Saba might very well be the friendliest place I have ever encountered. In order to get from Sint Maarten to Saba, I had to take a really small airplane (the airstripe at Saba is the shortest commercial runway in the world), and all us 15 passengers cramped ourselves together in the plane and prepared ourselves for the 15 min (!) flight over. Seems like everything is short or tiny around here. Anyways, during that 15 min flight I was invited for dinner to a super-nice teacher, and before I had managed to get out of the airport I was invited to a pre-wedding party next weekend and 3 people had asked me if I needed a lift somewhere (they were not even taxi drivers).

And the scenery! I have tried to shoot some nice photos for you readers, because it´s like nothing I have ever seen before. For those who does not know where and what Saba is: it is a dormant volcano in the Caribbean, and with its 13 km² it is the smallest island of the Netherlands Antilles. They only have 1 road on the island, which is called…”The Road”!

JoBean Chambers, her husband Frank and their 4 dogs are my hosts here for the entire week – and I can not express in words how thankful I am. She is a glass artist – so in addition to visiting the hyperbaric facility at Saba University School of Medicine and world class diving – I am learning how to make glass art! The experiences one can have with the Scholarship really has no limits.

My diving here on the island is generously sponsored by SeaSaba (http://www.seasaba.com/MainPages/DivingAllAbout.htm). They are one of three dive centres here, and even though I can´t say I have been doing a lot of diving with dive centres before – they have exceptionally good service. They will hardly let you do anything yourself. Except for maintaining reasonable levels of air flowing into your lungs when you´re underwater. I am going to be ridiculously spoiled staying on Saba, and it will be brutal returning to Norway in April, carrying all my stuff around myself again.

My first dive was on a site called 3rd Encounter, one of the famous Pinnacles. The Pinnacles rise from the depths of the sea, to about 85-130 feet – and in that way they are mountains of the sea! Pretty awesome. Here I saw sea turtles again. They are magical creatures, with a calmness from another world, and I will probably never get tired of watching them float around just doing their everyday thing. Oh! And I encountered nurse sharks for the very first time in my life! There were two delicate sharks right next to our mooring line, resting beneath a couple of rocks. I bet I could have brought with me an orchestra down there and they wouldn´t even raise their eyebrow. Beautiful site.

Second dive was on Diamond Rock, which unpleasantly (and sadly) did not get its name because it´s full of the expensive gem, but because birds spread their insides all over there and make it look white and beautiful. It is a dive site not often available to divers because of rip currents – but this day the guide let us in the water, and we had an amazing dive spiraling upwards the formations, spotting sea turtles, barracudas, trunkfish, spotted drumfish, sponges and other weird-looking underwater creatures.

As you probably understand, diving here is magical.

In addition to diving I have had a tour at the Saba University School of Medicine´s hyperbaric chamber. Dr. Jim Stewart gave me an introduction to hyperbaric medicine, which does not only include decompression sickness, but also treating diabetic foot ulcers, gangrene, carbon monoxide poisoning, intracranial abscesses and so on. I was eager to find out more about the situation here on the island, since it has only about 2000 inhabitants, but still 2 hyperbaric chambers! One at the Medical School, which I now know is primarily used for research, and one at the marine park – which is the one used to treat decompression illness. Now they only have 2-3 treatments per year, which is a 90% decrease in the last 5 years – and noone knows why. Could be that more and more people are diving on Nitrox, could be that diving computers today are more conservative than their predecessors. But sadly (or good for the divers not getting bent), this led to a shutdown of the hyperbaric facility in the marine park about 1 year ago. Luckily, if there is a crisis, divers will be sent to the hyperbaric chamber mainly used for research.

At the end of the tour, Dr. Stewart mentioned that a couple of his students were starting up a research project on the coming Friday – and I was welcome to join and see how they did the setup. I was so excited! Friday came and after two morning dives I went down to the university again. The project was a follow-up study on previous work done on grip strength under the influence of hyperbaric oxygen. Recent studies have shown that your grip strength increases as you go down to a certain depth while breathing 100% oxygen. So, this time they are adding other parameters to the same research protocol to see if they can find the explanation to the phenomenon. It was really interesting to see how they did their setup – and as I was with them I felt more and more excited and eager to do this kind of scientific work myself. That made me very happy – because part of the point with this Scholarship is to find out what you want to pursue as a career, and the way I felt in that lab. Well, I can only say I really look forward to getting more hands-on experience with this kind of work.

While being here I have also had some time to explore the island by foot. One of the instructors at SeaSaba, Steve, is an eager sportsman – and he agreed to show me around the island. Walking around here is more than pleasant for the eye, but pretty exhausting for your leg muscles as it is steep almost everywhere you go. One of the coolest hikes we did was to the old Sulphur Mine. A mining company began work there in 1887, but due to the steep terrain it proved impossible to make good money out of the project – and the venture ended within a year. Walking in the remaining mines was awesome. Very few experiences in my life has given me flashbacks to doing chemistry lab in high school (thank God), but this was one of them. The smell of sulphur and the heat was intense – and there were lots of cool bats relaxing in there. When I wanted to crawl through a pretty narrow sideway, Steve stopped me with the words: ”Let´s not, there´s a story you need to hear, but I aint tellin´you until we get outside”. And, yes, some guy had got lost in there 2 years ago and tragically died. A year later a small group of medical students had been exploring the Sulphur Mine and went through a narrow sideway (just like mine), where they encountered the remains of the poor fellow.

My stay here is coming to an end, and sadly I leave in just a couple of days. Thank you everybody who has made this stay possible and thank you to all of you who have met me with the one-and-only-Saba-friendliness – you have made my stay here something I will remember for the rest of my life.