Bonaire is a small desert island of the Caribbean Netherlands, off the coast of Venezuela, ringed by a reef that starts a few metres from the shore. Painted yellow stones along the coast road name more than eighty dive sites, and each one you simply walk into. You step off the ironshore into warm shallows and follow the sand until the slope drops away. The coral falls past sponge-crusted ledges and swaying sea fans into blue, with tarpon and the occasional turtle along the drop. Over the coral heads the small things appear if you are slow: banded shrimp, frogfish, a seahorse curled around a sponge. The reef has been protected since 1979, among the oldest marine parks anywhere, and barrel sponges big enough to climb inside show it. The clarity is the desert's doing: barely 500 millimetres of rain fall a year, so almost no mud reaches the sea and you can often see thirty metres down. A few nights after the late-summer full moons the whole reef spawns at once, clouding the water pink and orange.
On the sheltered east coast the lagoon at Lac Bay stays warm, waist-deep and flat under the trade winds — one of the great windsurfing spots. The south of the island runs on salt. The coast road there goes dead straight between the works and the sea, past white pyramids of salt and ponds gone pink, and at the southern tip it skirts the Pekelmeer, one of only four breeding colonies of the Caribbean flamingo. From March into mid-July more than ten thousand of them stand there as a pink band in glassy brine, and many fly to the Venezuelan coast to feed and come back to nest. The same road passes four coloured obelisks, raised in 1837 to tell a ship which pan to load from, and the low stone huts beside them. You have to bend double to get through a hut door. Enslaved workers slept in them through the week and walked seven hours north to Rincon on Saturdays, and the salt across the road is still being worked.