Bonaire and Curaçaoare curious remnants of the once sprawling Dutch Empire.

Today their landscape,music, their culture, the marine life,and their cactus forest are as distinct as their unifying language, Papiamentu.

Funding for In the Americas, was provided by Agnese Haury.

♪ music ♪ ♪ music ♪ There are six islands in the Netherlands Antilles, three of them of importance, the ABC Islands: Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao.

All of them bear quaint traces, a lingering nostalgia of the greatness of the Dutch empire that was in the Americas.

Historically, the most important of the ABC islands has been the middle one, Curaçao.

You might think from the architecture, that you're in Rotterdam or Amsterdam, but when you hear the music the salsa, the tumba as they call the local music or the reggae, you know you're in Willemstad.

The Dutch West India company used Curaçao as its base for over 300 years.

This particular harbor was the best in all of the Caribbean.

So they use it to full advantage for their mercantile interests.

The most important of which, was slaves.

The heritage of slavery is obvious here in Curaçao and in Bonaire and in Aruba.

All the natives speak four languages: English, Spanish, Dutch and Papiamentu, which is a creole language preferred by the local people.

The Dutch still retain strong ties here and many Dutch citizens when they retire like to come to Curaçao, especially to Curaçao, to retire and their influence is strong.

When you see people of light skin talking, they're usually speaking Dutch.

When you see people of darker skin talking, they're usually speaking Papiamentu.

We fit in okay.

We speak English and Spanish.

Spaniards first claimed the islands back in the 16th century but they didn't find any gold so they pronounced them to be useless islands, 'islas inútiles'.

In the early 17th century the Dutch realized that this was a valuable harbor, the best in all of the Caribbean.

So they stole it from Spain without too much battle and turned it into the biggest embarkation and disembarkation point for slaves in all of the Caribbean and South America.

This wall was part of a fort built by the Dutch to protect the harbor from pirates who knew where the money was.

On the other side is the other part of the wall and with a few cannons, they could control the entrance here.

Now the harbor is guarded by a casino.

In a sense it's a repatriation of money from the Netherlands to Curaçao.

The tourists who come here by the thousands and thousands bring their money here and sustain the economy of those natives who historically were so desperately plundered by the Dutch.

The climate in Curaçaoand in Bonaire is very dry.

They get about 20 inches of rain a year, which is semi-desert.

There's no natural water on the surface of either island.

So they have to import almost all of their produce but only 40 or 50 miles away is a port in Venezuela and Venezuela has all the fruit they could ever want, all the vegetables they could ever want.

So all of their produce comes in boated, five-hour journey and comes to this more or less floating market.

(Spanish) This market here has been going on for a hundred years.

It is a long time tradition for us Venezuelans who come work here in Curaçao, bringing the locals fruit.

We come here every month to set up the floating market.

Our compatriots come over every week from Tucacas, on the Venezuelan coast, bringing their fruits and vegetables.

We sell to the local residents in the restaurants.

Here on the island, they can't grow anything except for peppers and sweet potatoes.

We can't bring anything that they grow here.

That is the rule.

(Spanish) So we bring watermelons, melons, papayas, bananas, all kinds of fruits.

This market provides not only the fruits and vegetables that we recognize but several that we don't see in the United States.

This is the passion fruit, the pulp of that they make into a marvelous drink and use it as a pulp for punch, whatever they want.

These are yams and these are yams.

Two different kind of yams and this is a starchy root called the yucca.

All of them go into soups and various baked kinds of vegetables.

They're very nutritious, a basic part of the diet here.

We don't even know what they are.

This is not only a floating market supplied by boats but it's a mobile automobile market cause the cars come by here and the merchants are stopping them and offering them deals and there's a lot of bargaining that goes on.

Every vehicle that goes by has a possibility.

You don't want to let one go by without an offer.

If Curaçao is the economic heart of the islands, Bonaire is the natural history museum.

It's a half hour flight away in a puddle jumper that flies on an informal schedule.

In the islands, everyone speaks four languages, Dutch, Spanish, English and Papiamentu.

The radio station broadcasts in the popular tongue.

(Papiamentu) The island of Bonaire, just like the other islands Curaçao and Aruba, are really desert.

It rains very little except for two months of the year and even then it doesn't rain very much.

They get less than 20 inches of rain a year.

It's a tropical climate so that 20 inches doesn't go very far.

So it's scrubby vegetation, not enough for any sustained agriculture.

There've been attempts to grow some dry land fruits here but they have not been productive.

So basically the islands are dependent for all of their foodstuffs, except for fish and goat meat, on imported vegetables.

Thirty years ago the residents of the nation of Bonaire would not have dreamed that a cruise liner would show up on their shores.

The capital city of Kralendijk is small.

The entire nation has only about 15, 000 permanent residents.

Spaniards gave it up in the 16th century as useless and the Dutch used it only for producing salt to salt fish, but nowadays the world has come to find that it is a world class diving center.

