PR 7 Puerto Playa Oeste

I am very happy to have left Condado Beach for a trip to the west coast of the island. I wanted to visit the east coast as well, but I never made it there. You could visit it all in a week, but with better planning. I didn’t get to do plenty of things I wanted to do in Puerto Rico. I didn’t see a cock fight, I didn’t see the pearl of the south, I didn’t see the rainforest, nor the most beautiful beach of the island (Loquillo), but I had a nice time in the west.

First I visited the Caves of Camuy, which is one of the few natural attractions of the country. It’s one of those school trip destination, which meant that there were plenty school kids hanging around. Upon arrival, I had just missed a guided tour, so I had to wait 40 minutes for the next one (yeah, that’s Puerto Rico too), but I had fun watching the kids and how incredibly mixed the children were. From pitch black to whiter than… me. They weren’t all adorable. I think half will grow up to be ugly and at least 5 will start dealing drugs. But some were incredibly cute. If I don’t find a Brazilian mother for my children, I’ll start looking in Puerto Rico.

The tour itself was a bit amateur, but I was entertained. I still couldn’t walk properly, so I didn’t really want to complain too much. The caves are naturally cut out of a rock formation area called the Karst region. Now, I once was so fascinated by a guy in my school who had the same name extended with –en that I looked up the word in the dictionary. I hadn’t thought about that guy in ages, but finally seeing around the world. The caves are inhabited with bats, but I didn’t get to see any. We did see amazing shapes of stalactites and stalagmites that, in my imagination, looked like dinosaur fossils. But I especially liked the light that came into the caves.

We had to wait a long time before the trolley brought us back to the parking lot and I wondered what would happen if I was stuck with my fellow tour takers in a LOST kind of scenario. There was absolutely no-one in the group I felt like bonding with. It was the most boring mix of people I’ve ever seen together on an excursion. But the local guide was nice.

The drive from the Caves to Mayaquez was incredibly. I didn’t see that much of the very diverse landscapes I drove through as I was too focused on the road, but it showed that Puerto Rico was more than beaches. I liked the houses along the road that looked as if they were either very expensive or very cheap. I never know with Caribbean houses. They look so charming, but they probably are not modern at all inside. I like the colours and the flowers around the houses and of course the stray dogs and chicken that walk around and tease the cow or horse which is tied up along the road to graze.

More about Mayaquez later. This is about the west coast. I visited two beaches on the west coast that were tipped to me by other people I had met earlier in the trip. The first one was Boqueron in the southwest of the island. The other one was Rincon in the northwest of the island.

Boqueron has a large beach with palm trees as far as the eye can see. It also has a small village centre where you can buy mussels on the street! I tried to stop in the village and walk around, but it was so busy (on a Saturday) that I couldn’t find any place to park my car. They have a local dish which serves mussels in coconut milk sauce. It’s the kind of village that will become a major tourist attraction in a few years time. I parked my car on a designated car park near some condominiums and a big beach resort. From there you had a perfect beach filled with Puerto Ricans who want to get away in the weekend. I really liked that beach a lot and stayed there for a while watching the many surfers and ordinary families who had brought there whole kitchen with them.

Leaving Boqueron, I drove a little bit further inland to San German, which is the second oldest city of the country and the place where the missionaries tried to baptise the Indians. I had no idea there were Indians on the island, but apparently there were two tribes who didn’t like each other. They all got extinct of course, because of the European diseases, but some people still claim to be from a direct lineage of the indigenous people. San German was dead! There was no one there apart from this older man who was walking his dog and a few kids with their skate board. The city had a nice square though, as almost all these little towns.

Rincon is famed for its lighthouses and the best sunsets of the region and I didn’t want to miss that all. Of course, I ended up visiting the beach on that one day when it got cloudy in the afternoon and rained a bit. No sunset. However, I really liked Rincon. I stayed in a beach hotel which also had a bar and restaurant. A small family owned place with six rooms or so. There were more of these places on that stretch of beach and there was a nice atmosphere. Lots of young people, pina collada’s (invented in Puerto Rico) for 5 dollar, Rincon Steak Sandwiches for 8 dollar. I really liked the place, although I ended up leaving with some 20 bites of sand fleas I guess. I didn’t really have that much fun in the bar, because everyone was watching the superbowl game at home. But the owners of the place were really nice and we listed to Moby and some latin songs as I imagined how the sun would set on that nice beach.