Category Archives: Caribbean

Azul y Tranquilidad, Part III: Under the sea.

Posted on by
Reply

I’m winding the calendar back a couple of weeks to where I’m killing time before my flight home, walking the back streets of the little neighborhood where I stayed. Little blue and green lizards are scurrying about. And chickens. And the roosters who have no sense of time. Two sandy but friendly pups come out to say hi with their little wiggle-butts, grateful for the pats on the exceptionally warm morning.

two dogs sitting on a sidewalk

I take a dirt road which appears to go somewhere but really ends up in someone’s yard. In broken Spanglish I tell the lady sitting on her porch that I’m wandering and possibly lost but not really lost-lost. It’s a small place and there aren’t really that many roads. Everyone greets you with a smile.

I wander down to a part of the sidewalk that overlooks a corner of the beach, so I sit and let images of the undersea world dance through my brain as I look out to the sea of 7 colours.

I came down here to dive… and dive I did. I went in without expectations. Reefs across the warming planet are deteriorating and I really had no idea what to expect. Photos I’d seen of Providencia diving looked decent, but as last year’s I can’t even in Costa Rica proved, I didn’t get my hopes up.

Under the sea

I first started diving in this part of the Caribbean in the late 90s. The reefs were healthier, the massive building boom hadn’t gone into full swing yet, and the fishing industry hadn’t entirely decimated fish populations. Fast-forward a couple of decades, and while I still love to dive, it’s more and more a simultaneous feeling of gratitude and loss. The act of blowing bubbles as you explore an alien world is a privilege and an honor. Pretentious, maybe, to barge into this other world and expect a show. The corals are grayer than they used to be; the fish, fewer. But that said, it’s all thriving despite what’s being thrown at it.

There were curious reef sharks, and eels of all shapes and sizes (even a sharptail). Sandy bottoms held stingrays and garden eels, and blennies and those shy little jawfish, remodeling their holes with tiny rocks. The reefs were alive with schools of snappers and chromis. And deeper down, there were lobsters and crabs hiding in the wall, big groupers, and even some Atlantic spadefish looking regal and eerie at the same time. The usual Caribbean suspects: filefish and parrotfish and triggerfish… and some welcome sightings of cowfish (one of my favorites), trumpetfish, and an assortment of butterflyfish and hamlets, even a sighting of the masked hamlet, a species endemic to Providencia.

On a night dive, I watched a giant snapper use the light of our torches to hunt a blue tang (and amazingly eat the thing in 3 bites!). And I saw my first hammerhead, albeit a young one in fairly shallow waters.

2 / 31

Part of diving is the shared feeling of exploration with your boatmates, and the awe and wonder after each dive. Every dive is magic. Every dive is a gift. You make instant connections in the dive shop, and quite often new friends that remain even after the adrenaline fades.

At the surface

I took a boat to see the land from the sea. It turned out to be a “snorkeling tour”, bouncing from bay to bay to snorkel and sight-see. We visited Fort Bay and Morgan’s Head, then rounded the top of the island, where McBean Lagoon National Park comprises the northeast part of Providencia. The mangroves by the airport, Cayo Cangrejo, and the Tres Hermanos islands are all protected by the park, and that’s what I was really keen on seeing.

Crab Caye is a tiny island ringed by a reef, so it is a snorkeler’s dream (since you aren’t allowed to dive there). There were Portuguese man-o-war sightings that day, so I opted to walk to the lookout tower at the top (said tower was blown off during the hurricane, so it was a walk to the base of the tower), then watch the snorkelers bob in the shallows as I sipped a highly-recommended fresh coconut water. From here we continued on to Tres Hermanos, which is home to a nesting colony of frigatebirds. Later in the trip, I’d ask a different boat captain to take me back there with my big girl camera to capture some shots. We snorkeled in the bay between Tres Hermanos and the mangroves (look, squid!), and looped south and finally back to South West Bay.

