Having spent $16 to put half a tank in the tiniest car this side of a Hotwheels, by the way. The math I did in my head of what 73 cents a liter would translate into when thought of in gallons was apparently off. That was a lot for 5 gallons of gas.
So, anyway – yeah. 8:30. And here I find have to amend some of my comments about Puerto Rican scenery. The route we took yesterday made the place seem very thickly settled and deforested, but the schedule today called for a trip on the much, much larger Highway 52, and although it seems counterintuitive to me, the scenery was far more natural, less denuded, less riddled with cinderblock cacophony. We found ourselves somewhat helplessly groping to snap some pictures out the windows as we drove – It’s an absolutely majestic drive. These hills they have here are downright mountainous. The Taíno Indians apparently held out resisting the Spanish for quite a while, which always seemed unlikely to me, given the size of the island, but when you actually drive it, you get a feel for just how big a hundred-mile-long by thirty-mile-wide island is. That’s a huge chunk of property, with plenty of places to hide and raise a family. And it is fabulous to look at.
One funny thing, though: Highway 52, the big north-south artery in Puerto Rico between its two largest cities, doesn’t have a single spot where a person can pull over in his or her car and take in the dramatic views. It seemed so strange at the time, but now I think I know why: If there were such a spot, it would be jammed with traffic every daylight hour of every day, slowing down traffic in both directions for miles and miles and miles. With several million people on the island, you could never accommodate everyone who wanted to take in that view. So they accommodate no one. (Maybe it will be sunny in Ponce, Quinn, I don’t know. We’ll see when we get there.) We did find one spot to pull over at the crest of the mountain, and giddily pulled in for a look-see – but they had purposefully put the rest area at a spot where you can’t see out for the low ridges around you, and had fenced it in for good measure. But as I said, we did snap some pictures out the window, so you’ll get a certain feel for it.
Cresting the island, as you drop down toward the Caribbean coast, the climate changes dramatically, and suddenly you’re in a semi-arid scrubland with stunted trees, brown vegetation, and just about no people. You can’t grow anything, can’t get any water, so why live there? Or, more aptly: HOW live there? It is tragically beautiful in its own sparse, mountainous way. And the way the land drops away in front of you and disappears into the haze, which becomes the vague coastline of the Caribbean, is breathtaking. I’d love to do that drive over again, just to see it all roll past again.
We stopped at a McDonald’s with a playland for cookies, a bathroom break, and to shake out the squirreliness. (I don’t know, Quinn; it depends if it stops raining. If it stops raining, we might get to the beach. We’ll see.) And then on to Ponce, with Janneke as the capable navigation officer, armed with our amazingly accurate map, purchased for $2 at the gas station across the street from our apartment. We headed straight for the mansion first, called “El Castillo Serrallés”, after the family that built it, though we had to drive through Ponce to get there. There were a certain number of older-looking buildings, but nothing especially grand or intriguing; I thought we were in the old town right then, but Janneke felt confident that, no, this couldn’t be it. Not grand enough. And we drove up the hill to the promontory that overlooks the city, where the mansion was built.
It was originally a lookout where a wooden cross some 30 or 40 feet high served as an early-warning system for Ponce. Soldiers stationed in the hut next to the cross would scan the horizon with a telescope, looking for ships, and as soon as they could discern their provenance, they would run the appropriate flag up to the top of the cross. Another soldier, stationed in town, would see the flag and know if friend or foe was approaching, and could quickly sound the alarm if necessary. Kind of neat. And some time in the 70s or 80s, they replaced this old wooden cross with a two-hundred-foot-tall concrete one with an elevator going up to the cross-arms. (No, Quinn, we aren’t going to the beach unless it stops raining. Nobody likes to hang out on a wet beach in the cold.) This was our first stop on the tour of the mansion complex, and let me tell you: It was absolutely spectacular…ly anticlimactic. The chatty guide doesn’t give you much time to look out the windows; Ponce is not a majestic city to gaze upon from above; its actual shoreline is not very impressive or interesting; and the windows are only a couple of feet high, and they all have huge iron bars across them at 24” intervals, so you never feel like you’re anywhere but up 150 feet in the air, stuck in a giant concrete cross. Ah well.
