Part VII: Creatures of the sea

I was talking to my niece one time and she said something like "I'm not really a 'beach person.'" I was thinking about that while we were in Puerto Rico. Am I a beach person? What is a beach person? If it's someone who likes to sunbathe in a swimming suit—no, I am not one either. Good at surfing? No. Tan, with windswept, salt-water tousled hair? No. Likes to eat sand, as some of my babies seem to have? No. But I love the beach. I've loved it all this time even before I knew the water could be warm! I love watching the waves. I love just…I don't know, looking at the endless expanse of ocean, and listening to it. I love picking up tiny, pathetic pieces of shells or polished pebbles of agate and becoming attached to them, as if they were beautiful museum-quality specimens. So the other reason, besides the biobay, that I was excited about Vieques was that I read it had "some of the best beaches in the world." I don't know how one would even choose a "best beach." You'd rank them based on being beautiful, I guess, or peaceful or unspoiled. But who decides?

I still don't know, but whoever they are I think I agree with them. The main reason the beaches here felt "best" to me was that it felt like we were the only ones in the world to ever visit them! Of all the beaches we visited in a few days on Vieques (and we went to lots!)—there were other people on two of them. Maybe three. And even those times, it was maybe one other little group, way down at the other end of the sand, who left a half hour later. So it almost felt like Sam, Sebastian, and I were alone on some enchanted isle, enjoying the endless sky and the warm, calm, turquoise water.

The other "best," I guess, was the snorkeling! I haven't ever snorkeled much, but I was amazed at how many beautiful and colorful fish were even on the (comparatively) crowded beach we went to in Rincon, just swimming right around by the people! And here where there was no one around—I felt like we were in a nature documentary. Being able to swim and see under the water opens up a whole new dimension to the beach. It gives you something to do when you get tired of gazing at the ocean from the top side. It effectively doubles the beach's space, so you feel you're getting to see twice as much! The terrain underwater is always quite different than I would have imagined it, with trenches and hills and huge fields of water grasses you didn't even guess at from above. And underwater it's so quiet and strange. Even the filtered light is alien. I always came out with a sense of unreality, disoriented, as if I were returning to earth from another planet.

Another reason I think I'm a "beach person" is that I love seeing the water in different lights. I love how it changes all through the day, starting before sunrise when it might be pale and grey—under the marine layer in California and Oregon, misty and chilly—or, here in Puerto Rico, lavender as the sky starts to lighten. 

Even after sunset when you think it must have already passed its prettiest time, the ocean suddenly seems to turn into a huge silver mirror, as if it has collected all the light that just faded from the sky and spread it out paper-thin over its surface.

Sam and I went down to the beach early one morning. It was already hot, of course. The sun was peeking out through the cloud layer in the distance.

Looks like the beginning of a solar eclipse!

Ah, there's the full sun.

If there's one thing we like, it's crabs. Especially tiny hermit crabs.

The morning water looks so shimmery!

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Part VI. Blue Stars

This last place we stayed came about because I was looking up things to do in Puerto Rico, and I started reading about the bioluminescent bays there. I feel like we have learned a dozen different times about bioluminescence in homeschool; I'm not sure exactly why or in which units. (Electricity? Light? Animal kingdom? Insects? Oceans?) Anyway, I've always thought it would be cool to see it in the ocean, and one of the bays in Puerto Rico is supposedly the best and brightest one in the world. It's on a little island (off the island of Puerto Rico itself) called Vieques. First I had to look up how to say that (it's almost like V-A-K's) and then I started to get really interested in this tiny island. It costs a lot to fly there from San Juan airport. But then I learned you can drive to a different city and take a ferry, or fly a small independent airline from a smaller airport, and it's lots cheaper. The ferry is like $3 a person! People online were complaining a lot about the ferry (it's unreliable, weather is fickle, non-residents can get bumped off if there are residents who need to ride, etc.) so I almost gave up on the idea, but then I found a few threads where people talked about how the ferry had been privatized in the last couple years and was now way better. So I thought maybe we would risk it!

We got ferry tickets online a month in advance, but even though we had them of course I was nervous the whole time that we'd miss our time or go to the wrong place or there would be a storm or something. (That was the one trouble with going to this whole separate island…it added another ticket/schedule/timetable variable which could possibly go wrong.) But we got there in plenty of time and the only trouble was having to wait around in the heat for a half hour…it almost made me wish we'd been later!

The ferry itself was super nice, though. Air conditioned, with comfortable seats like a train. And the ride over to Vieques is quite fast, only 40 minutes or so.

It was fun to go up on the top deck or the back deck and watch us speed through the water!