3 / 14

Even though the snorkeling was decidedly “meh” on my tour, the boat ride was super-nice. And so, on the recommendation of one of our divemasters (everyone knows everyone here), I found a guy with a boat who could take me back to Tres Hermanos to do some frigateography.

We ventured as far as we could into the mangrove lagoon before it got too shallow and we had to pole it out of there. Much of the mangroves were destroyed in the hurricane, but they’ve made a huge effort to protect and tag the fledgling mangrove trees. They’ll be back! After the mangrove adventure, we spent quite a bit of time slowly circling one of los hermanos, the island that the frigatebirds call home.

The magnificent frigatebird, as I stated in an earlier post, looks (and acts) like a cross between a seagull and a vulture. First of all, they are enormous, with a wingspan of up to 2-1/2 metres (nearly 8’!). Second, they nest communally, and very close to the water, so their nests look like a frenzy of black and white and red feathers. The sky looks like a swirl of small aircraft. The males have this wattle that they expand as a mating ritual, and the females (smaller and way less showy) have a white head and throat. I could have stayed out there for hours just watching the frenzy but feared the captain would get bored out of his mind! While they will fish for their own food, frigatebirds prefer to steal what they can from fishermen and other waterbirds, and they are considered “kleptoparasites” in the scientific world: they pester other birds until they give up their prey.

4 / 10

Sure, on paper the magnificent frigatebird is kind of a disgusting jerk; but I was mesmerized watching them interact on their island home nonetheless.

As I sat there on the sidewalk that looked out over the beach, frigatebirds and sharks and little magic moments swirled in my mind. A little while later, a lady on a motorbike drove by and stopped to sell home-made ice pops from the cooler on the back. A little while after that, after saying goodbye to the guys at the dive shop and my new diver friends, I stopped by the little blue bakery to get some banana bread for the trip home.

I’m finishing this post after a fresh foot of snow has fallen back at home, and I’m wondering whether I should have just chucked it all and stayed. But I also think that the stories and the feeling of a place remain with you. And it’s these that will warm me in the cold winter months ahead.

I’m already at work on the next adventure, as any girl with a wandering spirit must be. So here’s to sunny days, wide-winged birds, and a large dose of natural wonder and undersea magic!

🤿🐡🪸🐟 Many thanks to the island of Providencia for having me and to the amazing team at Sirius Dive Shop for making every dive an experience to remember. 🐠🫧🪸🦈🏴‍☠

Azul y Tranquilidad, Part I: Getting to Providencia, a little island in the middle of the blue.

Posted on by
1

19 Jan 2026: I am channelling blue. Or, more precisely, the 7 (+/- 3) shades of blue that surround a little island I didn’t know existed 8 weeks ago.

Rewind to the beginning of December: I needed a break from my computer. My inner mermaid was screaming to return to her home planet. My bones were cold. I needed to tune out work and the real world and the endless blather from every form of media. I needed a return to the blue.

A plan is hatched.

A conversation with an old friend put me in touch with a dive instructor on a little-known island called Providencia; part of Colombia, but geographically closer to Nicaragua. Its history is that of pirate island, and an English, then Spanish, territory before Colombia’s independence in the 1800s. Privateering was Providencia’s chief business for a while, and rumours abound of treasure still hidden on the tiny island to this day. In 2007 UNESCO incorporated the archipelago of San Andrés, Providencia and Santa Catalina into their network of Caribbean biosphere reserves, calling it Seaflower.

Before the dot-com boom and bust and well before online travel blogs were really a thing, I spent a lot of my vacation time diving in Belize and Honduras. This was also before the hordes of tourists and the warming of the waters and the multi-story luxury resorts built on the edge of atolls that really can’t support the growth. The pristine reefs in that part of the Caribbean have grayed and crumbled over the years; apparently capitalism is an exemption in environmental protection.

So when I read about Providencia, it resonated like a glimmer of hopeful azul in a long, cold, gray December. It was small enough to be overlooked by the masses, cherished just so by its denizens, and hard enough to get to that most of the cringey tourists wouldn’t bother. Also, aside from beaching and diving and snorkeling and climbing The Peak, there wasn’t a heck of a lot to do there. I booked flights as soon as I saw photos.

