The ABC islands

Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao, colloquially known as the ABC islands, are three Caribbean islands belonging to the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Aruba, the westernmost of the three, lies roughly 85 miles Northeast of the Colombia/Venezuela border. The islands share a unique and beautiful creole language, Papiamentu, which is based in Spanish and Portuguese, with influence from Dutch and English. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never felt the need to say “this lady will pay for everything” in any language. Or “my hovercraft is full of eels”. However, those are two of the sentences in a list of useful phrases in Papiamentu I found. Perhaps I’ve been living my life wrong all these years. I’ve decided to make radical changes so that those two sentences become useful to me in my day-to-day life. E señora lo paga pa tur cos. Mi hovercraft ta yen di conglá. Hopefully the lady will pay for the hovercraft too.

Geographically… let’s see if I get this right. First, there’s the West Indies. That term includes all the Antillean Islands in the Caribbean Sea, plus the Lucayan Archipelago (Bahamas and Turk & Caicos) in the Atlantic Ocean. In turn, the Antillean Islands are divided into the Greater and Lesser Antilles. The Lesser Antilles is more or less the chain of islands we’ve been following (first South and now West), and are further subdivided into the Leeward Islands in the north, the Windward Islands in the south and the Leeward Antilles in the west. The latter comprise all the islands just North of Venezuela, including the ABCs. None of which makes much sense anyway, because if we now wanted to go from a Leeward Antille (say Bonaire) to a Leeward Island (say Guadeloupe), we’d have to go to windward.

Politically, the ABC islands are part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, but in different capacities. Bonaire is a special municipality of the Netherlands. However, it’s not part of the European Union, and the official currency is the U.S. dollar. Aruba and Curaçao are two autonomous countries of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, each with their own weird currency. Until 2010 it was simpler though: the islands were all part of the Netherlands Antilles, a now-dissolved country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Now, a question for the readers: we came to Bonaire in 2007 when it was part of the Netherlands Antilles. Today it’s part of a different country, the Netherlands. Do we count our two visits as visiting two countries?

In our infinite ignorance, extraordinary stinginess, and staggering laziness to do just a little bit of research during the summer, we thought of the ABC islands as all Dutch, and bought just one courtesy flag, the Netherlands flag, to rule them all and be done at once with the item “buy courtesy flags for all the countries we’ll visit next season”. Not only they are all three different countries, but Bonaire, even though it is part of the Netherlands, has its own flag. We figured it’d be less disrespectful to fly no flag at all than to fly a Dutch flag. So, if anyone is interested in a brand-new Dutch flag, let us know.