Here we are coming up on Vieques. It's a long, thin island. On the map it's so small I didn't know if we'd be able to just walk around the whole thing or what! Ha! But it's not THAT small. We did need a car to drive around. (You can't take rental cars on the ferry, so we rented another car on the island.) And it takes quite a while to get to the far beaches on either end. Maybe an hour to drive the island lengthwise.

The water was so pretty!

When we got off the ferry, we saw these two missionaries coming to get on it! Of course we said hi enthusiastically. They were coming on to the mainland for Mission President Interviews, but their area was here on Vieques. It just so happened that before the missionaries came along, we had met some fellow members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by the ferry (I don't remember how we figured that connection out, but maybe because of a BYU shirt or something? And you can often just tell…) who were coming to stay with the husband's former mission companion, a man had left the church years ago and was now living here on Vieques working as a bartender. So…our new friends gave the missionaries their old friend's contact information and invited them to visit him soon! :) Kind of fun to be part of that whole interaction.

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Part V: Existential Gardening Questions and an Ideal Birthday

We loved the place we stayed in Luquillo. The guy who owned the rental house lived in another house on the property, which can be awkward, but it was fine and we didn't feel that "barely-sanctioned intruder" feeling you sometimes get. He was the epitome of the expat high-powered corporate lawyer who left it all behind to live on a mountain top and do organic micro-farming. (I don't know what his real story is, but I'd put money on it being something like that.) When he showed us around, he had a sort of proud-but-also-laid-back vibe: "So here's the passion fruit vine; it's kinda taking over the place, ha ha." It made me wonder how one even has a yard in the middle of the rainforest. What IS a yard, really? How do you "plant" a garden when everything just grows? Does gardening consist mainly of fighting off the plants you don't want? How many months can you go before the rainforest starts encroaching on you with its own ideas? 

I have so many questions.

We had bananas, papayas, passion fruit, star fruit, and pineapple in our yard—those were just the things that were ripe. There may have been more. And speaking of strange gardening issues, I learned that a banana tree CAN ONLY GROW ONE BUNCH OF BANANAS. In its lifetime! That's it! Then it dies! But a new banana tree (and technically speaking they aren't even called trees) can sprout up from the side, out of the roots, and grow next to the old one. So, does a banana orchard just…migrate over time? If you want to plant bananas do you have to clear a whole row for the your one tree to proceed down over the years? If your neighbor plants a banana tree will it eventually be in your yard?

Also, do you feel bad that the tree which produced your bunch of breakfast bananas is now deceased, never to bear fruit again? Tropical fruits are so weird.

That's the passion fruit vine, growing up the tree

Star fruit tree

Close up

Baby pineapple

Our host said we could pick whatever fruit we wanted, and when we arrived at the house there was already a bowlful of fresh fruit there, so we got to try everything. There were also some flowers from the yard in vases. What would it be like to just go out and assemble a bouquet like this from your own yard??

Fruit cut up for breakfast. The star fruit is really good—I had it in Hawaii too but I thought it was better here. It reminds me of kiwi, a little. The passion fruit you think is going to be weird because you can eat the seeds, but they are just nice and lightly crisp, like poppyseeds or something. And the pulp around them is good and sweet. I like papaya but Seb thought it tasted deeply "wrong" somehow—not spoiled or anything, just strange to him. And of course the tiny bananas are so delicious. I wish we could grow them here! (One tree at a time.)

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Part IV: Rainforest views and waterfalls

I didn't want to stretch this trip report over weeks and weeks. I didn't want to break it up into a zillion parts either, but would one post with 5000 pictures have been better? I don't know. At any rate, we are pressing on. I love the rainforest! Love it! It seems like it must be the most beautiful place in the world! I suppose this is, amazingly, the third rainforest I've been to…although temperate rainforest (the Redwoods) doesn't quite seem to count. 

What surprised me is that the rainforest in Puerto Rico looked/felt different from the rainforest in Hawaii! It makes me wonder if the rainforest in Brazil, or Peru, or Africa is different still? I suppose it must be. That makes me wish I could visit all of them. (When I die and become a being of light and spirit…I will!)

After we got to our rainforest house, we spent the next few days either in the National Forest rainforest—El Yunque, it's called—or just outside it, in what was still the same rainforest, but not National Park land. I was actually quite worried about this, because you have to have tickets/reservations to get into El Yunque, and I had read lots of people online saying they hadn't been able to get them. You used to be able to get tickets 30 days in advance online, but in July of this year they changed the policy so you could ONLY get tickets 24 hours before you wanted to enter. (And now, as I'm writing this post, I read that as of the end of August, you don't need a reservation at all anymore! Make up your minds, people!) Anyway, I was so afraid we wouldn't get any tickets! And then we would never get to see it!

But, once we were actually in the town of Luquillo, I saw that the actual National Park was not ALL the rainforest. The actual forest extends outside of the boundaries of the Park, so if you can't get El Yunque tickets—there is still a lot of rainforest to see! Especially if you are staying right there as we were!