Rusty Spanish and a small glitch.

To get to Providencia, you need to go through San Andrés. Luckily Avianca flies direct to Bogotá from Boston; and while it feels like a world away, Colombia is in the same time zone as the Eastern US. So the flight from Bogotá to San Andrés was also relatively straightforward. The small oopsie: In the chaos of work-holiday-family-new year before the trip, I had completely forgotten to apply for my Check-MIG (tourist visa). So as the BOS-BOG flight taxied to the gate in Bogotá, I furiously entered my info into the web form then held my breath. Exhale: The acceptance email arrived as I was walking to the immigration line. This level of stress is not highly recommended. The other thing that nobody tells you unless you dig for the info (which I didn’t), is that you need a tourist card to enter the reserve area, so with rusty Spanish I navigated to the kiosk to get mine just in time to board the flight to San Andrés.

I stayed in an eco-hostel on San Andrés for a night, a quirky little hotel built into an ancient coral reef, before waking to take the final hop to Providencia (The Rock House: I highly recommend!). Even though I only spent one short night there, I felt welcomed and safe from the moment I arrived. As solo female travellers know, this is such a relief…one less thing to stress over, giving back some emotional energy to focus on that last leg.

Note to travellers: always check and re-check flight times… the flight was changed to leave 20 minutes early! But I made the flight, understood enough of the in-flight announcements (100% en Español), found a taxi, and made it to my little hotel in South West Bay in time to unpack, find the dive shop, and take a small nap in my hammock before sunset.

I hadn’t intended on writing a whole post on just the getting there process, pero aqui estamos (but here we are). Thanks for coming along on the beginning of this journey with me.

In Part II we’ll dive into Providencia. Literally.

Exit: Saba; Enter: new year’s intentions

Posted on by
Reply

Your last night in an endearing place is always a bit bittersweet. A frog jumped out of the tap when I turned it on to brush my teeth this evening, perfectly punctuating my last evening here on this surprising little island.

I spent my last night with new friends, and in the morning (which comes all too quickly) it’s time to leave and begin that multi-airport hopscotch.

As if on cue, the skies open up in a tropical downpour as I navigate my 17 kilo bag down the (what seemed like) 200 stairs from the heights of my cottage on Booby Hill. Soaking wet and laughing, I cross fingers that the stash of Saba Spice, a local liqueur made from aged rum and local spices (cinnamon, fennel, and others), survives the journey back to the States. I’m certain that the Elfin Forest imps are having fun at my expense…

On a solo trip it’s always a crapshoot, but usually an adventure, in how you spend your evenings. This trip, I fell asleep early a few nights, ventured down to a local restaurant where I took meals with dive boat friends and locals, and the last night, spent with divemasters from different pinpoints on the map talking fish and Western politics and equanimity, yoga, Buddhism and life, was perhaps the most enjoyable (Aside: it is usually at this juncture where I ask myself if I could chuck it all to work on an island somewhere and live the divemaster life). You share a lot with those you meet on a dive boat. Perhaps the fact that nobody looks good in a wetsuit gets people to let defenses down and open up a little more.

The people I met in Saba hailed mostly from Europe, some from the US. Divers, all, as this place is a hidden gem; more than earning her name as the Caribbean’s Unspoiled Queen. Languages on the boat ranged from English to Dutch to German to French to Spanish, making me more intent on improving a foreign tongue in the coming year, as I realise my creaky French now outshines my rusty Spanish. I can read a menu and perhaps have a scrappy conversation with a 7-year-old in 3 languages, yet only one with la bonne confiance, as they say.

benoit
peter & amy
stefen & heidi
luis

And so, after leaving somewhere that has made an impression, I reflect on not only the experiences had, but the things that got me there in the first place. The absurd airfares required for a Big Trip this Christmas; the yearning to get away from the routine back home; the random blip on the radar of this little island, nonexistent to me only 2 months ago yet something made me look into it… So it’s perhaps also appropriate at this juncture to think about what comes next.

