We had a busy day ahead of us, so we woke up early, had breakfast at the hotel, checked out and left. The nice thing about Puerto Rico is that even though it doesn’t feel like being in America, it still shares some of the infrastructure, like the currency, or Walgreens. We needed a Walgreens in order to get a cable that allowed us to play music in the car from my phone. The night before, Tom, my friend in Israel, sent me his mixes for an album I’ve been working on. I couldn’t wait to listen to it.
And so we drove to the Rio Camuy caves park with my upcoming album playing in the background. The road was windy and the drive beautiful. We were soaked in deep green and often drove through tiny villages. It was hard for me to divide my attention between manipulating the car through the sharp turns, absorbing the view, and getting excited about the album and how good was the work Tom did on it.
Unfortunately, when we got to the park we discovered that it was closed on Mondays, and so we continued to our next stop, the Arecibo observatory. It’s the largest radio telescope in the world, so a couple of nerds like us just had to see it.
The observatory features a small museum that is really cute but a little outdated. Some of the exhibits still refer to Pluto as a planet. Pffff.
The dish itself is really impressive. We had a young tour guide that tried to tell us some facts about it, but he suffered from a very soft voice and complete lack of charisma. We waited until everybody else left so we can take silly pictures with the dish, and then we got hungry, so we got hot dogs from a stand that was right on the porch overlooking the dish. The kid at the stand was also a tour guide at the observatory, and he was way more fun to talk to. He told us how they shot scenes from Contact and James Bond there, and that Pierce Brosnan was afraid of heights so all the scenes where Bond is climbing the telescope feature a stunt double. Also, the hot dogs totally hit the spot.
We then drove to the city of Arecibo. It’s terrible.
We ate some tapas in the only place that we found to be open, which were actually pretty good, and drove to Cueva del Indio. In these cave you can see drawings that were carved in the rocks by the Taíno, the native people of the island. Besides that, the nature there is extremely interesting: the textures of the rocks, the purple coloring of it where it meets the water, and the different shades of blue of the ocean. We also saw bee hives and urchins and we played with crabs and snails.
The sun was starting to set and we still had to get to San Juan. The roads were terrible, but we made it in one piece. We checked in at Aleli by the Sea, a small and cute guest house right on the beach and went out to look for dinner. We went into an Argentinian restaurant and got one of those meat assortments for two meals. This turned out to be way, way, way too much food for us, but the waitress told us not to feel bad - she only saw this dish finished once. It was by a single guy, though.
When we left, Julia was already a little bit drunk, so even though we saw a great hat for her, I managed to convince her not to buy it until the next day, when she has a clear mind. We went to sleep and were forced to use earplugs due to air conditioner. Why does everything in Puerto Rico have to be so loud?
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