Some of the best marine life visible in the world.

What is special about Bonaire, pretty much the biodiversity we find below the surface is amazing and because of that it attracts a lot of people coming to the island to scuba dive or snorkeling just looking after the beauty of the Caribbean marine life.

I was here in Bonaire in 2005 and it's now almost 2013.

The place has changed.

There are a lot more people.

There's a lot more traffic coming in, a lot more divers and the local people tell me a lot of damage has been done to the reef.

A lot of that damage came from a hurricane in 2008, whether it can be repaired or not is something that the local divers and local workers are going to find out.

Restoring the coral reef is a long process or else it would be done everywhere and anywhere by everybody.

So it involves research, of course, to which specific corals we're looking into restore, which are the ones we are building the shallow part of the reef and that obviously will trigger technique, time, effort, hours of work to see the results.

Obviously, a joint effort between marine park, between locals, between tourists coming to the island and all will end up in a successful story, which is happening already.

We're going out on the boat called the harbor lady.

There are two phases to the operation to fix the reef.

First, is to kill the lionfish, which are invasive species and kill off all the local fish.

The second is actually trying to restore the reef that has been destroyed.

That's a major project.

Profile for this dive.

Giant stride off the platform in the back.

You can see we have a nice shallow area that runs through the top area.

That is pretty similar to the rest of the dive sites that you have done in Bonaire.

You've got a nice shallow area, roughly 20 ft and then you've got a gentle drop off.

Dive site here... this is typical of the north site.

You will find the reef tends to wind.

We got some nice sand shoots also coming down, so you'll never know what is around the next corner.

Hopefully on this dive, lionfish we will find.

Dave will be participating in the maintenance activity that we regularly, weekly do here in the nursery.

Mainly, cleaning the nurseries, measuring, cleaning from the algae's growth because already in a week, the corals and the lines and also trees are covered by algae.

We need to remove the algae otherwise they will kill the corals.

Bonaire is known for the small marine life.

You will see a lot of small stuff, small fish but unpredictable marine life like mantas.

We also have them passing by.

Eagle rays, sting rays, lobsters, octopus, squid, you name it.

Nowadays Bonaire is basing its economy on the coral reef, on tourism, on diving.

This is what the people want to see.

They want to enjoy the coral reef, this beautiful marine life.

So loosing the coral reef, we're loosing the entire economy of this island.

We didn't find any lionfish but the word is that this boat is bringing some from other parts of the island and we'll get to see what they actually look like full grown, instead of just that long.

Lionfish became an issue in the Caribbean not too long ago.

And it's an invasive species that is obviously already eating marine life that doesn't know about the lionfish.

So they're being predated without warning and being humans, the number eight predator are the solution for that problem.

So in the island of Bonaire, what we're doing is we're offering courses.

We're offering courses to guests who come to the island, we have volunteers, my staff including myself, we go on a regular basis to shoot the lionfish.

The lionfish is not just a bad predator but it is quite toxic.

It has glands at the base of the spines.

When they are touched, it can inject very quickly venom into whatever touches it and it's apparently excruciatingly painful.

Also, there are glands around the ventral part, around the very bottom of it that do the same thing.

So If you try to eat it without cleaning it you're in very deep trouble and if you're a fish you stay away from it.

So nobody here on the reef, nothing wants to eat it.

So it lives a very calm, easy existence.

Until people come along who know how to kill them.

Bonairainsare struggling to develop a market for lionfish fillets.

The chef who knows best how to cook them isn't around yet, while we're waiting we drive out to the south end to the island to see Bonaire's other extractive industry.

Our planet has a lot of salt on it.

The ocean is roughly 3% but getting that salt to be a usable product is much more difficult.

You need a place that has a lot of very flat land, hundreds and hundreds of acres right next to the sea and you have a lot of sunshine.

There aren't a lot of places on our planet that meet those requirements.

Here's one on Bonaire that does.

It has been used for producing salt for hundreds of years.

First, run by slaves to salt fish and after that for a commodity to sell on the world market.

It's not everyday you get to participate in gourmet conservation but here in Bonaire I am doing just that.

The lionfish, I'm told is good and the world needs to know that lionfish is good food.

The more we extract the better for the coral reef and Chef Marcel is going to prepare some.

First, ceviche.

It's ready for Chef Marcel to do the main course, the lionfish.

If I were to try to buy some lionfish, how much would a kilo cost me?

Eight dollars a kilo but of course you have a lot of waste There's a lot of waste.

And that's just for the whole fish?

Yes.

Oh, so probably 1/3 of that is the actual fillet.

Yes it is.

Oh, so that's going to be an expensive fish.

It's going to be an expensive fish.

I am happy to report that the extermination of the lionfish has added to the pleasure in my life.

Not just knowing that the reef is safer, but because I had a great meal here in Bonaire.

