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Puerto Rico (10 - 14 January 2015)

New York City has the largest Puerto Rican population in America, and the bulk of them seem to reside just up the road from us in Harlem. Every time I cycle through there I feel as though I've teleported to Puerto Rico itself. With that being the case, and with Puerto Rico being a United States territory (one of five which are inhabited), I've long been interested in visiting the country and scoping it out. Kristina's birthday was on the 12th and my ten-year anniversary of leaving New Zealand was on the 17th, so a joint birthday/anniversary trip was in order! Four nights in Puerto Rico was the first part of that trip followed by another four in nearby Saint Martin, and as with our previous trips, Kristina was able to hook us up with awesome accommodations for cheap or even free. The perks of being married to a travel agent :)

The Caribbean archipelago of Puerto Rico is home to 3.5 million, and consists of the main island of Puerto Rico and a number of smaller islands. Above-right is the capital city of San Juan on the approach to the airport. All Caribbean nations have been fought over by various European powers during the last 500 years (in fact the region's history is an utter fucking mess). The various ruling powers over time have ultimately shaped the countries they are today in terms of their culture and customs. In the case of Puerto Rico, it was claimed for the Spanish by Christopher Columbus in 1493, and remained a Spanish colony for the next 400 years until 1898. Needless to say, it is a very Spanish nation. Spain eventually ceded its control of the island to the United States following the Spanish-American War, under the terms of the Treaty of Paris. Today it remains a US territory, but a 2012 referendum showed a small majority in favour of a change of status towards full statehood.

We landed late afternoon, fed our face and called it an early night after what was a typically early start. This was the view from our resort room the next morning, complete with some chick on the beach getting her hula dancing on, or something.				This is the Gran Melia Golf Resort, a 50km (30 mile) drive east of San Juan on the northeast coast.

It's a pretty bloody flash affair, which Kristina managed to secure for dirt-cheap hehe.				In fact, she managed to get us upgraded to what they call the "Red Level" which (among other things) has its own private pool area here which the cretins are not allowed in hahaha!

The cretins do get to use this pool however :)

A common sight throughout the resort and all over the island are these little fellas - some type of iguana. The first one we saw was splattered all over the road on the drive out to the resort, and I almost splattered another one a couple days later with the hire car when it tried to play chicken with me. Despite looking like angry little things which might take your head off, they were quick to run away from humans (but not cars evidently). Oh, and cats. Puerto Rico has a lot of stray cats (and dogs), several of which were meandering around the resort. One of these iguanas wandered up and sat on the edge of the Red Level pool while we were chilling out there one day. After about 15 minutes of just sitting there doing nothing (which they seem to do) a cat wandered over to give him a sniff, at which point the iguana dived into the pool, swam a whole lap, climbed out the other end of the pool, and sat there instead.

And this was our hire car for trip hehe. A little Mitsubishi Mirage with about as much power as a broken-down lawn mower, but it sucked through barely a single tank of gas during the 720km (450 miles) we put on it.		Anyway, back to San Juan. The city is a traffic nightmare which makes New York look positively brilliant, so we spent very little time here other than to wander around this part of it - the very colourful Old San Juan district.

Old San Juan is the oldest settlement in Puerto Rico, and is characterized by its narrow, blue cobblestone streets and flat-roofed brick and stone buildings dating back to the 16th and 17th century when the Spanish ruled the roost. With its abundance of shops, historic places, museums, open air cafes, restaurants, tree-shaded plazas, and its old beauty, this is definitely a tourist hotspot. In the centre shot is City Hall in Plaza de Armas, one of the city's main squares. The blue building on the right is La Fortaleza, the current official residence of the Governor of Puerto Rico. Nice digs!

This is inside the Cathedral of San Juan Baustista (with a wedding going on down there, though it didn't stop the public wandering in for a nosey).		The oldest parts of Old San Juan remain partly enclosed by massive walls, which I didn't get a photo of now that I think about it. I was going to take a photo of Kristina sitting on part of the wall, but she got spooked by an official-looking man in a white shirt who yelled at her to get off it from the bottom of the wall some 50 yards away. Despite my insistence to ignore him for the purpose of getting a photo (like everyone else was), she refused :) Anyway, the wall, along with several defensive structures and forts, acted as the primary defenses of the settlement which was subjected to numerous attacks by the French, Dutch, and British, who all wanted a piece of the Puerto Rico pie.

