Lost in the Cordillera...

Saturday night in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Came down a couple days ago to visit Mick, my son. He works days, so we only see each other after 7 PM when he gets off work. My nephew, Scotty, is with me. We rented a car today to cruise the island. Drove west a couple hours to Rincon, a beautiful artsy kind of town on the west coast. I went snorkelling at a beach called the Steps. It's an off-the-beaten-path kind of place. The reef is only a few feet deep, starting at the water's edge. Which is it's biggest problem. The ease of access has just about killed it. The once glorious Staghorn coral is all but gone. What skeletal remains still standing are covered by some almost cancerous type of growth. Aside from a few Brain Coral and some reef fish, the area is dead. If you consider a coral reef to be a single organism, this is a hell of a thing to have killed due to it being loved too much. I saw much of the same thing in the Red Sea. It's clear we are killing at least the shallower reefs. I'm glad I got to see some relatively healthy reefs back in the 70's.

Anyway, I always wanted to go up into the Puerto Rican mountains, which form the backbone of the island. This range is called the Cordillera. So after some searching and wrong turns I found a route up to the mountain ridge. Well, I must have been wearing my bad decision pants, because it turned out to be just that. After a hair-raising climb on a pretty narrow road we reached the top of the ridge. I've never seen a road with so many twists and turns. Somehow I must have got off course, because the road was no wider than a bike path in some locations. And I'd swear we were climbing at a 45 degree angle in places. But, even though we were clearly lost and NOT making good time, we knew something was up when we passed the same dog twice. Only he was laying on the opposite side of the road in front of an identical house with an identical couch we had passed 30 minutes earlier. After some dead reckoning we found a route down off the ridge toward what we hoped was civilization. Because I was getting concerned about running out of gas I put the car in Neutral as we coasted down. I went over three miles before I had to use the accelerator. When we arrived in the town of Yuaco I realized that for almost two hours driving we had made only about 10 miles of forward progress! But, for a while there I felt like I was flying a World War II fighter plane.

So we were late getting back to San Juan. But, all's well that ends well. Had a good dinner with Mick and got him safely home by 11:30. It's Saturday night and the natives are coming out to party. The prime party spot in PR is the Wyndham El San Juan Hotel, right across from my humble hotel. The traffic is unbelieveable. But, the fashions are even MORE unbelieveable. Yikes! Muy Caliente! 'nuf said.