29 August Washington Slagbaai National Park

Friends who now live here on Bonaire are off island for a week and have generously loaned us their 4WD truck. The ideal vehicle to visit the rugged nature park.

Washington Slagbaai park is the northern part of Bonaire and covers 59 sq km, or 20%, of the island. It began as two 17^th century plantations, Washington and Slagbaai, which produced salt, charcoal, aloe extract and up to 3,000 goats for export to Curacao and Europe. When the last owner died in 1979 the land was gifted to the island as a nature park.

It’s remote. It’s rugged and well worth a visit. Today we opted to take the longer of the two available driving routes to see more of the wilder east and north coastline.

At Boca Chikitu we watched the waves breaking on an unforgiving rocky shoreline amazed that this is a turtle nesting area. Turtle conservation has been very successful; there are now too many animals for available food that some are swimming on to repopulate new areas.

turtle nesting beach

Boca Chikitu

We stopped to take a look at a blow hole at Suplado, but the waves weren’t crazy enough for a picture worthy spout.

the underwhelming blow hole 

At the north tip of the island we took a walked down to Kokolishi beach to admire what the guide said would be fossilised conch shells in the rock. We looked but only found whelks.

Kokolishi

The lighthouse just along from Kokolishi is a stark reminder of the hazard to shipping that a low level island represents.

A long drive through the kadushi cactus on a rock strewn and dusty track brought us to the quieter east coast. Being in the wind and wave shadow these white beaches are good for swimming and a leisurely picnic. The water really is turquoise.  

When I flew to Bonaire 25 years ago on a diving holiday I came to this beach for a shore dive.  This was only a couple of years after the waves created by hurricane Lenny had smashed the reef.  Today there is no diving allowed in the park because the reef is under attack once more.  This time the destroyer is a disease killing hard corals across this part of the Caribbean.  By restricting access the hope is that corals can eventually recover.

The final hour drive of the four hour trip took us past brackish lakes which are home to hundreds of flamingos. Quite shy flamingos, too far away on the other side of the lake for a decent photo. However, we’d taken the boat binoculars and I got a great view of them.

cara cara bird

kadushi cactus

At the end of the day we had a car covered in dust, some good photos, because if you can’t record an image you haven’t seen anything, and sightings of birds of prey, parrots, flamingoes, iguanas and many, many cactus.