A post by Mark
Its happened again… I’m more than a month behind on posting. Sorry again for the delay – wifi is getting harder to come by – which, is not necessarily a bad thing. We’ve also been pretty busy – all good stuff. And then our site went down… Anyway – here goes…
After our great time in the Dominican Republic – it was time to move on to Puerto Rico. As Julie explained in her post, we left the DR a bit earlier than we would have liked to take advantage of a great weather window to cross the Mona Passage. We sailed (mainly motored) for 47 hours from Luperon in the DR to Boqueron PR. Unfortunately for us, we misread our guide book (OK – it was me) – as we thought that we could clear customs in Boqueron. Turns out, Boqueron is not a port of entry – so we had to take a 20-30 min cab ride north to Mayaquez the next day. Boqureon in a small tourist town – filled from Thursday afternoon to Sunday evening with Puerto Ricans having a great time. Monday through Thursday mid-day, however, the place is a ghost town. Of the 15 or 20 restaurants in town, maybe 4 are open during the week. Other than those 4 restaurants, the post office and a pretty poorly stocked mini-mart, there is nothing else open during the week. We arrived in Boqueron on Sunday evening – so getting a cab to go to customs on Monday morning was a challenge (no Uber here…). We eventually made our way to the marina in town – and around 9:30, the guy who runs the office arrived and called us a cab. About 20 minutes later Sammy showed up in a late-model Cadillac land ark. This thing was huge – I sat up front and Julie and the girls all fit in the back (with what looked like a bit of room to spare)! Sammy is quite the character. He’s from the Bronx and Puerto Rico – spent about half of his life in both. We had some interesting conversations and price negotiations – both filled with good chunks of misinterpretation. This would have made sense if there was a significant language barrier – but this guy spent half of his life in NYC and spoke pretty good English…. Oh well – I’ll just chalk this up to ‘he was an interesting character’. Sammy ended up driving us around for most of the day – bringing us to customs, and then to the USDA Tropical Research Center – which is like a botanical garden, as it has samples of just about every tropical plant from around the world. The mission of the center is to keep a living library of these plants and to research a handful of tropical species that could potentially be used as crops or for other beneficial ways (medicine, etc). Best of all, the place is open to the public and free to tour. It was a pretty neat place. Unforttuantely for us, it absolutely poured while we were there. Not a typical rainstorm, but a tropical one – full downpour, probably the most rain we’ve seen this entire trip. Luckily for us, we were able to find an open greenhouse and duck into it for the worst of it. It was about that time that we remembered that we had left all of the hatches and windows open on the boat – oops (more to come on that later). After the Research Center, we headed back towards the boat, stopping by the local Walgreens where we picked up the fixings for banana splits to celebrate Lucy’s birthday the next day. One problem…. No bananas – and we had just finished the last of our huge stalk from the DR a few days prior. We now had a mission for the next day – find bananas. After Walgreens, it was back to the boat. Preparing for the soggiest, we hopped on the boat to see how wet it was. Not a drop of water in it. As we later learned, the storms soak Mayaguez every day – but almost never make it to Boqueron. Good news for us.
The next day, we planned a relatively quiet day – a day at the beach. We had a lot of fun just sitting, swimming, and relaxing at the beach. That night, we went out for Lucy’s birthday dinner with friends of ours on Boreas – a couple from Quebec with a 1 yr old boy. They are super nice folks and we had a great time with them. Before we went to the restaurant, however, we swung by the minimart hoping for bananas. No luck… oh well, we’d just have to make due with ‘regular’ sundaes along with some chocolate cake that Boreas brought by for us.
The next day, we decided to rent a car and visit the world’s largest radio telescope in Arecebo – a little town about an hour and a half from Mayaguez. Another cab ride with Sammy to the car rental place, and we were off. We took the scenic route to Arecebo – and it was really neat – it had an ‘over the river and through the woods’ feel to it. We passed through some really small villages perched on beautiful mountain vistas, past some pretty waterfalls, and by a handful of fruit stands (where we got some great fresh produce). Also along the way was a park famous for its extensive caves and for containing the world’s third largest underground river. We planned to spend a few hours there – and after a few wrong turns, finally arrived. Unfortunately for us (and everybody else), the park was closed – still cleaning up from hurricane damage. The parking lot was filled with trees and other debris still needing to be cleaned up.