Early next morning we drive to the north end of the island to visit the most unusual Washington Slagbaai National Park.

The cactus are everywhere and I know the cacti are there.

I've seen them.

People have told me that in some of the flats up here where there's water, we'll find flamingos.

So if we are lucky, it's hard to imagine a cactus forest that has flamingos but I think we're going to find them.

There's an odd combination here in Bonaire of cactus forests, unlike anywhere else I know of, and flamingos.

The flamingos like this especially because the water comes in from the ocean at high tide and settles and it evaporates.

They like brackish water.

So the concentration of the salt doesn't bother them but it helps the shrimp that they eat to hatch and they eat and they eat and they eat the shrimp and they turn pink.

Bonaire has three species of giant cacti, giant columnars and here are two of them.

This is the yatu, which is related to the organ pipe cactus.

It gives great fruit, very edible fruit and they make fences all over the island from it.

The other is called the kadushi and it's a genus found all over South America but not in North America and it actually provides a food for stews.

They can take a section of it, clean off the green stuff and stew it and it becomes edible.

Nowhere else that I have found do people actually eat the cactus itself.

Nobody knows why the cactus forests here on Bonaire are so dense.

All the species are found elsewhere but never in the numbers that you see in here.

It's an otherworldly type of place.

Fortunately, for the world, the government of Bonaire has made it into a national park.

People come from all over the world to see melo cacti, which is what this guy is.

All this structure they call a cephalium is reproductive.

The flowers come out here and fruits.

They're just starting here but when they are ripe, you can actually pluck them off and eat them.

Some cactus scientists believe that the ancestors of this, now lost, were big columnar cacti but they put so much energy into this reproductive structure that they got smaller and smaller and this is what remains.

We're in a national park here and yet all the way along this amazing cactus forest we see goats.

It's a symbol of a conflict between local people, who view this as a place where they can run their goats and make a few extra dollars, and the conservationists who see the damage that the goats do to the native vegetation.

It's a very tricky situation for the government to control and to decide.

In the long run, the goats will disappear but in the meantime they convert a lot of this marvelous vegetation into meat to enrich a few people, not a lot of people.

I have a little teal lizard climbing up my back pocket here.

This species has evolved as lizards often do on Bonaire and where they don't have a lot of competition from others, they tend to get big.

So this is quite large for this particular lizard family.

The females have the iridescence on their ankles, which is somewhat unusual but they're fighting among themselves and maybe that helps them attract the males.

But the male, this guy's a young male.

He's not a big one but he is mature and he's patrolling, make sure that all the females know that he's around.

Just outside Washington Slagbaai National Park, we find the cactus fence country club.

My guess is that most wealthy people would not find this the kind of country club they want to enjoy but it's very much a part of Bonaire.

The fence is literally made out of cactus.

It is only a thirty-minute drive from the national park to Kralendijk, the capital town through some very different cactus country.

In case you didn't notice, it's almost Christmas time in Bonaire.

Christmas is something different for children who are growing up where the temperature never varies more than about 10 degrees between 75 and 85 but Christmas has long tentacle regions here and the kids love it just as much as if they were in upstate New York.

These kids are singing 'We Wish You A Merry Christmas' in four different languages but they do, they all speak four languages.

Papiamentu is a basic language here.

But we teach them Dutch too, at school.

But when they are in the secondary school, they are learning Spanish and English.

Which is the most difficult language to learn to speak?

For me it's, well, Spanish.

Spanish is the hardest and what for you what's the hardest?

It would be the Spanish and a little of the Dutch.

In Spanish, we say good morning, we say buenos dias, how would you say that in Papiamentu?

(Papiamentu & Dutch) So we would say how are you today, we say ' Cómo estás?'

in Español, how would you say it in Papiamentu?

(Papiamentu) Oh, that's quite different and how about goodnight, we would say Buenas noches in Spanish and how would you say it?

(Papiamentu) Papiamentu originated from different languages because our history goes back to, first we had the Indians here and then came the Dutch people and then some slaves etcetera and when they have to communicate with each other Papiamentu originated.

Alright the rules are, you're going to talk about something all five of you in Papiamentu.

I'm going to listen and I'm going to try to figure out what you're saying cause I don't speak Papiamentu, okay go.

(Papiamentu) Something about his mother...

Yes.

(Papiamentu) She wants something about dancing.

(Papiamentu) He likes something, what was it you like?

Ice cream.

Oh, he likes ice cream.

Oh it was ice cream.

It was in English so I couldn't understand it.

I could learn Papiamentu after five years of you being my teachers.

I don't have time, so I'll give you two years.

Thank you very much you guys.

(Papiamentu) Monuments built by slaves.

Quilombos.

Cachoiera.

The Atlantic forest.

The Reconcavo.

Camamu.

All these are part of Salvador Brazil and the area around All Saints Bay.

Join us next time on In the Americas with me David Yetman.

[music] [music] Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman , was provided by Agnese Haury.

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