Using what we'd learned from the "survey" trip that we took last winter, we decided to spend most of our time in 4 places: We spent our first afternoon in San Juan, the next 2 days in Ponce, a day on the offshore island of Culebra (picture above), and then finished up with an evening kayaking trip in the "bioluminescent" bay called Laguna Grande in the extreme northeast corner of the main island.
We flew in to San Juan late Friday night/Saturday morning, so we decided to spend the late morning and afternoon exploring old San Juan. The old part of San Juan reminds me a lot of downtown Boston or San Francisco: It's undeniably charming and old (even older than Boston... don't forget, this is the part of the world where Columbus landed on his first voyage), but also a bit too obviously tourist oriented in places. Click here for the San Juan pictures (or here for a full slideshow).
Our second stop was the south coast city of Ponce. When we were there last year, we kept hearing that they had one of the biggest carnaval celebrations in the Caribbean during the week leading up to Ash Wednesday. This was the main reason that we chose the week that we did to make this trip. We weren't disappointed. The magnitude of the festival is almost a little bit overwhelming. Most of the pictures I took are of the parade that happens on Sunday afternoon, which started at 1:00pm and didn't end until 10:30 or so! From the hot, dry, breezy weather and mountainous surroundings, to the Catalonian architecture, to interesting things like Carnaval, I like Ponce a lot... I'm not quite sure why so few people outside of Puerto Rico know anything about it, but I guess maybe it's better that way. Unlike Old San Juan, Ponce is tourist friendly, but not sickeningly touristy. Click here for the Ponce pictures (or here for full slideshow).
Our next to last stop was the offshore island of Culebra, which is politically part of Puerto Rico, but geographically more par of the Virgin Islands (St. Thomas is only about 10 miles to the east). In terms of overall activity, Culebra was almost a 180 degree difference from Ponce, as it's purportedly one of the least developed places in the Caribbean. On the whole island, there are about 2000 full time residents, and probably less than 100 tourists at any given time. There are only about 4 restaurants on the whole island, and everything closes at 10:30 (but if you want to stay up later and walk around, that's fine too... crime is virtually non-existent here). The only places to stay are small bed-and-breakfast type places and beachside bungalow type apartments that can be rented for the whole week. They're all very affordable (I now see absolutely no reason to ever rent a place on Martha's Vineyard or the Cape for a week... even with airfare, it would be cheaper and much nicer to go here). The beaches are unbelievably beautiful (I didn't enhance these pictures at all... the water really looks that way!), and on a weekday, even the most popular one probably had no more than 30 people on it. I suspect it's only a matter of time before people begin to discover this place and someone has the idea to start building tacky resort hotels that will bring in tourists by the thousands. We hope to return a few times before this happens! For the Culebra pictures, click here (or here for slideshow).
The trip's finale was probably the most unique experience. We took a kayaking trip into the Laguna Grande, which is one of the last bodies of water in the world where bioluminescent plankton live year round. It's really amazing to dip your hand or paddle into the water and see a cloud of blueish light follow (they only light up when physically agitated). You also get a fireworks display any time a fish jumps or darts away from the kayak. Unfortunately it's really impossible to photograph this well (and it's a fairly bad idea to take an unsealed camera on a kayak ride). If you look at the map here, you can see where we went. We started in the oceanside bay that you see in the lower right-hand corner of the map. The guide then lead us through a completely dark mangrove swamp into the lagoon. It really felt like we were in the jungle as we were paddling through the swamp (Jessica was scared that a snake was going to drop down from the trees!), but in the end, I think we agreed that it was well worth it!