I don’t make resolutions. As this wobbly world does its best to leave us wondering what crazy thing is coming next, and as things change along the way (as they are wont to do), I find that resolutions tend to leave one feeling more frustrated and unfulfilled than resolute come March or so. That’s not to say there aren’t things to be learnt and new adventures to be had and unfinished somethings that need finishing; because there are! And so I set intentions at this time of year, focused on feeling well and greeting the days with gratitude and welcoming new experiences into my universe; learning much along the way, finishing what’s been started and ultimately moving forward each day on strong legs and with a bright heart. There’s something about setting an intention that makes the path to achieving it more evident and perhaps the future result more tangible.

I write now, flying over the Atlantic Ocean on my northbound trajectory: a little bit browner than when I left and a little more grateful for the wonders of the natural world, having seen some quite amazing undersea stuff as well as rainforest flora and fauna. I met a few wonderful people and also encountered some characters; hiked in the rainforest, dodged raindrops and lived amongst what I’ve nicknamed the woodland creatures: Coquee frogs, snakes, lizards (the little Saba anole lizards and also giant iguanas), hummingbirds, crickets, grasshoppers, roosters and goats, all moving about on their own schedules, setting a rhythm to each day.

  

But when you return home, to a place where water isn’t a luxury, it makes you think about the scarcity of our natural resources. And it makes you grateful for the little things: the plentitude of bananas when you want them; hot water on demand; hair that doesn’t react so insanely to the humidity; dry stuff (in the rainforest, things only get “somewhat dry”). I ran into a woman on the trail up Mt. Scenery with unless tattooed on her shoulder. Unless, indeed.

So now, as we close the books on 2015, there are places to go and people to see and more potential adventures than there are days on the calendar. I wonder if it’s possible to do one new thing each day or maybe each week? There’s only one way to find out: try.

Happy New Year.

Saba tales: in which I find things to do on dry land

Posted on by
Reply

Feeling a bit wonky and also slightly water-logged, I opt for a day on dry land. The tropical weather doesn’t seem to want to cooperate, repeating its sun-rain-fog-sun-fog-rain rhythm as a fog swoops down from Mt. Scenery and envelops Windward Side. The town has two markets, a handful of restaurants and bars, a bakery, a couple of dive shops and a few other random places to spend a tourist (US$) dollar. I find a quick brekkie at the bakery in town, the Bizzy Bee (“flour, flour” on their sign). From their Christmas stollen (shared on the boat with my new diving friends Christmas Day) to the almond cookie I had on the trail (filled with marzipan!!!), their stuff is fabulous! Sated, I embark on the day’s mission: summit Mt. Scenery, the highest point in the Kingdom of The Netherlands.

In 1967, a stairway comprising 1064 steps was built, leading up to the “Elfin Forest” at the top of this dormant volcano. A somewhat treacherous (mossy and steep) climb through the rainforest and around a private residence which reminded me of something like a tropical Deliverance (“take no photos, please respect” signs clearly posted), and then rising through the elephant ear and mountain palm, tropical flowers and trees. The trailside was teeming with butterflies: little white ones, black and yellow-striped and some even a vibrant orange. The mosses and ferns truly made the setting look like a scene from Grimm’s.

Rainforest, Saba

With a fog-ensconced trail, I was not optimistic of seeing much besides treetops and tropical mist when I (finally) reached the summit. And so, an hour after leaving the trail shop, I did, in fact, land at the top of Mt. Scenery; greeted by a friendly mountain chicken and a dense blanket of cool fog (which was actually quite refreshing after that tricky ascent). And so, as Samuel Clemens said about the weather in New England, “if you don’t like the weather, wait a minute.” Or 15, in my case. For the wait, I was rewarded with a parting of the clouds as it were: a brilliant view of Saba, from the Airport over to The Bottom, materialised in front of my eyes. Blue skies, lush hills, the charming red-roofed buildings in Windward Side and a shining Caribbean sea below. I stayed until the fog returned, its little cat feet guiding my way down the mountain once again.

