A Honeymoon on Saba: Hiking, Diving, and a Quiet Celebration
Our legs ached and mud caked our skin. It was the perfect start to a Caribbean honeymoon. My partner, Jeanne, and I, together for two decades, had finally married in a quick ceremony last November. With matching gold rings, we headed for Saba, a place most people couldn't place on a map.
This five-square-mile Dutch Caribbean island has no cruise ports and barely a beach. Its single, winding road was carved by hand nearly a century ago. About 2,000 people live here—descendants of settlers, pirates, and enslaved Africans, alongside expats and a handful of the wealthy. It’s a community where everyone knows your business, as our taxi driver cheerfully warned.
A third of Saba is national park, surrounded by a marine reserve. The ‘Unspoiled Queen’ offers little beyond diving, hiking, and eating lobster. We flew from New York to St. Maarten, then took a 12-minute flight to an airstrip famously short.
We stayed at Juliana’s Hotel in Windwardside, a village of storybook cottages. We ate lobster three ways by the pool. The next morning, I dove with Sea Saba. At Man O' War Shoals, sea turtles rested and manta rays drifted past thriving coral formations. The dive shop, with the Saba Conservation Foundation, also nurtures young coral in nurseries, repairing damage from storms.
Later, park officer Robin van der Bij guided us along historic trails, once the island’s main roads. We passed an old sulfur mine, now a bat roost, and hiked through dry forest alive with lizards and soldier crabs. Entering the rainforest, we were surrounded by elephant ear plants, lobster-claw flowers, and ancient tree ferns. Bananaquits chattered overhead.
The trail called Sandy Cruz tested us, a steep, slippery descent into a ravine. We regretted forgetting our walking sticks back in the room. Van der Bij mentioned that local athletes run all 20 island trails in about ten hours. After five hours covering just three paths, we were exhausted but proud.
We visited a small church in The Bottom, its ceiling painted with local faces among jungle flora, then ate steak and tuna at Brigadoon in Windwardside.
On our final morning, we hiked the Elfin Forest Trail to the top of Mount Scenery, the highest point in the Dutch Kingdom. A thick mist hid the view, but the climb through cloud forest, past orchids and bromeliads, was stunning. Afterward, at the Colibri Café, I finally checked my phone. The Supreme Court had declined to hear the challenge to same-sex marriage. The legal urgency for our wedding had passed. Jeanne laughed, took my muddy hand, and our rings touched. We were, simply and happily, married.