelisks that once signalled ships which pan to load from. At the southern tip the road skirts the Pekelmeer, one of only four breeding colonies of the Caribbean flamingo, where from March to July more than ten thousand birds stand as a pink band in glassy brine; many of the adults fly to Venezuela to feed and return here to nest. On the sheltered east coast the lagoon at Lac Bay stays warm and waist-deep under steady trade winds, the flat water that made it a great windsurfing spot for beginners and freestylers. Bonaire is a reef with a road beside it, and the yellow stones tell you where to walk in.