Because yesterday there were a number of frustrations that threatened to overshadow the good stuff that did indeed happen. It’s no doubt going to make this whole experience less painful if I just start with a list of frustrations:
Highways go unmarked through vast stretches of the island, and especially its capital city, San Juan. On the way to and from El Yunque, we were continually deceived by signs placed very far away from the turns they indicated, or placed so close to them that you had to scream across four lanes of traffic to make the turn. Or simply not being there at all, as we proved by going past the exit onto Highway 18 twice, once in each direction, and seeing no indication whatsoever as to which of the many exits available was for 18. We drove for miles on a highway, the ramp onto which had been completely unmarked, and saw no indication anywhere of which highway we were on. Maddening.
They warned me about the drivers, but man, after a few days, it starts to get to you. So little regard for the most basic of rules, even laws, by absolutely everybody, including the police. The rates of crashes and deaths must be incredible.
Everybody ignores police and ambulance sirens, because police and ambulance drivers abuse them, turning them on when they’re in no apparent hurry. The police seem to be saying, “Here we are, anyone in the commission of a crime, you should probably stop before we get close enough to see it, thanks a lot!”
A lackadaisical approach to schedules and to everyone else’s convenience. “Well, big surprise, Joe, it’s Latin America. You’ve lived there before.” Yeah, I know. I just can’t get used to it or see it as anything but a bad thing. I just don’t see where it benefits anyone. Folks will go out of their way to help you, slowing down their own schedule, it’s true. That’s great. But I would wager that 90% of the time, schedules are slowed down out of people’s regard for their own convenience, not someone else’s.
There, I’ve said them. On to the day:
We went to El Yunque, and experienced some travel difficulties on the way. Once there, we paid our entry fees at the main welcome center, and found out there was a tour to be given at 12:30 up the road a ways at another visitors area. So we had lunch and waited until it was 12:10 or so before driving up there. Tess collected leaves as we walked; I called Quinn over during lunch so we could watch as a pearly-eyed thrasher killed and flew off with a lizard, right out of the tree we were sitting under.
Drove up to the tour area, and were quickly and efficiently informed that the tour was at 1:30. So we walked a nearby trail to kill the time, and it was nice. The forest is mountainous, incredibly lush, and pretty well maintained. We saw a lot of people sitting on the stones in the healing waters of the stone-bottomed rushing river, drinking from glass beer bottles, as well as others walking along the concrete jungle trails, drinking from glass beer bottles. I’ll say no more on that subject.
We were back in plenty of time for the 1:30 tour, and saw our guide show up and begin chatting up some folks. Then we noticed that she wasn’t there, and that it was 1:40. Around 1:55 we got the frazzled man who works the counter to admit that she had left without us – she’d never announced the tour out loud and had just grabbed some people and left with them. We would get another tour when the next tour guide finished his sandwich.
We were on the way by around 2:05, and our guide again apologized for the inconvenience. His name was Frank, and he was utterly bilingual. He did the tour in English, as the other family, a Hispanic family from New Mexico (she had attended Smith and was Puerto Rican), had kids whose Spanish wasn’t very good. He had a painted walking stick and a very typical park ranger-type outfit, straight out of a movie. We got a walking tour from Frank that lasted a little over an hour, during which he quoted the Bible a few times and gave us information that was pretty much just common knowledge. Some nifty details, like which plants were edible, but overall a lot of things that were just obvious. He may have been aiming his talks at the kids in the group, but it really wasn’t worth the time. We would have been better off walking on our own, pointing out things we did know to the kids at our own pace. But we didn’t know that before we paid for the tour ($13). And by the time the tour was over, there wasn’t really any more in the kids’ tank, and we headed for the beach.
Luquillo is a beach that’s supposed to be long and gorgeous and right near El Yunque, so we headed there. And there were some frustrations again with signage, but we overcame them and sniffed our way to a beach that wasn't the one in the guidebooks, but was really very nifty. The ocean there was rough, but this whole stretch of beach is protected by reefs, which start maybe 40 feet off the edge of the water and extend out for hundreds of yards. So we broke out the masks and snorkels that Janneke had bought at Walgreen’s a couple of days ago, and Quinn tried them on. Just the mask at first, which he was thrilled with; and then naturally he was so taken with what he could see that he wanted to try the snorkel. What a brave boy he’s becoming – he must have swallowed quarts of water between diving too deep when he’d first start out, or forgetting to put the snorkel in his mouth at all and breathing anyway (I did see that happen, and managed to contain my laughter), or waves that would engulf his tube occasionally. But he never cried, and never gave up, and at the end he was plopping his little feet behind him like a pro, looking at fish and sea anemones and coral. He did fantastically. Janneke stayed behind on the beach and looked after Tess, who made sand sculptures that looked like the mountains we’d just visited. It was really remarkable – wet sand dripped across piles from someone else’s hole-digging tailings, and presto, El Yunque. She did really well with the notion that she was too small to try snorkeling. Minor miracle, that.
We had supper in a great place – a long line of “kiosks”, open-ended restaurants all strung together along an access road that fronts Highway 3. The four of us ate tons of fried Puerto Rican food and spent $20.75. Nobody was hungry when we left.
Quinn was crying now, though, with a stiff neck that he got from jerking his head out of the water every time he filled his mouth with sea water. We stopped at Walgreen’s and got him some pain reliever, and then Janneke sat in the back with him so he could feel comforted on the ride home. Both kids fell asleep, which is just as well, because there was a lot of swearing going on over the course of the next hour as we tried to navigate our way back to Condado. As I told Janneke last night, the frustration was not in not knowing where we were – at any point, I could have pointed toward our house. In fact, when we would miss a turn, or take the wrong one, we knew it because I could feel that we had gone too far west, or that the road we’d just turned onto was going too much toward the east, and we needed to go north. It was just a question of signage. OK, OK, I’ll stop.
A fun day overall, which I’ll try not to allow to be ruined by the frustrations. Going to take it easier today – we can’t quite handle another full day of travel. Maybe we’ll take the car out to one of the nearby big beaches. That should be easy enough.
Here’s some pictures!
Learning in the jungle. The lesson:
Don't hire a guide.
Jungle snail. In twenty minutes you could
pick 100 of these off the brances.
Luquillo beach
Quinn learns to snorkel
Tess makes art in a hole
Quinn was attacked by a giant squid -
the tentacles left that mark on his face.
He killed it with his bare hands.
Then he ate it, so we never saw it.
But that's what happened.
1 comment:
I guess it was one of those days...Quinn definitely saved it with his heroic feat, and the pictures are great!
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