Down is harder than up on the moss- and jungle mist-covered slick steps, and I’m certain a mountain troll or elf is giggling at me from behind the elephant ear as I slip and teeter down the trail. I have seen hummingbirds and butterflies and lizards and the myriad rainforest flora. I land back at the trail center…mission: accomplished.

Lunch is a spectacular grouper sandwich at Scout’s Place. As I order, I hesitate – I have a moral dilemma with grouper. I love it but at the same time it is a scarce fish in most parts because of overfishing and poorly-designated marine reserves. But in pristine waters like this, with few fishermen on the island, the catch is both hand-reeled and controlled. So it’s doubly cool when the chef can show you a picture of the fish you’re eating, and more than likely introduce you to the fisherman.

The afternoon is rounded out with a siesta on my little terrace, views of Mt. Scenery (partially enveloped in its signature fog) in the distance; an ear out for the giant iguana thrashing about in the trees and the hummingbirds with their miniature jet fighter trajectories. Background din is the melange of goats from down the hill, birdsong, roosters and an occasional barking dog. The sun is looming lower in the sky and the peeper frogs (Coquee) are on deck to begin their nightly chorus more.

On Christmas and coral and hope for the natural world

Posted on by
1

Christmas Eve evening, shortly after I returned from diving, the proprietor here came up to my room bearing a message that I had been invited to Christmas lunch at the home of the parents of one of the women I met on the flight from St. Maarten. Because the rumour mill is small, and the magnifying glass is large on an island this size, everyone knows everyone, and “oh, she knows where the house is; lunch is at 11” was all that was needed by way of invitation. It’s nice and welcoming, when you’re on the friendly side of the looking glass in any case. In my case, I was booked on a dive boat (fish always trump Santa!) and so I walked down to the house (indeed, I did know where it was, having been greeted profusely from the driveway my first day here) to acknowledge the invitation and pre-excuse myself for being late.

I dove Christmas morning, on pristine walls and through fabulous coral formations. Saba is proof that ocean conservation works; its teeming reefs and coral as healthy as any I’ve seen in years is testament that when you curtail pollution, prohibit fishing and limit the number of boats in a marine park, you win. I thought about that diagram we all see in grade school: where the ocean feeds the rain which provides the water to the land… and somehow we humans, in our need to build and grow and super-size everything, forget that the sea is at the beginning of the entire process of our existence. Plainly: without healthy oceans, there is no healthy rain. Coral is a living, breathing thing. It is being bleached and killed off with our warming oceans. It is being choked by pollution and stomped on by inconsiderate tourists. It is a filter for our seas, it provides shelter to the smaller marine life and food to some of the larger. And it is the bottom of the marine food chain that feeds up through the top.

Corals
Banded Coral Shrimp
Smooth Trunkfish
Corals
Trunkfish

And as I dove and marvelled at the life going on all around me, I was hoping that maybe this is the year that people start to get it; that maybe this coming year will mark some kind of turning point in conservation and appreciation for the natural world. That maybe rabid consumption turns into something more like conscious consumerism. To quote one of my favorite doctors, “UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” (Dr. Seuss, The Lorax)

After the dive, I found the best bottle of wine I could on Christmas Day on a very small Caribbean island when everything was closed, and walked down the road to join someone else’s Christmas. And though I had missed most of the festivities and all of Christmas dinner, they had made me a plate for later and treated me to Saban fruitcake. And with that very small act of kindness, coupled with the power of the Internet to bring me closer to those I’d like to be with, I went to sleep Christmas night feeling really lucky to have found this weird little island that nobody really knows about. There is a cat that visits me in my room (and slept with me last night), and a hermit crab with a broken shell (like a sunroof) that lives in my bathroom, and two hummingbirds that fancy the tree outside my door; and giant iguanas and peeper frogs and tropical rain and a marine park for me to explore in the coming days.