Puerto Rico - Holidays!!!!
Finally after a stressful few months with Dive BVI and constantly being surrounded by people on holiday it was our turn to have a month off, and way overdue as it was our first real holiday in over 2 years. Contrary to popular belief work is still work even if you do happen to live in paradise!
We decided to go to Puerto Rico first as our great friends Sheena and Richie were flying in to join us. We went a week ahead of them so we could do some major shopping (there are no shops at all where we
live unless you want T-Shirts with Virgin Gorda plastered all over them, not a good idea in a Spanish speaking country as it literally translates to Fat Virgin!) and of course our favourite hobbies of eating and drinking. It was so nice to go out to live salsa bars until the early hours and eat really good Latino food as the ‘night’ life here generally ends at around 10pm and the staple diet is ribs and burgers.
Once Sheena and Richie arrived we hired a car then drove around the island which was an amazing surprise. We were expecting just a mini America on a Caribbean island, but it was so much better than that. For a start hardly anyone spoke English which meant we got to practice our Spanish for the first time in years, but also once you got out of old San Juan (which is an amazing colonial old town pretty much like Cuba would have been today without Castro) it was more like being in Central America than North America.
The sheer diversity of the environment also took us by surprise. In just 10 days we managed to hike through the lush tropical rainforest of El Yunque and dry forests of Guanica on the other side of the island - two completely different eco systems only about 30 miles apart! Another highlight was night kayaking through mangroves to get to a bio luminescent pool which lit up every time you dipped your paddle with tiny phosphorescent - amazing.
After exploring the coastal roads from the historic city of Ponce and it’s uniquely painted fire station, to the tiny (and often closed at this time of year) fishing villages of the west coast, we backtracked through the central mountains which was quite scary and dangerous judging by the number of burnt our cars we counted along the way. The beautiful views through the cloud forests definitely made it worth while, and along the way we debated what the little bushes with bright berries on them could have been…olives, cranberries…? It wasn’t until we stopped at a working coffee plantation that we finally realised they were coffee beans - doh! Our final destination was a beautiful eco camp in the middle of the jungle close by some amazing underground caves and the biggest space telescope in the world - the one in the film Contact with Jodie Foster, and also James Bond’s Golden Eye.
Puerto Rico - who would have known it???
Read MoreWe decided to go to Puerto Rico first as our great friends Sheena and Richie were flying in to join us. We went a week ahead of them so we could do some major shopping (there are no shops at all where we
live unless you want T-Shirts with Virgin Gorda plastered all over them, not a good idea in a Spanish speaking country as it literally translates to Fat Virgin!) and of course our favourite hobbies of eating and drinking. It was so nice to go out to live salsa bars until the early hours and eat really good Latino food as the ‘night’ life here generally ends at around 10pm and the staple diet is ribs and burgers.
Once Sheena and Richie arrived we hired a car then drove around the island which was an amazing surprise. We were expecting just a mini America on a Caribbean island, but it was so much better than that. For a start hardly anyone spoke English which meant we got to practice our Spanish for the first time in years, but also once you got out of old San Juan (which is an amazing colonial old town pretty much like Cuba would have been today without Castro) it was more like being in Central America than North America.
The sheer diversity of the environment also took us by surprise. In just 10 days we managed to hike through the lush tropical rainforest of El Yunque and dry forests of Guanica on the other side of the island - two completely different eco systems only about 30 miles apart! Another highlight was night kayaking through mangroves to get to a bio luminescent pool which lit up every time you dipped your paddle with tiny phosphorescent - amazing.
After exploring the coastal roads from the historic city of Ponce and it’s uniquely painted fire station, to the tiny (and often closed at this time of year) fishing villages of the west coast, we backtracked through the central mountains which was quite scary and dangerous judging by the number of burnt our cars we counted along the way. The beautiful views through the cloud forests definitely made it worth while, and along the way we debated what the little bushes with bright berries on them could have been…olives, cranberries…? It wasn’t until we stopped at a working coffee plantation that we finally realised they were coffee beans - doh! Our final destination was a beautiful eco camp in the middle of the jungle close by some amazing underground caves and the biggest space telescope in the world - the one in the film Contact with Jodie Foster, and also James Bond’s Golden Eye.
Puerto Rico - who would have known it???