We were then let in for the mansion tour, and sat through five to eight minutes of commercials – one for a bank, another for a local university – before being able to watch a less-hokey-than-average documentary on the rum baron’s family, their business history, and the sugar and rum industries in general. We did learn one – I hesitate to call it a euphemism, but that’s kind of what it is: In Puerto Rico, one refers to the Spanish-American War, and the ensuing…what? Theft? Conquest? Acquisition? – of Puerto Rico in a way that keeps tempers down on any given side. They call it “el cambio de soberanía” – “the change in sovereignty”. Very nice diplomatic solution. (I don’t know if it’s still raining, Quinn. We’re in the basement of the mansion right now.)
But the mansion tour was a lot of fun. It was built in the 30s for the third-generation sugar and rum baron, and sold to the city 50 years later by his daughter on the condition that it become a museum. In most ways it was just like any number of other mansion tours I’m sure you’ve all been on, with the oohs and the aahs over the prices of the place settings and the number of years it took to carve the ceiling and the extravagance of having the bed built in the room because it would have been too big to carry in when finished. All pretty standard mansion tour fare.
And out kids were by FAR the best behaved, apart from some sixteen-year-olds. And with them, it was a tie. All the other children on the tour were squabbly little monsters who actually knocked things over. We talked them up in a big way when we were done.
Lunch in the car, in the rain, since we’d brought it along with us, and down the hill to Old Ponce. (No, it doesn’t look like we’ll go to the beach today, Quinn, because it’s frickin’ raining. The beach isn’t fun in the rain.) And Janneke, unfortunately, was wrong about the section we’d driven through. That’s it. That’s old Ponce.
The pictures will tell you what I’m talking about – It’s just seen far better days. A huge percentage of these old buildings are simply abandoned, left to crumble into nothing, semi-empty lots with a boarded-up façade, smelling of urine and trash. And then the next building will be beautifully restored, absolutely gorgeous – and the one after that, a near- vacant lot again. It kind of got us down. We were expecting more, somehow – the heyday of Ponce didn’t get as much hey into it as we had thought it would have.
We did walk around a lot down there, and found some potentially very lovely shopping-ready streets, with wonderful old storefronts from the 20s and 30s, but for block after block, most of the stores were hawking the same cheap plastic Chinese mass-produced crap that you find in Wal-Mart and the dollar store. Chain after chain – one chain, “Me $alvé”, had two shops on the same street! – All peddling trinkets. You can see how they’ve tried to revitalize the shopping possibilities, and how in many respects it’s working – these streets were teeming with people, after all. But the intricacies of an economy were put in plain view: What does anybody in Ponce actually MAKE anymore? Where does the money come from? How will they invent another reason to make people want to stay in Ponce…? It was darkly fascinating.
Around 3:00 we took a breather in a wonderful little bakery, much like the one in Cayey yesterday, but cleaner, a little more first-world. Still, there was a man – not homeless, by the look of him, but poor, and dirty, and hungry, and apparently not quite all there – begging people, and not for money, but for something to eat. We didn’t give him anything – he hadn’t come directly up to us, I don’t think. But Quinn had a lot of questions about him, which he kept asking as we crossed the street and headed over to a public phone, so I could try to call the El Yunque national forest and reserve a tour date. Janneke gave me enough change to make the call, and I turned to deposit it into the phone. Janneke, however, saw that Quinn kept looking back across the street at the hungry man. Wordlessly, they sprang into action.