As as side note, we spoke to a bunch of folks about Maria. It was rough, and was it was the ‘everyday’ folks who cleared the streets, helped their neighbors, etc – no different than what happens in any storm everywhere. Another reminder that people are more similar than they are different (a common theme that has arisen on this journey).To a person, however, they all said that it wasn’t nearly as bad as the media made it out to be. OK – back to the story…
After finding and leaving the park, we made our way to the Observatory. It was a fun ride through a series of karst hills. What are karst hills you ask? They are small mountains that look exactly like haystacks – right out of Monet painting (just green instead of hay-color). The road to Arecebo goes over and around a bunch of these hills. At the observatory, we parked near the bottom of one of these hills and started walking up to the visitors center. Along the way, there is a scale model of the Solar system – starting with a model of the sun about the size of a basketball. After a 10 or 15 minute walk up the hill, we get to the Earth – about the size of a pin head (maybe a bit larger- but not much). We later learn that the models for the outer planets (Neptune and Uranus) would be over 10 miles away – really crazy to think about the huge scale of the solar system. That was a good preview of what we were about to learn about the size and scale of what the scientists at Arecebo study. Without going totally nerdy on you all, I’ll leave it at ‘its a big universe out there’ – and there are some pretty smart folks doing a lot of interesting research about it.
After the observatory, we stopped by Taco Maker for lunch (local version of Taco Bell), and headed back to the Walmart Supercenter to re-provision – including bananas and more ice-cream. Walking into the Walmart was like walking into the middle of America. Other than the signs having the Spanish writing on top and the English below – vs the reverse on the mainland – the place looked and felt like any other mid-sized Supercenter I’ve ever visited. After Walmart, we headed back towards the rental car place and got stuck in a bunch of traffic – so much traffic that we were too late to return the car. Turned out not to be an issue – and actually worked out in our favor – as early the next morning, Julie, Heidi, and I took the car to a nearby lighthouse before I had to return it. It was a really pretty morning – very quiet and peaceful.
One thing I didn’t mention…. The prior afternoon / evening (Thursday), the beach and the park next to it got really crowded – literally hundreds of tents were popping up everywhere. Turns out, the Puerto Rico scouting jamboree was about to kick-off in Boqueron. Friday afternoon, we went into the beach and walked around. We talked to a bunch of really friendly folks – and were invited to come back that evening for a concert and other general merriment. Heidi is a Venture Scout – which is an co-ed scouting group geared towards adventure activities run by the BSA for 14-21 year olds. This is the group that she and Julie went paddling in the Boundary Waters in MN and Canada last summer (Julie is a Venture Scout leader). Anyway – the reason any of this is relevant is that we hooked up with one of the Venture Scout groups that evening and had a great time with them. I was so impressed with how mature and generous with their time these ‘kids’ were. We didn’t stay too late though – as Julie, Heidi and I had gotten up very early to go to the lighthouse and were losing steam just about the time the party was getting going.
The next morning, we went back to the beach to watch a parade to kick-off the closing ceremonies. The theme of the jamboree and the parade was ‘pirates’ – as Boqureron was a key spot in the Golden Age of Piracy. Here are some fun pics of the parade.
We stayed a few more days in Boqueron – waiting for decent weather to head East. Turns out, the trip around the southwest corner of the island – by the lighthouse we visited – can get pretty squirrelly. We left on a relatively calm morning, but still had a bumpy ride around the point. It was a short ride, and by mid-day, we were anchored by La Parquera – a small town in a peaceful anchorage. In the anchorage is a small island that houses the oceanography department of the University of Puerto Rico. Also on this island are hundreds (and probably thousands) of iguanas. Willie had fun looking at them on our walks. One highlight we tried to see was a bioluminescent bay near this anchorage. It was a dark night – great for seeing the bioluminescence, but not great for navigating our way to the bay via dinghy. It was about a mile away – and rough ride. Since one of our later stops was to a ‘better’ bioluminescent bay a week or so later, we decided to turn around when the wind and waves really started to pick up and we were having a hard time seeing the coastline in the dark. We reackon that we got at least 3/4 of the way there before we turned around. A few days later, we caught up again with Boreas who went there the night after us and said it was the greatest thing ever (more or less). Ugh – we missed out on that one.
Oh well – after a night in La Parquera, we headed to Gilligan’s Island – a tropical oasis near the town of Guanica. It is a beautiful harbor with a really pretty mangrove island in the middle. The island is a nature park – and is pretty cool. It got the name Gilligan’s island because it looks a lot the island from the show, and, apparently, one of the former rangers looked a lot like either Gilligan or the Skipper (can’t remember which).
Once we got settled into our anchor, we decided it was time to ‘dragging’ – pulling a big tube behind our dinghy. It was a lot of fun for the girls – here are some pictures.
The best, however, was yet to come! As this post has gotten to long, I’m going to stop here and will pick-up in my next one. Promise it won’t be a month.
Until then,
Mark