Then we actually DID manage to get tickets too, for both days we wanted them. I just logged on to the Recreation.gov website right at 8 am when the tickets opened up and we were lucky! I'm so glad, because I loved El Yunque…but if we hadn't gotten tickets, I think we still would have been okay.

Anyway, the pictures in this post are of actual El Yunque. There is a nice visitor's center with a walkway over the trees, some outdoor exhibits, and then a small "discovery trail" where some of the plants are labeled. It was cool, but probably the least cool part of the forest we saw.

The ocean looks so far away in this picture. It felt close in real life. Like you could just hop over the trees and be there.

It was worth going to the visitor's center just for these parrots. They are Puerto Rican Parrots native to this rainforest. I think they are endangered, but making a comeback. Anyway, we were happy to see the "Green Caws" (as we all thought of them) and excited to show the pictures to Gus. :)

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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.

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Part II: Aguadilla, strange fruits, and a faithful friend

The drive from San Juan across the top of the island was really pretty. It's not like the Pacific Coast Highway where you get to see ocean the whole way (sadly!). But the scenery was really interesting.

We drove along the yellow line, taking about 3 hours in all. Along the way it was green and forest-y everywhere on the sides of the road, and a little farther away we could see all these strange bumpy green hills—not as tall as mountains, but tall, and seeming taller because they were narrow. I don't mean "rolling hills"…that conjures up a whole different image. No, these were bumping hills:

and I was so curious about them! Sam said this was probably a karst landscape (a place where water has dissolved the limestone) and that makes sense because there is a big cave system you can visit in this region, Rio Camuy caverns. I had read about it and was sad we didn't have to time to go there. Next time!

The distance we covered wasn't even that great, but a lot of the road went through small towns where you'd line up for the one traffic light (that did remind me of the California coast), so it took a long time, especially as it got toward evening.

Even though it was so green and lush, it didn't really remind me of Hawaii. As with so many other things, this felt like its own unique place.

We were hurrying a little because we wanted to find our rental house before it got dark, and it was a good thing, because the road ended up being straight up one of those little mountains (they did seem like mountains once we were actually on one!). We said, "This can't possibly be the road," but it was the road, and luckily Sam is a very intrepid driver from having driven our van (both rightly and wrongly) in so many odd places. :) Our little rented Kia was no problem for him! After driving up the impossibly steep road, we came to this forbidding gate, which opened with a code, and then we parked and emerged out into a little terrace with this view down to the ocean:

So pretty!

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Part I: Dallas and Old San Juan

Whenever Sam has to write something for BYU, there are all these academic writing rules and conventions he has to follow. But the problem is, academic writing is awful! Have you read any of it lately? Wordy and pretentious and obscure. It's not about clarity—quite the opposite. It's about showing off and impressing the others in your in-group. And yet you can't get away from it! If you publish or work in academia you have to follow its rules. I hate it, and yet, perversely, my own writing shares many of its flaws. I'm good at putting on that academic mask! I slip easily into that style because there have been times when I need to, and honestly, it's probably affected my regular writing for the worse.

Anyway, one of the things Sam is always told to do is "contextualize" everything—supposedly so that those who don't work in his discipline can understand the significance of what he's talking about (but really so he can use more words and establish a higher position in the ever-present academic pecking order). (Sam is actually NOT good at doing this, to his credit. His style is way too direct and coherent. The other professors have to edit him back into ambiguity.) And sometimes when I start a blog post I feel like I'm caught in that "contextualizing" cycle too, where I spill a thousand words in disclaimers and caveats and apologies and scene-setting, spending more time talking about what I'm going to talk about than I do about the subject itself! It drives me crazy! And if I spend any more time deciding how to tell about this trip, I'll die of old age! 

So (now that I've completely wasted my two introductory paragraphs), let's get right to it, for crying out loud! Sam and I took Sebastian on a trip for his graduation/birthday. For months, I agonized over every aspect of it—the money, what to do with the kids, where we should go and most of all IF we should go, and finally things fell into place enough that I had to make a choice to stop agonizing and just be grateful. One of the fun things that worked out was that we found really cheap tickets with a twenty-nine hour layover in Dallas. We found a tiny apartment to stay in overnight so we could explore a little bit of the city. I knew we wouldn't be able to visit Abe, but it felt exciting to be right there near him, seeing some of the things he'd seen when he got to his mission!

Abe's mission, oddly (for being called the Texas Dallas East Mission), doesn't actually even include the city of Dallas at all. But he was in Plano and Richardson and Rowlett for six months, and he could see downtown Dallas from his apartment.

We found a place to eat downtown and walked around a little. There was a beautiful sunset!

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