Exploring Puerto Rico

Puerto Ricans, and their helpers back in mainland America, have worked hard on their landscape. Large areas of four lane highway, big box stores in sprawling malls, a preponderance of half finished reinforced concrete housing, large areas of low cost, low income, low attractiveness homes and many other visual delights accost you as you drive the developed areas of the low coastal plain.

Yet, despite all their efforts, the country cannot avoid being beautiful and beguiling. From our base in the middle of the southern coast the unescapable vista was the central mountains, a series of ridges and ranges that dominated the background of any view and photograph that wasn't looking out to the glittering caribbean sea.

Those mountains draw you in, dare you to explore so we rented a car and drove up into the Forest Torro Negro, one of many areas of various forest parks around the country. Torro Negro is high tropical rainforest, and we headed for an area of National Park with well defined trails and somewhere obvious to leave the car. The drive up was stunning, rapidly escaping the attempts at sprawling suburbia and switchbacking its way up the mountainside, the road gained the central ridge and provided stunning views down both sides of the island, to the Atlantic and the Caribbean.

Tourism in Puerto Rico is fairly low key, especially in the south. The cruise ships call at San Juan, and if visitors go to a forest it seems to be El Junque in the east. We had this one all to ourselves. From the look of the car park, there might have been one other group around somewhere, but we never saw anyone. We hiked for three hours on rough roads and narrow tracks, finding ripe oranges to supplement lunch, seeing huge stands of bamboo and other trees, gaining amazing views over the island and, eventually, attaining the top of a hill where someone had gone to the trouble of building a stone tower with spiral steps and battlements at the top. Issie just wanted to play stranded princess and we were all delegated to be rescuing princes at one time or another.

As we entered the last mile of the hike, the rainforest lived up to it's name and drenched us, having forgotten to bring any raingear, unusually for us. Yet by the time we got back to the car the sun had reappeared and we were halfway to dry. We enjoyed our brief taste of this area, and would love to return there again.

The following day we visited Ponce, a major town on the south coast. With a long history and some elegant colonial architecture, Ponce is trying hard to present itself as a tourist destination and there is certainly plenty worth seeing. Yet the over-riding impression, as in many of the older sections of these towns, is one of somewhere long past its prime. Boarded up buildings are everywhere, rough edges of town are no long on the edges, they protrude, like a painful spine, into the places where the old centre has fallen away.

We took a tour on an optimistic venture - the road train. The kids thought this was great, we were the only passengers and I suspect our $8 wasn't enough to justify driving around for forty minutes, but off we went. We certainly saw the highlights, but they are interspersed by some pretty intriguing lowlights too. On one section of the tour, we pass the police and defence force headquarters, with impressive murals and flagpoles, then veer right up a ramp onto the main highway (we ride the hard shoulder at fifteen miles an hour whilst the traffic whips by our ears) and take the next exit, a half mile on, to pass broken down and boarded up concrete shells and the bridge over the river - now a canalised concrete drain reminiscent of the racetrack in the movie 'Grease'. But this strange exercise in impressing the visitors has a point, we pause at a fenced in park with a big tree in the centre, it is over a thousand years old, our driver proudly tells us. It is impressive, but the surroundings are not.

Don't get me wrong, I actually really liked Ponce in the way that one can really like a decrepit drunk of an actor or writer because the good points really do make up for the rest. One true redeeming feature was the fabulous Cafe Mayor - often just called Cafe Cafe, where we thank the Rough Guide for finding us lunch. Not only was lunch honest, straightforward and excellent local food, but the surroundings were lovely - a mix of bohemian indoor space and tropical garden patio, with just the right amount of dishevelledness to match the city outside. The real highlight is that the cafe is owned by a family who also own a coffee plantation up in the western mountains and they roast, grind and serve the coffee right there. It was fabulous.

I spent a good while chatting to the mother and two of her sons. She was very proud of them, the business and what they do, justifiably so. She showed us how they hand pick the coffee beans on a sieve like grid, we ran our fingers through the bag of rejects, any slightly browned beans, and she joked that those are the ones they sell to starbucks. One of her sons not only ran the cafe but was also involved in wind power, distributing software that modeled the power output possible from a given terrain. He'd spent time in Loughborough, England studying renewable power and we had a good chat about that too. They were very interested in our sailing adventure, and our future plans. It was fun to chat.

As was the case all along in our visit. The Puerto Ricans we met were friendly, charming, well educated and engaging. Helen and I were amazed to bump into a chap who spoke Dutch, having spent a year in Amsterdam as a teenager he still remembered enough of the language to exchange a few sentences with Helen. Many people spoke excellent English, and those that didn't were quick to accost an English speaking colleague or friend to help us with our rudimentary spanglish.

I certainly like to return to Puerto Rico one day, it feels like we saw a fraction of the country in our two weeks there. Photos when we next have wifi.

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