[conspire] Communication (was: Web spam and yandex forms)

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Syeed Ali (syeedali at syeedali.com):

> As an aside, dual Dutch citizenship (I might get it; I'm a special case)
> would also make me be a citizen of Saba.  :)

I hope you get a chance to visit Saba.  It's one of my favourite places, 
and perhaps you'll fall in love with it as I did.

Saba is a dauntingly steep volcanic island (887 metres tall) covered
with lush, rain-forest vegetation and with several picturesque Dutch
towns in the higher elevations.  There are no beaches and thus none of
the usual sun-worshipping tourism culture found in the Caribbean,
generally.  It was extremely difficult to get on and off, not to mention
around, until post WWI, because it lacked usable ports, had no airport,
and (critically) had no roads.

The locals appealed to the Netherlands government to construct a road.
After study, this task was pronounced impossible.  In 1943, one of the
locals, Joseph Hassell, took a correspondence course in road
engineering, and with several helpers set out to construct a road,
without power tools, managing to construct the impossible road by
stages, about 8 km across the island, between 1943 and 1958.  A
commercial airport followed, one with the shortest (and arguably
scariest) runway of any commercial airport in the world, and a
semi-serviceable harbour at the other end of what is now called The Road
(albeit, the harbour didn't even have a pier until 1972).

Saba is also world-famous among scuba divers, as there is no fringing
reef but the surrounding waters are heaven for divers.

Every time I've been on Saba (by boat, thank you!), I've taken long
hikes across much of the island and usually up Mt. Scenery, the central
peak and highest point in the Netherlands.  The island was classified
legally as part of the Netherlands Antilles until 2010, when that body
was dissolved and it became a "special municipality of the Kingdom of
the Netherlands", along with St. Eustatius and Bonaire.