Hiking in Saba

We had a great time in Saba! We took The Edge II (ferry) on Thursday morning. It was an interesting ferry ride…the army was on the ferry with us! Tons of men in uniform and lots of guns! Ahhh!!!!

It was pretty funny when we arrived in Saba. You always have to go through customs, where they check your passport and keep track of how long you are staying, where you are staying, etc. Their customs was funny! It was just a police officer who pulled up by the dock!!!! Not official at all!

We had a group of six on the ferry, but three just went to hike and were taking the ferry back the same day. We got lucky and a really nice taxi driver picked us up! He drove us around and told us about Saba…kind of our own private tour! He dropped those 3 off partway up the mountain. They hiked the rest of the way up and then all the way down. (When taking a ferry back the same day, you don’t really have time to hike the whole thing.) Then he took us to the office for Scout’s Place, where we were supposed to go check in for our scuba diving the next day. We filled out paperwork and paid, then walked over to our hotel, Juliana’s. It was a really neat little place!!! We put our luggage in the room, then headed over to the hiking shop to get walking sticks. We started hiking at the beginning of the trail and hiked the whole way up! It was pretty difficult at times and we were out of breath!!! There were 1,064 steps plus the path was sloped fairly steep even when there weren’t any steps! We had amazing views of the ocean and of Saba while climbing up! The top of the mountain was completely hidden in the clouds. It got cooler as we got closer to the top! (We enjoyed all of the trees, flowers, and lizards along the way, but didn’t exactly love the three snakes that we saw!!!) We finally made it to the top! It was amazing! You looked over the edge and couldn’t see anything! Just white from the clouds. It looked like there was nothing there at all. Crazy! Even the tower at the top was hard to see! Very neat feeling and we were so proud that we made it all the way up! We thought down would be a lot easier…but quickly realized we were WRONG!!! The stone path and steps had green algae growing on them, which made them slippery!!! We had to be super careful not to fall. It was a little scary at times, but we are so glad we did it!

We were STARVING when we returned to the bottom four hours later!!!!! We ate at a cute little pizza pub. It was soooo good!!!! Then we walked back to our hotel and got in the hot tub!!!! We deserved it! :-) And we figured maybe it would help us to be a little less sore for the next day! Our hotel was nice. It even had a common room with computers with internet and an Honor Bar! We liked the honor bar. Everyone is so trusting in Saba. They say there’s no reason to even lock your doors in Saba…of course we did anyway! The honor bar had all kinds of drinks. There was a paper in each room to record any drinks on. Then you just turn in that paper when you check out and they add it to your tab. That would never work in the US!

We were so worn out!!!! Phillip and I were in bed by 8:00 and Alicia said she was in bed super early too! We slept approx 10 hours!!!!!!!