A first-person travel vlog by Nate and Kara Buchanan documenting 24 hours on the Caribbean island of Saba (referred to as Ceiba in the transcript). The hosts highlight Saba's exceptionally short commercial runway (stated as 400 meters), small land area (stated as five square miles / 5 square kilometers), steep topography with Mount Scenery reaching nearly 3,000 ft, and a small population (~2,000 people). The video mixes on-site experiences (landing/takeoff observation from the airport roof, hiking Mount Scenery), local interactions (tourism board assistance recovering a lost camera), and casual commentary about local flora and pilot training requirements for the challenging runway.
Questions this video answers
400 meters
Five square miles (also stated as 5 square kilometers)
Almost 3,000 ft
About 2,000 people
Pilots who go on vacation for longer than a month must come back and retrain to remain qualified to land on this runway.
Chapters
I finally talked Kara into letting us book tickets, and this morning we are flying to Ceiba. How often do you get the chance to say that you have landed on the world's shortest commercial Runway? It's only 400 meters long, which is slightly longer than an aircraft carrier.
And I'm so scared.
That was incredible.
You did it.
You survived.
This entire island is only five square miles.
Today is our first and last morning on the beautiful island of Ceiba. And we learned something super interesting last night. And that's at the top of this island. It's actually the highest point in all of the Netherlands.
So we have a few hours before we have to catch our flight out of here. We're gonna see if we can make it to the top.
Are you breathing? We're on our way.
Trying out the local dress.
I love it. Oh, I ripped it.
Don't look. You're torn your grass.
The crazy thing about this island is that even though it's only 5 square kilometers, it actually has five different ecosystems on it because it goes from sea level to almost 3,000ft at its very peak.
I can't believe how huge these leaves are. Everything is, like, massive.
We're getting close. Thankfully.
This is serious.
We have made it to the top of Mount Scenery, where it is extremely windy. Being up here means that we are the tallest people in the world, currently standing on Netherlands soil. I never thought I'd do this in the Caribbean. The views from up here are absolutely incredible. And we accidentally timed it perfectly, and we just got to see a plane take off from the shortest commercial Runway in the world.
Such a unique island. Also care doesn't trust me. It's holding onto my belt right now. And this is the highest chicken in the Netherlands.
We are 3,000ft lower than we were the last time you saw us. And you'll never guess where we are right now.
We've been given access to the roof of the airport. This. This is the tower, the radio tower of the airport. We're standing on the roof, and this.
Is the shortest commercial Runway in the world. And we get to watch a plane land on it.
The plane that we're about to be flying out on is going to land here any minute. We ended up having dinner with a lady from the tourism board last night. We told her how much we enjoyed the flight. She pulled some strings, and now we're.
Here on the roof of an airport.
Too cool. Too, too cool. We are so lucky.
W.
Wow.
Got a little bit of Runway to go.
That was nuts.
It stopped so fast.
I Thought for sure the pilot was going to try to land on, like, the very end of the Runway, but he landed, like, halfway down it. Confident. It took him, like, 100 meters to come to a complete stop.
Yeah. I can't believe how much space he still had to go.
I think they make the Runway too long. Not challenging enough for these pilots.
Waste space.
Oh. That is something else that we've learned since we've been here is that all the pilots who fly these planes undergo, like, rigorous training. They said if they go on vacation for longer than a month, they have to come back and retrain to make sure they're still qualified to land on this Runway.
Yeah. Which is really cool. Makes me feel really good about it.
Some of the best pilots in the world are flying in and out of this airport every day.
All right, here we go. Our 24 hours on Ceiba island is up.
It.
Sam.
Ram.
That was too cool. Getting to fly over airplane beach, where we were the other day, and it was even cooler getting to see it from the window of the cockpit. And now we've been sitting at the airport for about four hours because we made it back to St. Martin, but one of our cameras did not.
Oopsie. I was so excited about the plane landing on the Runway that I left one of my cameras time lapsing for 22 minutes, literally.
She left. She left her camera on top of the airport.
As soon as we got in the plane, the engines were starting up. It was like. And I was like, oh, I'm gonna film this. I reached in my bag, and my camera wasn't there. And that was the worst part. It's like it was right there. I could have like, jumped up and gotten it.
But the good news is, she left it on an island of 2,000 people. So we messaged the lady at the tourism board. She messaged her brother who works at the airport, who gave it to a friend that was coming here on the next flight. So we got the camera back. Yeah.
We had a productive afternoon of editing in the airport.
We're just walking down the road, waving at people as they drive by, And I just started cracking up, realizing how touristy we look right now. I mean, we are tourists, but sometimes it's just really obvious. I have a camera around my neck, a camera around my wrist, and then Nate has a camera in one hand and a lens on his head. We're just fully embracing the tourist look today. I actually think we look like this every day. It just feels more like it here because there's so few people.
Really sticking out.
Bugs sitting there. Chickens on his morning walk.
I want to grab it.
Getting some exercise. An Indian fern.
Fern? Yep.
So it's a seed.
So, no, it is the fiddlehead of the farm.
I don't know what that is. Ah. Okay. A meeting. Part of an Indian firm.
Sperm burn.
Yeah. So you're eating some vitamins, maybe Vitamin E. Okay. Okay.
