Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao

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.

There was a similar moment on Curacao, 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 most well-known of these three islands -- the landscape struck me very much like southern Arizona, except for the distractingly brilliant blue of the Caribbean.

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

Straight 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 Curacao 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.

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