Part III: Missing roofs, a calm sea, and foolish and blind guides

Our next house in Puerto Rico was back on the east side of the island. At first I was trying to find us a place on the south side, down near Ponce. And there were some cool houses down there! But the place I finally settled on was up farther north, so we decided to drive the southern route on the way so we could at least see what it was like!  We left Aguadilla and drove down the west coast. I had hoped we might go all the way to the southwestern point at Cabo Rojo. But when the time came it didn't seem worth going so far out of our way, so we just angled down on the main highway, following roughly the yellow line on the map above.

There were so many interesting things to see along the way. Everything was green and jungle-y, though there didn't seem to be the same sort of bumpy hills we'd seen on the top of the island. We went through a few heavy rainstorms that would turn the road into a river for a few minutes and then move just as suddenly away. We saw a lot of the roadside food truck/restaurant areas we'd started to notice everywhere. 

Even just looking at the houses was interesting. I noticed that almost every house had iron grates over the windows and doors and garages. In San Juan I'd thought it might be for crime prevention, but even the country houses had them, so I think it was just the style. The iron work was often quite intricate and decorative!

It was beautiful to look up at the green hills and see colorful houses tumbling down the hillsides. We were so intrigued by this little town that we drove in to get a closer look. I don't even know what it was called!

But it was cool. The painting on this part had obviously been coordinated—by whom? the city?—and there was a little street fair going on.

It was so hilly! I liked this colorful set of stairs.

You can see all the iron gates and grates across porches and windows, and more of those crazy tangled electrical wires! I like these colorful houses here, less over-the-top than the other spot.

I had started to notice houses now and then that didn't have roofs, or where the top story was broken and open to the air. Sometimes these houses seemed to be in partial use, with people living in the inhabitable parts, but other times they appeared to be abandoned altogether. I kept wondering about them—was construction on the island just very slow? Were the houses older than they looked? Were they meant to be that way? 

In this particular town there were so many of these houses! Finally I remembered reading about how some cities in Puerto Rico had "still not really recovered after the hurricane" and I realized this was probably what that meant! 

By this point Sam and Seb were curious too, so we looked it up and learned that a Category 5 hurricane, Hurricane Maria, hit Puerto Rico in 2017 and wiped out everything—water, electricity, hospitals, infrastructure. Almost 3000 people died. Schools were closed. Residents didn't have the most basic services. Even a month later, 88% of people were without power. You'd think I would have heard about it at the time and I'm sure I did—but the country of Puerto Rico was still a nebulous far-off place in my mind at that point, so the information didn't take hold. Isn't it interesting how that happens? Now that we were there, it actually meant something. We deduced that all these roofless houses had been damaged in the hurricane and then just abandoned for a variety of reasons—maybe the families had no money to fix them. Maybe there were no materials to fix them, or no workers. Maybe they had been afraid to rebuild and potentially lose everything again. It was sobering to think about it. What would we do if our house were destroyed? What if all the houses around us were destroyed too? What if supply chains, not to mention rising costs, made it impossible to fix it? We read that by a year after the hurricane, 160,000 Puerto Rican residents had just left—moved to the  continental United States and started over. Can you imagine? Either leaving everything—or staying behind when everyone else was leaving.

This grillwork was really pretty!

As we drove down the west side of the island and got glimpses of ocean to our right, I kept saying "Look, is that the Caribbean? Are we looking at the Caribbean?" Sebastian kept dashing my hopes by saying it was still the Atlantic. (Perhaps there is no real dividing line. I don't really know what the water between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic counts as.) But finally, as we rounded the bottom corner, I said "Now is it the Caribbean?" and Seb had to admit that now it probably was. I don't why that felt so amazing to me, but it did—the Caribbean Sea! I never thought I'd see it!

When we got to the city of Ponce (named for Ponce de Leon, whose name I have not heard nor even thought of since about sixth grade when we learned about explorers), we found a beach where we could go get a closer look. I wanted to put my feet in the water so I could feel like I'd really been there!

