Puerto Rico 67 - Vieques

Last year for my birthday, we did San Juan and the main island. We were convinced Vieques would be beach paradise after how nice the main island was, but there are a lot of downsides.

Our arrival in San Juan was on time to make our New Years dinner reservation! Five courses at Costa Azul (Isla Verde). Eleni said it tasted great! My taste buds were still dead from COVID😞. New Years day we walked the Isla Verde neighborhood and beaches, but did not swim, because . . . Vieques.

The next morning we were ready to walk out the door to catch our flight to Vieques when Cape Air canceled!!! And no flights the rest of the day (and no refund - I had to dispute the charge finally). The nightmare had begun.

I got ferry tickets online for 7:00 pm, but that would have gotten us into Vieques very late. I tried to work with the Avis place where we had a car reserved, but they close at 1:00 pm and wanted us to hand-fill a form and scan it to send. So, I asked them just to hold the car for the next day.

Meanwhile, the one hour Uber trip to the ferry terminal got us there in time to get tickets on the 5:30 ferry. Ferry went well, but I think the workers might enjoy herding a little much. Taxi to Hacienda Tamarindo

got us there barely in time to get our room keys. We walked next door to The Blue Horizon, which could not seat us for 45 minutes, so we walked the rest of the way into Esperanza to eat at Tradewinds. The bartender REALLY wanted us to eat there and served us Old Harbor El Yunuque IPAs, and finally seated us. The was good.

The next morning, I had to get our rental Jeep. So we tried to get a taxi. Never arrived. It was getting close to Avis closing time, so I walked 4 miles across the island in an hour to get to Avis. And I got rained on for the first time. Google was impressed at my speed, though. But Avis hadn't really saved my reservation, and I had to wait "15 minutes." That turned into about an hour, after which the really cranky desk person tried to charge me hundreds of dollars MORE for picking up the car a day late. She stayed angry, but at least got me the original rate and didn't charge me for the missed day. And she got me a pretty blue Jeep. So things were looking up.

Except, the exertion and the stresses caught up with me and put me out of commission for a couple hours. Eleni had scouted Black Sand Beach nearby, so we walked to it for a short swim. And got rained on HARD. From this experience, we learned to always bring our stuff in plastic bags, because everything was soaked. The walk back was total mud, of course.

The path to Black Sand Beach before the downpour

Black Sand Beach sidewall

Then it was time to drive into town for dinner and bioluminescent bay kayaking! Dinner at Bananas in Esperanza was really disappointing. The highly-rated kayaking company turned out to use old beaten up school buses to get from the meeting spot to the bay. But the kayaks and the guide were nice enough. My paddle was actually able to set blades at 90 degrees! The dinoflagellates were brighter than the main island bio-bay, but the moon was very bright. We did the tarp thing to blot out the light to see what it might have been like during no moon. And after that, the guide found where some fish were swimming around the surface, stirring up the dinoflagellates, and that was cool. Back to shore, where we got rained on HARD again.

I am pretty sure I picked up schistosomiasis there. Lab test was positive for anitgens, so I got the meds. De-worming was traumatic, as the guidance has the patient wait until the buildup of worms is maximized so the body's immune response is triggered. But that means there are a LOT of very angry worms when the anthelmintic hits. Second dosing a month later, to get any worms that escaped the first, was much less traumatic.

Finally, the next day we started to explore the fabled beaches of Vieques. And they were very nice.

La Chiva

Horses and people crowded Caracas beach

La Chiva

And the Puerto Ferro lighthouse/beach.

Dinner at Duffy's was better. More El Yunque and I had fried whole fresh red snapper. Yum.

The next day - more hiking and more time at the beaches. We set up at Secret Beach. The secret was that it was really Plata Prieta beach. And we went to the end of La Chiva and had a pavilion to ourselves in case it rained, so it didn't.

