Saba – The Rock

By Roberta Sotonoff

The approach, especially if you are sitting on the right side of the plane during the descent, will bring a prayer to your lips — a prayer that the wing will not hit the mountain.

Not to worry. The plane always makes a smooth landing on the world’s smallest commercial runway, bordered on three sides by steep 100-foot cliffs. The plane taxis for about six inches on the aircraft carrier-sized strip (without the catapult). Then it turns toward the dollhouse-like international terminal of Saba (pronounced say-ba). The island, a 5-square-mile rock in the Caribbean, is about a 14-minute flight south from St. Maarten and well worth the harrowing arrival.

Once on the ground in Saba, which you are likely to kiss, it is necessary to navigate “The Road.” Josephus Lambert Hassell, who took a correspondence course in road building, designed it. It took 15 years to build and is hand-swept clean everyday. Its concrete ribbons and 14-hairpin turns lead to the main towns of The Bottom, Windwardside and Hells Gate. On the way there is a view of the Great Wall of Saba, the poor man’s answer to the one in China.

But though the Road and plane landing are thrill rides, most people come to Saba to relax, dive and hike. Underwater sites and visibility are extraordinary. Sea walls drop to about 1,000 feet just ½ mile from shore, and Saba Marine Park maintains sites that include pinnacles, shoals, reefs and corals.

Since everything is on a slant on Saba, hiking is a given. Its most famous trek is Mt. Scenery, the peak of the rock that is Saba. It is a grunt along with 1,064 steps to the top, at 2,855 feet. The Crispeen Trail ends just above The Bottom, which is really located about halfway up the mountain. It passes through lush greenery and the new Ecolodge Rendez-Vous Lodge where the bellman is a donkey named Brownie. Goats occupy the Sulphur Mine Trail that weaves alongside the mountain to an abandon mine and bat colony home.

Maps are available at the Trail Shop, Windwardside. They can brief you on the island’s history like, when in 1937, the ratio of woman to men was 11 to one. Back then, every new male on the island was treated like a king. Ladies ran the island businesses. If they wanted to land a man, they had to do three things: tat lace, cook and brew a mean Saba Spice, a potent, 151-proof rum mixture. Saba Lace, Saba Spice and Jobean’s hand-blown glass are still the island’s best souvenirs.

Cooking skills and quality cuisine still thrive on the island. Find outstanding coconut shrimp and escargot at Restaurant Eden and savor anything from tasty, popular fare to sushi and schwarma (Lebanese gyros) at Brigadoon. But for both excellent food in a charming, romantic atmosphere, Queen’s Garden cannot be beat.

The Swinging Doors offers a great barbeque plate every Tuesday and Friday night and Saturday afternoon.Steak night is Sunday. It is the place to hobnob with the locals whose surnames are likely Johnson, Hassell or Peterson. Sabans are interesting, friendly and smiling. They live amid greenery and flowers in lattice trimmed, white houses with red corrugated roofs and green shutters. These gingerbread houses that hang off the mountain along pencil-striped roads give the island a fairy tale-like aura.

“We are a step back in time,” says Glen Holm, head of the Saba Tourist Board. “Our charm is it took us a long time to move into the 20th century.”

SABA Website: www.sabatourism.com