Day 5 Cavernas del Rio Camury

Today’s adventure is to the world’s third largest cavern system.  Del Rio Camury was only discovered in the 1960’s, but they have done a nice job of developing it for tourists.  We take a little tram to the bottom of a huge sink hole, then we are guided with audio in English through several huge caverns.  Not as spectacular and intricate as other caverns and caves we have seen, but huge in dimension.  Below are a few pictures of the adventure:

Day 4 Culebra Island

Just west of Puerto Rico is the small island of Calebra.  A great destination for one or several days.  We took the first catamaran shuttle over at 9:30AM to spend the day. 

Once we got to the little town of Culebra with the hundreds of other people, we apparently looked lost enough that a couple of American Expats came over to us to help!

We told them we wanted to snorkel and they directed us to their favorite beach that few people go to!  Only 15 minutes from town on a secluded sandy trail, past the island dump and the taxi drops us off at Tamarindo Beach.  A beautiful little beach with few people and lots of good snorkeling.

Below are some of the photos we got while on the surface snorkeling.

Day 3 El Yunque Tropical Forest

El Yunque is the gem of Puerto Rico’s 20 rainforest preserves.  More than 20 varieties of orchids and 50 varieties of ferns share this diverse habitat with millions of tiny tree frogs, whose distinctive cry of coqui (pronounced “ko-kee”) has given them their name.  You here these very loud, mini frogs everywhere on the island, all day and all night.  But you never see them. 

El Yunque encompasses four distinct forest types, but for the untrained hiker, it is one big, dense jungle.  Beautiful and primitive.  Below are just a few pictures we took while hiking the many trails.

Day 1 and Day 2 Hiking the Beach

Routine transit to Puerto Rico.  Drive to SFO, Friday evening,  two connecting flights, arrive in San Juan on Saturday at noon.  Pick up the rental car and Tom and Kathy, and arrive at condo in Humacao a bit after dark. We are part of a huge condo/hotel settlement.  A hold over from the time share heyday.  Lots of condos all over, looks a bit like southern California the way it is built up with endless pink stucco buildings.

Next day, late start then a hike along the windward east facing beach.  This must be the shore the hurricanes come in on.  Very windy.  Most hotels  and condos are either empty, closed for the hottest, most humid part of the year, (hmm, some coincidence for our visit), or abandoned.  Anyhow, very quite, and very little beach, well, actually NO beach. But a nice walk, not many people here.

Puerto Rico is part of the US…….well, sorta.  Not a state, not sure what it is exactly. But they have the US Postal Service here, but everything is in Spanish.  They use the US Dollar, but fuel is measured in liters, (cheaper here then in California now). Speed limits are in MPH, but distance on the road markers are in kilometers.  Temperatures are in Fahrenheit.

After the beach walk, we drove into Farjardo to check out the transportation to islands of Culebra and Vieques later in the week.  Finally, a quest for dinner.  See below, a great find.  Good food.

Maki with eel sauce!