Caves and Coves

Another day with the car, and our Puerto Rico navigation skills are shown to be even more profoundly honed than we had at first imagined.

First off, we nixed the idea of going to the little lagoon on the other side of Ponce, because the forecast called for showers in the afternoon, and if we’re going to drive that far to swim, we want good weather. Tomorrow was supposed to be clearer, so we set our sights on something closer to home.

A little over an hour to the west of San Juan is Camuy Cave, carved out of the karst region of the island by the world’s third-largest underground river. What’s karst, you ask? (Not you, Ronadh. You knew already.) Karst is a term that denotes a landscape made up of limestone, which erodes and forms caves and sinkholes. You can see as you drive west from San Juan, which is not in the karst region, that the cutaways in the hills go through rock and after being cut away, the rock remains largely bare. Unlike the red earth cutaways you see to the south of San Juan. The region seemed especially fertile – as soon as you get out of the major metropolitan area (which takes surprisingly little time), the hills just explode in greenery.

Something else happens, too – It’s more prosperous over there. Janneke and I both noticed it: Houses are nicer, less fortress-like, spaced out more, with actual yards occasionally; there’s less trash in the streets and on the roads; electric lines are hung more cleanly (that’s the son of a power lineman talking, so you can take that observation to the bank)…It’s just nicer. We really liked it over there – and the landscape is fantastic. Similar spiky ridges covered in trees, but with more agriculture happening. You see people riding horses from the highway – paso fino horses, which are so impressive when they go by you. They have this shuffly quick-walk gait, a lot like a Tennessee walking horse, which moves them along pretty fast but leaves the rider feeling like he’s sitting in a Barco-lounger.

But I digress. The road to the caves was INCREDIBLY well-marked. Once we started to get off at the wrong exit, and a sign marked “Cavernas de Camuy” ran alongside us and physically pushed us back onto the road. It was kind of creepy. And the cavern itself is maintained and operated to the absolute top level of professionalism. World-class outfit: tasteful, non-shlocky, efficient. Ten minutes after arriving we were on a trolley, heading down a paved path overshadowed by dense tropical vegetation toward the cave. Which is immense, beautiful, and completely worth the drive. And the $12 per adult, $7 per child over 4. The kids loved it, even though Quinn enjoyed imagining orcs and trolls in there while Tess spent many a long minute narrating to us and having confirmed by us the many-faceted truth that no such monsters exist in such places. Except for an absolutely horrific cave spider, which I shall never speak of again.

We had to sit on some lovely benches for ten minutes or so while we waited to be trolleyed back up to the entrance, and I struck up a conversation with yet another hyper-nice Puerto Rican, a man from a nearby town who was there with his small family. He had been to the cave once before, and was now back to show his daughter. He asked us how long we’d been there, what we’d seen, etc. And he said, “Have you been to Ponce?” I said we had, just the other day, for the day. He shook his head and seemed sad for us. “Not nearly long enough to see Ponce,” he said, in a very friendly way.

He’s obviously nuts.

But a good guy nonetheless, who, when the cave tour was done, came up to us and asked if we knew how close we were to the Arecibo Observatory. We did, and had decided not to go, as it wouldn’t really flip the kids’ switches, probably. But I acted like we didn’t and thanked him for letting us know about it. Really nice guy.

We hit the road, headed for Mar Chiquita, which our tour book describes as a sheltered lagoon with a baby-safe beach surrounded by lush natural beauty. It is all that, but the folks who live off the tourists there are in the process of ruining it. Lots of trash all over the place (well, that’s the tourists more than the vendors), and a food guy whose music was turned up to such ear-splitting levels that we could still hear every word even from the absolute furthest possible spot on the beach, a good 200 yards away. I had to walk back to the car for something, and stopped to ask if he could turn it down. I wasn’t especially obsequious about it – I think my demeanor made clear I wasn’t happy with the situation. And he didn’t say a word back to me – just looked at me hatefully and turned back to whatever he was doing. But you know what? He turned it down. He was also competing with two – Count ‘em! TWO! – ice cream truck drivers with maniacal ice cream truck music screaming from loudspeakers, and – AND! – reggaetón music pouring out the open windows of the driver’s compartment. So four different songs, all going at full volume – and the two drivers pulled up next to each other and stopped to chat. The whole beach stared at them, several people plugging their ears, and they finally left. I can’t imagine they attract a lot of business that way. But, heck, maybe they do. They keep doing it, after all.

