Day 1: The Big Party

Day 5: The Jungle

The next morning, we left town around 10 am and drove east, stopping to have lunch at the kiosks in Luquillo, which appear to have suffered considerably from being "discovered" by the tourist guides.

We swam at the nearby public beach and took advantage of the bathrooms ($1 a person) to wash off the salt water and change into our hiking clothes before driving south to the border of the El Yunque rainforest. There, we met Jaime and seven other tourists. We followed Jaime's truck up an unpaved road to the top of the hill, where he outfitted each of us with a harness, helmet and gloves. After a brief uphill hike, Jaime hooked each of us, one by one, onto a long steel cable and sent us zipping above the jungle canopy at breakneck speeds. It took me over a minute to calm the shaking in my legs after the first ride, but subsequent zips and the final rapel were much easier. 

As we had discovered in Ponce the day before, finding something to do when the sun goes down is one of the big challenges of a beach vacation. But the tiny fishing village of Las Croabas, located on the very tip of the island just north of Fajardo, is the one place in Puerto Rico that parties late into every night. From this small port, dozens of kayak and motorboat excursions depart at 5, 7 and 9pm. They are heading for the "biobay", a natural body of water filled with tiny organisms that light it up with an eerie green glow. On the shore, you will find Popeye's, with its delicious smoothies and a collection of exotic animals, a few other bars and restaurants, and a number of little tents selling everything from shark tacos to pechugas on a stick.

The Tainos contributed many words to Spanish and, through it, to other European languages. The canoas, piraguas and cayucas that carried the hunters downriver, the jamacas in which they rested for the night, the barbacoas on which they cooked their food, and the angry god Jurakan who devastated their villages, have all found their way into French, English, and even Slavic languages. Maybe the Russian word pichuga, meaning "small bird", is not really onomatopoeic, as Dal's dictionary insists, but a reference to the old Indian custom of skewering the breast of said small bird on a wooden stick and roasting it over hot coals.

Owing to my habit of packing light, by the last night of our journey we had completely ran out of dry clothes to change into, so we opted to share an electric boat with half a dozen strangers over a perilous kayaking adventure. There are some locations in the world so overrun by Russian tourists that by now all the locals know how to haggle over souvenirs and insult your mother in the language of Dostoyevski. That was not at all my impression of Puerto Rico. However, on this particular excursion it turned out that every single other passenger in the boat was either from Russia proper or "from Vladimir by way of Boston".

As we made our way to the bay through the narrow channel, our captain pointed out iguanas in the mangrove trees and explained about tides and navigating by the stars, but for the most part he left us to play in the magically glowing water in silence. We were saved from boredom by a vivacious biologist from Moscow, who explained the chemical reaction behind bioluminescence and told us a few interesting facts about the sharp-toothed morenas living in the mangrove roots on the edges of the bay. She also grilled us on the details of our ziplining adventure, blithely disregarding her worried young husband's objections that "in her condition" ziplining was "completely out of the question."

After the excursion, Liz fell asleep in the car and I drove around for a couple of hours before returning the keys to the Hertz counter at the airport.


Laugh or cry? 50-foot-tall Christmas light installation in front of a monument dedicated to "Indio Puertorriqueno" off RT3 near the small town of Canovanas.

Luis Munoz Marin International Airport is a decidedly uncomfortable place to spend the night, but with only three hours to go before our flight it wasn't a big deal.

This concludes the Puerto Rico travelogue. We cannot wait to go back, and after sorting through or vacation memories and doing a bit more research, I feel almost qualified to plan a longer trip. Would you like to join us?