SABA!
I had been wanting to see this island since I first heard about it years ago, and seeing it rise up in the distance from Cupecoy made me want to go even more. Tall and steep, only 5 square miles but almost 3000 feet high, lushly forested, only 1500 residents, a tiny airstrip so short that they cannot not land in the rain, and great diving...all of those things sounded irresistible. Today was the day. We were up at 5 (Ugh!) for a 6 AM check-in and a 7AM flight. We parked the car and started for the terminal when I head a voice behind me calling "Sir! Sir!" I really didn't want to deal with these "have you listened to the radio this morning" people again, and wanted to ignore the guy, but I turned around anyway. He pointed at the car and said "Your lights are on".
We found out at the gate that our flight was not a 10 minute direct flight as we had expected, but that we would make an 18 minute hop to Statia first, then fly to Saba. Oh, well, still better than the boat trip.
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We stepped off of the plane into the tiny airport, and met a local cabby named Billy..."Like Billy the Kid", he said. When we found out that he had 5 children by 4 women, Lana took to calling him "Billy the Stud Muffin". The government has a set rate of $40 for a cabby to take tourists around the island, and it is worth it. There are no rental cars on the island, and you have got to be pretty ambitious to walk. The island did not have ANY roads, or cars, until the 1940s. The islanders asked the Dutch (Saba is a Dutch possession) to build them a road. The Dutch engineers came over, looked at the terrain, and said "Impossible" (a pretty serious thing for the Dutch, they have some great engineers). So a local man took a correspondence course on road-building, put together a local crew, and they built the road themselves. It took 20 years to build the 12-mile ribbon of concrete that the locals simply call "The Road". |
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Saba is a step back in time. It has no beaches, only 4 towns, and less than 50 hotel rooms. She is known as "the Unspoiled Queen". If you like to hike, dive, or bird watch, this is your place. Otherwise, there is not much to do there. I did not bring my dive gear on this trip, but we were up for a hike, so Billy took us to the base of the Mt. Scenery trail and said he would meet us at a nearby restaurant at 1:30. I don't know what altitude the hike starts at, but the tourist info says that there are over 1000 steps hewn into the mountainside from trailhead to top. The vegetation was very dense, reminding me of St. Lucia and Dominica. The mountaintop is shrouded in clouds a lot of the time, and the island gets a lot of rain. We struggled up the mountain, stopping occasionally to take pictures or catch our breath. It got slippery towards the top, and there were trees that were twisted into all sorts of weird shapes by the wind. Seems like someone described this area as The Fairy Garden, and it fit. We arrived at the top, drenched with sweat, and had a wonderful view of the island laid out before us, with other islands clearly visible off in the distance. Swallows darted around our heads and we welcomed a cool wind after our hot hike. Soon the wind blew some clouds in. On the windward side side the clouds covered our view of the village below, but on the leeward side we could still see the valley . The mountain was actually leaving a wake in the cloud, and we could see the vapor swirling and twisting like the vortices off the wingtips of an aircraft. |
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I checked the cell phone, and we had service (due to elevation, I suppose), so we each called our parents to let them know where we were. Then we started the trip back down. I had just finished razzing Lana about being so slow and careful on the descent, when my feet slipped out from under me and I fell flat, breaking my watch band and getting a few scrapes. Served me right, I suppose.
We got to the restaurant at 11, probably way earlier than we were expected! They were not ready to serve, so we chatted with the hostess and wandered the grounds. The facility is an eco-lodge, 12 cute cabins and a restaurant on a steep hillside with lush gardens. They grow a lot of their own veggies, run on solar power, and have one phone. A few more people showed up around noon, we had a lunch of Monte Carlo sandwiches and passion fruit juice, and scanned some books about the local area that were laying around. I picked up the Guide To The Saba Marine Park, and mentioned to Lana that it was written by Tom Van d Hof, the same man that wrote the Guide To The Bonaire Marine Park (I am on my second copy of the Bonaire guide, my first one fell apart from being used so much). The chef overheard me and said "He is my dad"! His name was Berents (not sure of the spelling), and I told him how much I enjoyed his fathers Bonaire guide. It was cool meeting him.
The Stud Muffin was waiting at the appointed place, so we set off for the other side of the island. On the way we passed his wife walking home from work. He said she refuses to drive the car home, "She doesn't want to gain a pound", he said. She looked to be in good shape. He took us down to see the harbor and showed us the old footpath that EVERYTHING had to be carried up before the road was built. In the old days the boats just pulled up to the cliff side (no dock), goods were offloaded into slings and winched up to the first bit of level ground, then hauled up the mountains on the backs of donkeys or men. We drove back to the interior and stopped by the daycare to pick up his 6-year-old son, Christian, whom he scolded the whole way into Windwardside about messing up the upholstery with the mango he was eating. Later, as we walked around Windwardside, we stopped at the Saba museum, which is in a house built in the 1860's and is run by a lady who grew up just a few doors away. There was a piano in the the house that had been hauled up that footpath. Those folks must have wanted that piano BAD. We looked around town for ice cream, and finally found some at a place called Scouts.
Billy took us back to the airport around 4:30 for our flight. I was pretty tired and sacked out on the floor, and was almost asleep when the plane landed. Believe it or not, it was EARLY. We loaded up and I watched as the pilot taxied to the end of the runway. The strip is 1200 feet long, and there is NOTHING at the either end of the strip...no grass, dirt, nothing...just thin air, it runs from cliff-top to cliff-top. The pilot got so close to the takeoff end that when he turned the plane around, the wingtip swung out over the edge. It was a full flight, and I began to notice that we had some pretty hefty folks aboard. I hoped that the crew had done their weight calculations properly. The pilot throttled up both engines to the max with the brakes on, the airframe was shuddering as they spun up to full power. He released the brakes and the airplane lurched forward, headed for the drop-off 1200 feet away. By the time we got to the other end of the runway, the nose gear was up, but I don't think that he ever pulled the mains off the strip...we just fell off the face of the cliff and started flying. It was cool.
Ten minutes later we were one the ground in St. Martin, 5 minutes before we were supposed to leave Saba! We collected the car and paid the $24, you read it right $24 parking fee. It's a buck every half hour! And I thought Hartsfield was bad. All I had was a hundred dollar bill, so we sat for a few minutes while the attendant ran to the terminal to get change, with traffic backing up behind us. It was dark by the time we got back to the hotel, we were tired, so we took a quick shower and went to the cafe on the grounds for dinner, and turned in.