Later in the day we drove our Mitsubishi lawn mower deep into the guts of the island, up and down hills and through quiet little neighbourhoods scattered about the place.

And this is what we'd come to see - the Arecibo Observatory! The observatory's 305m (1,000ft) radio telescope here is the world's largest single-aperture telescope, with construction completed in 1963. The surface of the dish is comprised of 38,778 perforated aluminum panels. That brown crap all over the dish is some sort of fungus that no one bothers to clean off, but which apparently has no impact on the performance of the telescope.		The massive receiver here is on a 900-ton platform suspended 150m (500ft) above the dish by 18 cables running from three reinforced concrete towers. Unlike more mobile radio telescopes that can be rotated and tilted to aim them at a specific part of the sky, Arecibo's dish is fixed in place. To aim this big guy, the receiver is moved instead to intercept signals reflected from different directions by the spherical dish surface.

The Arecibo telescope is used in three major areas of research: radio astronomy (the study of celestial objects at radio frequencies), aeronomy (the study of the upper region of Earth's atmosphere), and radar astronomy (a technique of observing nearby astronomical objects by reflecting microwaves off target objects and analyzing the reflections). Since it began operations, many scientific discoveries have been made using the Arecibo telescope. I first learned of its existence from an episode of The X-Files I saw as a kid hehe, and I've been curious to visit this ever since :) That particular episode focused on SETI, or the search for extraterrestrial intelligence - the collective name for a number of activities undertaken to search for intelligent extraterrestrial life for which the Arecibo telescope is still actively used. We haven't had much luck so far though, perhaps with the possible exception of the Wow! signal detected in 1977.

From there we headed into the city of Arecibo itself to a restaurant recommended by a local back at the telescope for dinner on the beach. Nice!

The following day was Kristina's birthday, and we spent it pretty much doing nothing but chilling by the beach and pool, and lapping up the hot sun (which we haven't seen much of lately in New York).

Kristina modelled.		I posed.		And then I climbed ;)

We did a birthday dinner that I had previously organised on a quiet stretch of beach outside of San Juan. This is simply called Pamela's, and sits beneath a guest house which I believe is also run by Pamela hehe. Busy lady. She cooks some good food though!
Before leaving the resort for dinner I had secretly organised with the butler (yes, we had a butler) to deck the room out all romantical. I hear chicks like romance ;) Flower petals everywhere, a big bottle of bubbly, more bubbles in our hot tub on the deck which overlooks the beach, and even some birthday cake from the sales manager of the resort to impress the travel agent hahaha - excellent! So, happy birthday to Kristina!

The following day was our last full day here, and we screwed our lawn mower up the side of a mountain into El Yunque National Rainforest. Apparently it rains a lot up here which creates a lush, jungle-like setting. The rain held off for our visit though which gave me plenty of time to go nuts with the camera.

There are several walking trails throughout the forest, with the most popular being an easy 30-minute hike to La Mina Falls here on the right. Those 30 minutes ended up being about 90 though thanks to my constant stopping for photos :) As for the waterfall, it's littered with bloody tourists everywhere, so a bit of Photoshop magic was required here to get rid of them all from multiple merged images.

As the sun was setting we descended back to sea level and grabbed a random dinner on a random beach from this row of random food shops.
That evening we set out on a kayaking excursion through a mangrove forest in the dark hehe. Rather than risk damaging my $4000-something DSLR, I had to resort to using my little waterproof point-and-shoot (which really struggled in the pitch-black).		After 30 minutes of banging into other kayakers and things we couldn't see, we emerged at Laguna Grande on the northeastern corner of Puerto Rico. This lake is famous for its bioluminescent plankton that illuminate when agitated. This shot isn't my own - my little camera simply couldn't see squat (I needed my big guy for that) so I had to steal this one. In the pitch black of night, this is a pretty accurate shot of what it looks like however. Shortly after arriving the heavens opened up with a torrential downpour, and the raindrops slamming into the lake were enough to agitate the plankton which was quite an amazing sight! These particular plankton are not unique to Puerto Rico, but there are very few places in the world where this can be seen.

So that was a bit of Puerto Rico in a nutshell. I think we were both surprised at just how awesome a destination it is, and four days definitely wasn't enough to completely tick it off the list but was enough for a good taster. Unfortunately we didn't have time to visit any of the other islands that make up the archipelago but we're already talking about returning here at some point to do so, as well as see some of the other attractions on the main island we didn't make it to on this trip. So, stay tuned for a Puerto Rico part two :)

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