Our arrival went just fine – got in a little past 8pm island time, collected our rental car (a little Chevy Spark), picked up some essentials (snacks and rum, Don Q since it was something we’ve never had before and cheap), and drove out of San Juan to Loiza, where our rental for the week is located. The night drive along the coast line was awesome, with ocean on one side and a thick wall of green on the other down some narrow roads that was just lovely.
We’re staying at the ever so exclusive Aquatika Beach Resort — just kidding, it’s just a bunch of condos that get rented out to folks like us. But, more important, we’re in a condo that literally faces the private beach. It’s nice and quiet and pretty damn heavenly. Just walk out the door, say hello to the iguanas, the parrots, and drink your coffee on the beach.
A girl could get used to waking up like this, let me tell ya…
Anyway. Our first day here involves the most driving – we’re going from Loiza to Arecibo Observatory, which is about a two hour drive. Everything here is measured in metric except the speed limit, but safe to say that the estimate on driving was accurate, minus a stop for breakfast and coffee.
We tried to stop first in the neighborhood of Santurce in San Juan, but traffic, and especially parking, were a major pain in the neck.
Seems like it’s pretty common for vehicles to just stop in the lane they’re driving in, regardless of traffic, and block everyone so they can make their deliveries. If you’re stuck behind one, you have to wait for the cars in the oncoming lane to get out of the way so you can go around because there isn’t really another option. Lots of colorful buildings in Santurce though, so despite all the excitement, it’s really neat to look around.
We gave up pretty quick on trying to find breakfast in San Juan and picked up coffee and sandwiches further down the road. Once we turned off the main highway after the town of Arecibo, the roads narrowed significantly. The lanes didn’t really matter and every time you drove by another car going the other way, you hoped you’d both fit on the road (doesn’t work with buses or bigger trucks).
But holy cow was it gorgeous! Just green on either side and not even in the rainforest. This was definitely a fun drive. It’d be a lot more fun if we had a manual shift vehicle and could see further ahead to really take advantage of the winding roads, but the sight lines were minimal at best and coming across other cars was always a bit of a startle.
Up and down, seeing occasional homes/towns/even a graveyard, lots of forest, and out of no where, there’s the sign for Arecibo.
There’s a parking lot just after the sign and maybe a handful of cars at best. It’s a little bit of a hike up the hill to get to the visitor center, but it’s not hard, and they’ve got a neat model of the solar system with to-scale-distance between each planet.
Over the trees you can see the leftovers of the towers that once held the suspension. We later learned that these are only a third to a fourth of their original height. Kind of crazy to think about.
Of course I have to take picture of the local plants. They’re just too cool, especially to someone who grew up in the desert.
Tickets weren’t pricey for this, but I’d happily pay more. The visitor center reminded me a bit of the ‘museum’ in the video game Outer Wilds.
A lot of neat little exhibits, mostly geared towards kids, but I’m a science dork and I love it. JA has to put up with my enthusiasm and things like ‘JA for scale’ pics, like this one, with some giant nuts and other stuff.
A tour guide found us in time for a brief presentation and history video on Arecibo and then she led us out to the actual telescope.
Bittersweet. Kind of heartbreaking. I’ve got no other words really. I wish I could have seen it in its prime. The scale is so hard to convey in pictures, but it’s huge, almost overwhelming. Just crazy.
This is the only functioning telescope at Arecibo currently.
Some of the broken hardware on display outside. JA for scale.
I had a lot of mixed feelings as we walked back down to the car. I’m grateful I was able to see it before it’s completely cleared out. I hope it gets rebuilt at some point. We have nothing like it in the world and it’d be incredible to see it funded once again.
We planned an additional activity for the day, Cueva del Indio, which was on the way back from Arecibo. It’s a cave on the beach that has petroglyphs and is supposed to be free to visit. Unfortunately more most tourists, the main entrance is owned by a company that charges for ‘entry’ past their fence (essentially paying to cross their property for all of 20 feet). There was another path further down the beach, just involved road parking. But it was a pretty walk along a beach!
Dead coral, brain coral I think?
That general rock formation is where we’re headed – you don’t cross over to the one on the left.
The path got a little tricky past here – the rocks were too jagged along the beach to try and climb, but there was a small path through the vegetation.
There was also a little bit of climbing involved, but nothing a normally fit person couldn’t handle.
The view at the top is pretty awesome.
To be fair, this would have been plenty for me to just come up here. I’m easy like that. The fact there’s is bonus. The petroglyphs were from the Tainos people, the original inhabitants of PR, and you can find their markings all over the island.
The way down to the actual cave we’re here to see is carved out of the rock. At one point, you could go into the cave to look at the markings up close, but as with any site these days, people ruin everything and no one is allowed in any more due to previous vandalism. But plenty are still viewable from above.
We ended up taking the easy walk down that came close to the property that charges but dipped under a fence to walk back on the beach before we truly trespassed. These activities took up most of our day and we were ready to drive back and grab some local food and rum.
But we got to see one more thing before all that, definitely nothing we planned on. Out of now here we came across this monstrosity:
A statue called ‘Birth of the New World’ that is taller than the Statue of Liberty. Crazy, just out there in a place in PR that probably very few people even bother driving by. It was supposed to be a donation to US to mark the 500th anniversary of Columbus ‘discovering America’ but was turned down by Columbus, Ohio, New York, Boston, Cleveland, Fort Lauderdale, and Miami (to name a few) before they were finally able to dump it on Puerto Rico. Again, pictures do not do size justice. It’s huge. And in a spot where almost no one goes.
Puerto Rico – Old San Juan-dering | Puerto Rico – Rainforest | Puerto Rico – Beach!