Heedless of the danger of notoriously congested main-plaza traffic, Janneke and Quinn backflipped across the street and back into the bakery. Moving with the ruthless efficiency bred into her pirate blood, Janneke selected the most nutritious of the offerings in the pastry section and purchased one, whirling to present it to Quinn. “Go and give it to him,” she said. But Quinn hesitated, blanching white – This would require...a Social Interaction! His one weakness...!
Janneke knew what to do. She cartwheeled across the tabletops and plopped the pastry into the man’s hand, then swung back to Quinn’s side. The two of them were back behind me before I’d hung up the phone. I turned and regarded them, looking disappointed. “No answer,” I said. And on we went.
We hit the highlights of the downtown: An 1880’s pavilion that’s been turned into a whimsical museum to firefighters; a big plaza with majestic banking buildings around it; giant red letters that spell out PONCE; and a 300-year-old ceiba tree. And to get to the ceiba, you have to walk six blocks of urban blight and cross a river that is pretty much made up of sewage. Thankfully, there is a bridge, and thankfully, that bridge is a good 60 feet over the river. Which is about 60 feet too close.
The tree is big and old and gnarly. Let’s go back to the fricking car.
Leaving Ponce is fun. There's a picture below that tells part of the story - Highway 1 East goes off to the left, while Highway 1 South goes ahead. Call me crazy, but generally, a highway is one cardinal direction going one way, and the opposite cardinal direction going the other. But at one point, we were on Highway1 South, East, and North, all at the same time. I was really hoping to hit for the cycle, but we never did see a sign saying we were on 1 West. Not until after Salinas, anyway.
Halfway back to San Juan, that's where we stopped, the same town where we’d stopped before, because it’s famous for its seafood restaurants. We found one recommended by our book, and it was lovely, overlooking the calm Caribbean (I know it isn’t raining now, Quinn, but it’s supper time, and we are not going to clamber over the rails of the restaurant dining area and jump into the water.), but expensive. And we were the absolutely only customers. Our waiter was pretty openly disappointed to see us come – Janneke saw him put his head against the bar in mourning when he saw us walk up. The service was about what you would expect, given that beginning, and the tip reflected it. Little else to report about dinner. On our way out of Salinas, a woman talking on her cell phone rolled through a stop sign and nearly hit us; she seemed not to notice. And forty feet further on, another woman talking on her cell phone blithely sliced out from a gas station and cut across both lanes of traffic, forcing both directions to stop suddenly, and then rolled along on her merry way. I wonder if they were talking to each other.
The gorgeous drive home was done in the dark, unfortunately, but I could just feel the mountains sliding past us. I hope we get to do that drive again. Quinn, by the way, has been paying attention during all the “ventaja / desventaja” discussions. Apropos of nothing, he announced to the car just after supper: “La ventaja de Papi: Sabe mucho sobre muchos animales. La desventaja de Papi: No habla tantas lenguas. La ventaja de Mami: Sabe muchas lenguas. La desventaja: Sólo sabe mucho sobre perros.” So we know where we stand.
And here we are, resting up for a trip to El Yunque tomorrow. My hunch is it will exceed expectations to the same degree that Ponce failed to live up to them. Then both days will average out, and over that period, we’ll be able to shrug and say that we were bored. Saves a lot of writing.
On the drive to Ponce
I mean, come on.
Nifty scene in Ponce early on - We were excited
The mansion. Rich people lived well. Surprise, surprise.
It's kind of funny to stand in front of these letters with
a map, looking flustered, and ask passersby how to get
to Ponce.
The bakery in Ponce
Refurbiushed, Ponce-style home
Nearby, non-refurbished home.
Compasses in Puerto Rico must be hard to come by.
1 comment:
I wish your trip were as much fun as it was reading about it!
Hopefully there will be no more rain on "day three with wheels" -especially since it's apparently coming our way :(
Had dinner with the Bidis, Megs and Dirk. They all join Muffin and me in sending their love. It's already 1:15 am, so I'll bid you all good night my Hobies, with a special "Buenas Noches" to Quinn and Tessie!
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