Hi
I did a house exchage and spent 3+ weeks living on Curacao this past August. It is a very pleasant island, and an extremely engaging place to visit. The comments above about crime should be taken in context - Curacao has always been a transfer point to and from South America - from 1503 to about 1900 it was slaves, for most the the last century it was oil (Venezuelan oil was refined on Curacao - one of the most important refineries in the world in WWII) and in the recent past, it has been for drugs. The drug trade accounts for almost all the crime and all of the murders - if you are not involved, you don't even notice it. Downtown Willemstad has almost no street people, and is a very safe place. I would not let crime worries send you elsewhere.
I am not at all interested in night clubs, but still found a lot of interesting things to do in the area. Shopping is extremely good for certain things - and I don't think you can find lower prices on Dive Watches anywhere!! I bought one there (Citizen), and found it to be lower than any internet price anywhere.
The diving on Curacao is not only superb, it is dead easy. You can almost go anywhere and find a reef needing exploring. We had use of a good size boat, but didn't need to bother for most dives.
We did some dives on our own, but ended up doing most of them with some really fine people we met through Eric Wederfoort's school. Eric Wederfoort is a living legend - he has done more dives than you can imagine (he is probably about 60 and has been teaching diving all his life - and still does a minimum of 3 dives a day - you do the math - I lost count over 50,000 dives)
He has many protoges, and we were lucky enough to meet some and end up going diving with them. They took us to a lot of unusual places, and we had so much fun, it now seems like a dream.
One day a dozen or so of us went to the huge deep water dock at Caracasbai - there was an enormous cable laying ship in dock, and our dive that day was to go under, around and see what it was like. A propeller the size of a house, seen from 60 feet under, through crystal clear water teeming with fish is not an everyday sight.
The sea life there is fantastic - we saw turtles on 90% of our dives - a really interesting array of small and large shrimp and other invertebrates - bizarre looking things - night dives with TONS of cowfish - schools of squid of all sizes - huge long lists of fish - and then there are the sponges and corals - mind boggling fields of the most unusual shapes and sizes. Your entire field of vision was filled with shapes, textures and colours that seemed to be from outer space. Really good wreck dives - some deep, some only 8 feet deep. I could go on and on.
And the amazing part is, these things are everywhere off the south shore - and even when we went to a beach that supposedly was NOT a dive site, there were dive sites galore - impossible to get bored in the water there.
The temperature of the water was REALLY warm - 85 to 88 degrees on the surface, no lower than 83 deg at the bottom. I gave up wearing a suit except for surf entries (just for protection) - I ended up not even bothering with a t-shirt - what a difference compared to home (west coast of Canada).
Air temperature is very hot - and humid - 38 deg C most days, 80 % humidity plus - I found it a bit too hot. I was there in July/August, but it doesn't change much year round. It is even hot in the middle of the night. Despite the humidity, the island is quite barren with scrubby trees and cacti as the natural vegetation - palm trees exist only with irrigation.
I haven't been to Bonaire - and if it is better than Curacao, it must be amazing.
I would go back in a heartbeat. After 3+ weeks, we felt like we were only getting started.
If you go, do look up Wederfoort's school - well worth it. There are lots of other very good operations as well - but just getting to meet Eric is worth the trip.
Cheers
John