We planned our trip so we would leave right after District Council. We were gone for a total of a week, so my parents watched the kids for the first half and Erick's family watched them for the other half. We flew out on Wednesday from Indianapolis and came back on Saturday.
The hotel we reserved was in Ponce, named for Ponce de Leon. We got lost every time we tried to get back to our hotel, which was downtown. The map and directions we had printed out from Google Maps wasn't even close. We ended up having to call the hotel and have the receptionist help us get there. The biggest problem was the lack of signs. There were very few street signs, and the ones they had were hard to see. Most of them (we finally discovered) were actually on the sides of the buildings. It took me awhile to remember that "calle" is "street" in Spanish, so that didn't help, either. Most of the streets were one-way, and several of the streets downtown were blocked off for some sort of festival. And the few street signs that they actually had no one even followed. Most intersections did not have a stop sign--people just went whenever they found a spot. It was crazy. Here is a picture of our hotel, and also a picture of Ponce taken from one of the balconies in our room.
On Thursday we went to see the Camuy cavern. There is a 4-lane highway from Ponce up to the cavern, but it isn't quite finished. There was maybe 25 miles through the mountains and rain forest that was little more than a one-land road. It was so curvy it made the roads in West Virginia look straight! When semis came around the bend, they would lay on the horn so other cars would know they were coming. We managed to get lost in one of the towns we went through, too. It probably took us an hour and a half to go 25 miles. The cavern was amazing. The tour guide, like most Puerto Ricans, was bilingual. Spanish and English are both the official languages of Puerto Rico, and most people can speak them both but primarily speak Spanish. When we were in the rural parts, people assumed we spoke Spanish and would speak to us in Spanish. In San Juan and the more touristy areas, people would assume we spoke English.
Here are a couple of pictures of the cavern:
That evening we went to Old San Juan. Again, we got lost, but we finally found the fort. We didn't get to go in, because it had closed before we found it, but we did walk around the outside of the old wall that used to completely surround Old San Juan. I discovered that there are hundreds of cats living in the rocks by the ocean around the wall. They all seem healthy looking and don't seem to be mean. Every few yards there was another cat, sunning itself on the rocks, sleeping on the grass, or wandering around on the path. It seems that Puerto Ricans are a lot more tolerant of animals being around than we are around here. It was not uncommon to see horses wandering down the side of the road, or cats begging food at an outdoor restaurant. Cattle would graze by the highway without a fence. I wondered how they knew not to get on the road. The outdoors were almost a part of the indoors, actually. It's not unusual to see architecture with open courtyards. Even at our hotel, the pool area was out in the open. There were TVs on the walls, which I don't know how they keep from getting wet when it rains (which it does pretty much every day).
Here are some of the pictures of the Old San Juan Fort and the cats that live by it.
This next picture shows something else interesting about the walls by the fort. If you look closely at the bushes on the top, you can see kites stuck in the branches. There are dozens of stuck kites along the edges of the fort. I guess people must think flying kites there is a good idea. Maybe they see the stuck kites and think, "Kite flying! What a great idea!"
Here is the front of the fort. Yes, that's a kite string in the grass in the foreground of the picture. I guess people like to fly kites on this side of the fort, too.
On Friday, we went to the beach in Ponce, but it was too rocky to swim. So we watched sand crabs crawl in and out of their holes and played in the sand. We took some pictures of some really weird trees and then made a sandcastle of sorts.
We went back to our hotel to change after that, since we had gotten all wet and sandy. We took a walk around town and got some pictures. Here are some of the sights from near our hotel. The first is a mango tree that we saw from our balcony. We weren't sure what it was at first, because I didn't know that mangoes were purple.
So we decided to walk to it and get a closer look. Underneath it were lots of mangoes that fell to the ground and smashed open. It was odd seeing all that expensive fruit going to waste on the ground.
We also saw this cool sand art. (Although Erick and I agreed that our sand art at the beach was just as good!)
This picture is of the old Ponce fire station. It is now a museum. This is one of the few structures that we saw that was made out of wood. Most of the buildings are brightly painted cement.
After we walked around Ponce for awhile, we decided to find a better swimming
beach. We drove to a place called Baqueron on the Southwest side of the island
and went swimming. It was sprinkling, but we swam anyway. There were a ton of
mosquitoes there, though. They didn't bother us in the water, but when we got
out they attacked. We ran to our car and got in, soaking wet and still in our
bathing suits, and used our beach towels to smash all the mosquitoes that
followed us into the car. Then we drove back to Ponce, stopping on the way to
eat at a seafood restaurant by the ocean. I just pulled my jeans on over my
bathing suit, but we didn't care that we were soaked. I ordered mofongo with red
snapper, made from mashed plantains. It was delicious!
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