The beach is really neat. There’s one area where the sea gets in, and it comes in in big waves, but these are then reduced in size by the lagoon’s length before they hit the beach. And the rocks and coral that protect the lagoon made for great (we thought, anyway) snorkeling. Quinn is getting to be downright good at it, though he still prefers to go without a snorkel, just the mask. Tessie was following Janneke around in her floatie suit, having invented a stroke. “Papi! Estoy montando bicicleta!!” And when you look below the water, her little legs are going in a perfect cycling motion, and she’s chugging away. Rolling waver after rolling wave lifted and dropped her (they don’t crest there), and she enjoyed the bejeezus out of it. Fearless kid.

We found more sea urchin skeletons (that, apparently, is what they are), as well as another diving mask, which was rolling around in a really pretty deep little hole along with a bunch of beer bottles. It was right about at my exact personal limit for depth when diving, but I got it, after a couple of tries, and it was pretty much brand-new, so now we have 3. And we made use of all of them at once, all of us tooling around this gorgeous lagoon for a couple of hours. Huge fun.

I also saw my first wild squid! Big couple of days for me, cephalopod-wise. (There’s probably a really easy joke to make at my expense there. Go ahead, knock yourself out.)

Supper at Burger King. We caved. (No pun intended.) It was fun, and silly, and as the kids played in the Playland, Janneke and I played hackie-sack. Every time I would stall it on top of my head, I would hear Tessie cackling like mad, and when I looked to see how it was happening so consistently, I saw her and Quinn looking out the window of the Playland, watching us play hackey-sack. Nice moment.

Home, but not by way of Route 22, oh no. That would be the trap that folks unfamiliar with Puerto Rico would fall into. Having noticed that 22 was backed up for miles going east as we had rushed westward in the morning, and that those delays were caused by construction, not accidents, we consulted our handy-dandy map and decided to go all the way home on Route 2, which is slower, but does run parrallel to 22. And it was neat, becuase we got to see the prosperity of this northern Karst region laid out for us in terms of strip mall franchises. Our first island Wal-Mart was spotted, as were any number of Burger Kings, McDonals, KFC, Taco Bell, Taco Maker, Office Max, Staples...It was like a long trip through an American suburban ring. The reason for this prosperity was visible too: Pharmaceutical companies are all over these little towns out here, as our new friend in the cave had told us. Bristol-Meiers Squibb, Merck, etc., all had large campuses along Route 2. Which inject huge sums of money into the local economy, which in turn makes chains sprout like dandelions along the road. Ponce could do with one of these. Maybe the guy we met will find a way to make that happen for his beloved southern city.

Which we will drive miles out of the way to avoid tomorrow.

Observation: Puerto Rican license plates consist of six characters. If it's a passenger vehicle, the first three are letters, the last three, numbers. If it's a truck, all are numbers.

SUVs? Letters and numbers.

So the Puerto Ricans agree with the philosophy espoused in one of my favorite commercials ever, the Miller High Life spot where a typical man's man stands in his driveway and looks disdainfully at the SUV parked in the neighbor's driveway. The narrator:

"These days, this is what passes for a truck in some people's twisted minds. But a man knows a station wagon when he sees one."

Yet another reason to love the Puerto Ricans.

Pictures!!



Family on the trolley to the caves. Where pictures, as we found out,
really don't work out too well.



Puerto Rican honking lizard. Actually, it's the same
species we saw in the park and played football with.
But when she saw it, Janneke said, "That's a big honkin' lizard!"



The cove where we swam today. We're on the right;
I'm in a blue T-shirt.



Another view of the cove, moments later. I'm still there in the same
spot, and you can see the opening where the waves come in.
They're reduced to nothing by the time they hit the beach.



Tess snoozes in the car between the cave and the cove.
Go ahead, copy it, turn it right-side up. It's worth it.



No such trouble need be taken to appreciate
Quinn in his position, at that same moment.