Look! It's so blue and so beautiful! And so calm! I don't know if it's calm everywhere, but it sure was here!

It was kind of a dusty, scrubby little beach. There was hardly anyone there. I don't think Ponce is much of a tourist town, anyway. (And it was another place that I read had been hit especially hard by the hurricane, so maybe it used to be different.) But there were lots of little shells to find, and the water was just as beautiful and warm as it had been in Rincon!

This water park next to the beach was abandoned and falling apart. Looks like it used to be fun!

We ate at a Mexican place in Ponce and had this huge meaty "torta," which Sam would want preserved here for posterity. He still talks about it from time to time. That pale yellow stuff is not scrambled eggs, but guacamole. The avocados we tried in Puerto Rico seem to be like this—pale and a little watery and not extremely flavorful. But the guacamole was good!

On the way out of Ponce we saw this "Policia" building. A whole police tower! It had to be documented for Ziggy's sake. (And it caught his imagination as I knew it would. He drew and played about "Policia" towers many times in the weeks after we returned.)

(Here is one of his drawings. You can see that one of the floors is set up like a fire station--there are clothes draped over chairs ready to be put on quickly, boots sitting next to a bed, and an alarm bell ringing urgently!)

The highway curves back up through the center of the island after it goes through Ponce. There were lots more of those beautiful bumpy hills.

Then the terrain changes again as the road turns back east. I don't know if all of Puerto Rico is considered rainforest? There were rental houses on the southern end that said they were "right in the rainforest" or "next to the rainforest." It certainly seemed lush and green and like you were in the dense jungle almost everywhere you went. But there is one area that is officially designated rainforest, and it's a National Forest. And as we headed back west we were approaching that. It's the darker green blotch on the upper right side of the island, in the map at the top of this post, and it's called El Yunque Rainforest.

In this area there were more rivers, and the hills got even denser and MORE covered with greenery, if that is possible. There were huge poufs of bamboo growing by the rivers—I kept noticing them and thinking, "Wow, I really love those feathery trees" and then every time I realized they were bamboo thickets.

A closer look at the bamboo

Our next rental house really was RIGHT on the edge of the rainforest, on the map. The guy who owned it had given very specific instructions about how to get there, and how you should NOT get directions from the airport or from the highway, but wait until you got to a certain Walgreens in the city and then enter the address into your GPS. Otherwise, he said, Maps would take you on strange back roads and it would be hard and confusing.

We dutifully drove to the appointed spot and entered in the address, and we carefully followed the directions, hardly able to believe how beautiful the area was. As the route wound up and down and around, through, we started to get a little worried. The road was amazing, but it kept getting more and more overgrown with trees and vines, and the surrounding jungle got denser and denser.

We started to feel like this couldn't possibly be the way…the main, easy way that was so much better than the other bad way we'd have gotten without following proper directions!

The rest of Puerto Rico had been green, but now that we were here we could see—THIS was different. THIS was true rainforest, a hundred times greener and denser and more abundant than the already green, already dense, already abundant landscape we'd been in up to this point. It almost did start to feel like too much life—plants bursting out like jack-in-the-boxes every direction you looked. Save some green for the rest of the world, sheesh!

After driving cautiously along the winding roads for quite some time, ducking our heads involuntarily as the car crept under the overhanging branches and vines, we did at last reach the spot our directions had said we'd reach! (But backwards. Hmm.) And we drove up a dirt road and a truly scary hill and then parked the car and—here we were. In the Garden of Eden?

It was getting dark, so we couldn't explore as much as we wanted to yet, but we did manage to find our way back down to town…an easier way. (We never quite figured out what went wrong with the GPS directions. I think my phone liked to take us a third way, neither the bad nor the good way the house guy had described. But once we'd done it, we were so glad we had, because it was a beautiful route! And not as worrisome once we knew where we'd come out.)

We got another kind of mofongo, topped with some kind of fish this time. It was so good!

And we sat by the dark ocean in Luquillo and watched the white crests of the waves catch the last light.