Vieques!

We're taking 8 days out of it to abandon all responsibility (with a serious case of #catownerguilt) and hang out in Puerto Rico. So far it's been … um, worth it. Also, this blog will likely gather dust for another year or so … unless we drunkenly buy flights to an exotic paradise again before I finish my MBA.

Vieques!

So our first stop is Vieques, a.k.a. Island Bum Central. Monday we arrived in San Juan, then took a very expensive cab for an hour to Fajardo, a city on the coast. From Fajardo we took a ferry to Vieques. It's a small island off the coast of PR, but it's bigger than it looks: most people rent a jeep to get around. Stubbornly, Seth and I refused to spend $60 per day on transportation when we already had cool things scheduled, so we succumbed to more extortion. It took about 15 minutes to take a cab from the ferry terminal to Esperanza, a little barrio in the south with a single convenience store and about 6 restaurants, but good access to beaches. That's where our hostel was. Upon telling our cab driver we were staying at “Lazy Jack's Hostel,” he said, “Oh! Party central!” and we thought, “oh my – we have plans!” (because we're old now) and then we arrived and realized it was a very relative term. With signs in the shared bathrooms reminding you to save electricity (“How would you like it if somebody turned YOU on and then left?"), a kitchen with a very slow coffee maker, and a bar outside, it was just where the young people hang out. There are about 20 young people there on any given evening who like to have some booze and pizza, and it's open late. Oh yeah, and they're all the same people. I'm pretty sure there are about 50 people in Vieques. Yesterday, we went scuba diving and saw the same couple who went diving with us THREE TIMES after our tour. It eventually got awkward. If we end up seeing them in San Juan later, we've decided to just turn around and abort any activity we had planned.

Esperanza!

It's been said that Vieques is a good representation of what the Caribbean looked like about 30-40 years ago. There are a lot of transplants here (we've met a few U.S. nationals who moved after visiting the place from childhood), but many were also born and raised. Casually, there are an estimated 200,000 horses on the island, along with their accompanying piles of manure; some of them are branded but most are wild. They like to have fun – they're known to frequent Lazy Jack's on the weekend and drink the beer out of the garbage. And they get stumbling drunk. Otherwise, about 1/3 of the island is reserved as a national park, and most of it is natural growth, too – a great place for wild horses to roam around. There are mango trees all over the place, and yesterday I learned that mangoes do not fall gracefully when they are ripe. In fact, it's probably wise not to hang around under a ripe mango tree. Mangoes are heavy fruit, and they fall that way: with a loud thump, usually splitting open a little at the bottom so the horses and bugs can get to them. Seth picked up a fat, red, juicy one outside Lazy Jack's on Tuesday morning and ate it for breakfast.

FREE MANGOES IF YOU CAN MAKE IT

After consuming some mango and finally some coffee, we took another expensive cab to meet Arnaud for a scuba session. First was a 3-hour refresher course/dive, because of the high possibility of death that comes with Self-ContainedUnderwaterBreathingApparatuses if you don't know what you're doing and get excited underwater. The location was pretty original: in the 30s, the U.S. Navy wanted to build a 6-mile bridge from Vieques to Puerto Rico, and got about half a mile out before they stopped, LIKE QUITTERS. Also Pearl Harbor happened so their efforts were needed elsewhere. But that turned out to be a blessing for divers: the pillars from the bridge have become overgrown with coral reefs and algae, and it's a perfect place for... SEA TURTLES. Yes. We swam with sea turtles. At first I was sure it wouldn't happen, because our dive master Arnaud (a French sommelier, no big deal) told us that he had done the dive at last 1500 times, and had never not seen a turtle, so he could probably guarantee it. That's a sure-fire way to jinx it, but nonetheless we saw 4 or 5 sea turtles, one about half the size of Seth (so 3-4 feet). Arnaud the dive master/sommelier/casual professional photographer/restaurant owner told us he had seen one almost the size of his respectably-sized pickup truck – a leatherback, but they hang out deeper than we go, which is a max of 60 feet with our current certifications. We just saw some very technically named “green sea turtles,” although one of them was yellow with black spots? And we swooned. We also saw eel, cuttlefish, and other fish. It was le'badass.

Seth and pillars

the elusive "green sea turtle"

me

In the afternoon we ate our weight in island food and drink, before the BIO(luminescent)BAY TOUR. I have zero pictures of it. Even if my gopro hadn't mysteriously died halfway through the day (I know why – I left the wifi on) and I'd been able to try to capture it, you need a special camera anyway and apparently the gopro isn't “special enough.” But here I go, I'll try to explain it to you in great detail.

We took a price-gauging cab to Sun Bay, where our super fun van driver Pepe asked us if we were READY TO RUMBLE. We replied that we were, indeed, ready, ahem, to, um, rumble, and he loaded us into a van with eight other excited tourists who appeared more ready than we were for said rumbling. We then took an extremely bumpy ride down a dirt road to the aptly-named “Mosquito Bay” (actually named after a pirate ship conveniently called “el Mosquito”) and got in 2-person kayaks under a clear sky with an amazing view of the stars. Emilio, our guide on his own kayak, enthusiastically led the 5-boat group (some could kayak, some could not) out to the middle of the lake. It didn't take long to start seeing the glowing algae. As soon as you, your boat, or your paddle touches the water, the water lights up in a fiery blue. The algae is a kind of dinoflagellum, and uses the same chemical as fireflies to light up in the dark, possibly for evolutionary purposes. The environment can't be replicated anywhere else at this magnitude – the Vieques Biobay has consistently been in the Guinness Book of World Records for the highest concentration of these microorganisms per gallon of water. You're not allowed to swim in the water, as the chemicals we wear on our skin are harmful to the bacteria, but we were welcome to stick our hands in the Avatar water and watch it light up as we swished around. We also grabbed a handful of water and let it run down our arms, and saw little lights run down our arm. It's not uncommon to see fish, small sharks and stingrays illuminate as they dash around under the boats. Emilio pointed out Scorpio in the sky to us, and a few other constellations with his super strong laser pointer. We crashed after the tour – from the turtles to the stars to the fire water, we had some REM processing to do.

In the morning we took a brief visit to Coconut beach before grabbing a taxi back to the ferry terminal. Following vague instructions from the small child who worked at the reception of Lazy Jack's (OK maybe she was 18), we walked through a blue gate and down a path, eventually finding ourselves at a secluded beach lined with coconut trees and brimming with crystal clear blue waters. Seth rested his sunburnt body in the shade while I walked the waterline. I think I found some kind of dead sea urchin. Yeah. It was a good day.

Coconut Beach from above!

urchin? anybody?

And that's it! We're off to Ocean Park, a small neighborhood of San Juan. We will be renting a car in Fajardo!

PEACE

NEXT: El Yunque and La Cueva Ventana, and a few other shenanigans sprinkled in there