This is embarrassing. It's MAY and I still haven't posted about my vacation in February. It's almost not even worth posting only because everyone has already heard about it, but since this is a travel blog and the trip counts as travel, I have to at least document it before I got on another trip. So if you already know all about it, humor me and relive it for a few moments...
Dave's friends take trips together every so often, and we did some talking back in November about a beach vacation. We settled on Puerto Rico, "Island of Enchantment." I can tell you that most of it was, in fact, enchanting, even the parts of it that didn't work out so well. But I'll get to that later.
Dave and I left before the rest of the party (there were five of us involved in the planning - myself, Dave, and Dave's friends John, Jill, and Clay) Feb. 20. We decided we wanted a slightly longer vacation and were interested in going off the beaten path. Just a little though. Not like trek-the-Himalayas - style off the beaten path, but just something a little different. We decided on Isla Culebra, a smallish sounding, less developed island off the east coast of Puerto Rico. It claimed great beach-front, easy-to-reach snorkeling, and bare necessities for food. That's all we really needed. We had a few hours to kill in San Juan when we arrived, so, laden with luggage, we taxied to El Morro, one of the forts built by the Spanish to defend Puerto Rico against the English and the Dutch (or "The Hollands" as out slightly English-challenged cab driver cum tour guide described to us during a later jaunt to Old San Juan).
After an hour or so checking out El Morro, and in general basking in the warm sun, we stopped at a Wendy's for lunch (I know - roll your eyes at the predictability of Americans on holiday), and headed to the junior airport in San Juan to await our Vieques Airlink flight to Culebra.
The logistics of landing in Culebra after 5pm makes things a bit difficult because many things have closed at that point. Accompanied by a woman from New Hampshire who was planning to camp at Flamingo Beach, we found our way into the "town" to look for transportation. A kind fellow who was chatting with two of approximately four policemen on the island called a taxi driver friend of his, who promised to finish his dinner quickly and meet us in 15 minutes. The details on getting us to the Culebra Beach Rentals are boring so I won't go into it.
We arrived at Playa Flamenco - Flamingo Beach - before it was dark, which was nice, because we could get really excited about what we were in for the next day. The beach was long, deep, and had the softest white sand I've ever felt. The first night we were there, we got to see most of the lunar eclipse, however the clouds rolled in about a half hour before it was full. I'm guessing some higher power was just jealous that we had found our way to such a beautiful location and didn't think it was fair to everyone back home. But we didn't mind.
Once we got moving on day 2, we headed to get a taxi back to town so that I could rent snorkeling gear, we picked up important provisions for the evening (rum) and headed back to the beach. Dave had figured out how to get to two prime snorkeling destinations, both just a 20 minute walk away from where we were. Neither beach could be accessed other than on foot, which meant that they were pretty untouched. The first stop was Playa Tamarindo. It took us a while to find the reef, but once we decided to pay attention to the obvious (dark spots in water=coral), we came upon it pretty quickly. And how cool it was. Fish everywhere, several types of coral, and even an octopus! There's nothing quite as relaxing as snorkeling on a beautiful day. Playa Luis Pena was the second one. The coral wasn't quite as nice but we had a very unique experience with some fish escorts (about five or so unidentified fish were more curious about us as we were about anything else going on and would not leave us alone the whole time we were in the water). There was something very "Disney Movie" about being followed around by these fish. It's like they were trying to tell us something.
We spend the rest of the day either laying on the beach or swinging in hammocks. Seriously - can you beat that? Don't even try. Then when we started to get hungry, we fired up the barbeque pit and started grilling. We finished the day with a beach bum gourmet meal of grilled BBQ chicken and veggies with saffron rice on the side, not to mention a few Cuba Libres.
The next day, we woke up, and did some snorkeling around Playa Flamenco, our home beach. Again, it took us a little while to find the coral, but once we found it, it was (similar to our experiences the day before) really cool. Our cool sighting of the morning was two little squid pushing their way through the water.
We checked out around late morning, and headed for Dewey, and the ferry back to Puerto Rico.
That ends part 1. I really felt like I had to separate the two sections of the trip because they were, just seriously, incredibly different.
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