Dinner at Tin Box was a real disappointment except for a nice hostess. She said there would be a half-hour wait, but she got us a table to wait at. The server did finally have time to take our orders after that half hour, but then took another half hour to bring drinks and another 15 minutes to bring the food. During that time, 2 children were running around screaming. Not sure why that was acceptable to their parents or the restaurant. The food was not good. I had smoked chicken breast that was so dry it could not be swallowed without liquid (finished beer and switched to water). 

Next day - more of the same! Lovely swimming. Dinner at Mango Public House, the only restaurant on the island that was not a shack. It seemed to be nice for drinks, but food choices were limited. My reuben sandwich was tiny and tasteless. French fries came from a freezer bag. Eleni liked her coconut rice, though. We had to dodge a cranky horse to get back to the Jeep. 

After 5 nights, we checked out of Hacienda Tamarindo and moved to an AirBnB in Isabella Segundo for 3 more nights. Along with the roosters and horses, we had a tree iguana.

This location was to make it easier to check out the northeast side of Vieques. Playa Grande was supposed to be nice. Except, the northeast side of the island turns out to be inaccessible by car. Google tried to get us there by taking us 1/4 mile on a jungle path

to a gate that we later figured was not supposed to be a gate - just a cut cable. We had to maneuver just to get through it to a gravel road that Google said ran to the north to get to the road to Playa Grande. There was no road at the end, just a cliff . . . and lots of signs saying not to go off the road because of unexploded ordinance. So, we took the road to the south side of the island. All the side roads Google showed did not exist. At the south side of the island, we found a locked gate. 

We tried to call the park office to see if we could be let out into a parking lot that we had already visited on another day. Phone number wouldn't ring. The gate seemed defeatable, so we tried. Nope. But I got defeated by stepping on an ant-hill. My feet were covered by biting, burning ants. Eight days later I still had pustules. Back to the cut cable, through the jungle, and to one of the original beaches before giving up on that day. Here are pictures from these idyllic days:

You may notice that you don't actually see anybody else at these beaches. That's only partially clever framing - the beaches are almost empty on weekdays.

Our private pavillion on La Chiva beach

This hermit crab needs a new home!

Hiking theTapón Bay Loop

John with the ceiba tree

Eleni with the ceiba tree

Vieques, or specifically the main town of Isabel Segundo, was a mixture of trash, dilapidated (or maybe not yet recovered from Maria) homes,

A somewhat nice mini-plaza in Isabel Segundo

and upscale homes off by themselves. Beer cans everywhere. 

Eleni at the Isabel Segundo overlook

Restaurants with little or no structure/atmosphere. Some agreeable food, but very little that didn't seem to be heated up from freezer bags. Taverna in Isabel Segunda at least had real food and a structure and some rugs hanging on the wall. We ate there twice because we ate there Saturday and then it turned out to be the ONLY restaurant open on Sunday. And we really liked Victor.

Wait - have I mentioned the roosters? Vieques is infested with roosters. Everywhere. They have a tight schedule of crowing interspersed with napping. If you want to sleep on Vieques, you either need earplugs or a copy of their crow/nap schedule to synchronize your napping.

Oh - and horses. Wild and domestic-uncorraled horses roam freely everywhere. Horse poop everywhere. Some are trained to shake down tourists for handouts, but mostly they left us alone. It was very sad, though, to see horses eating from garbage cans. One of the noblest of animals reduced to eating garbage. That is enough to keep us from returning.

January 10. Time to leave Vieques for the main island.

The welcoming iguana at Avis drop-off

Lots of horses waiting at airport, but I don't think they had reservations. Everything went well for the first time on the island, resulting in our getting to the airport very early. Cape Air had seats on a slightly earlier flight for us, so Goodbye Vieques. Hello crazy flight on a Cessna so small that one passenger had to sit in the co-pilot seat. The pilot deftly flew around some nasty weather and got us back to SJU reasonably safely. Except the flight was where I picked up some COVID germs, I think. The airport hotel charged us extra to check in early, but we had a free day to revisit San Juan.

It was still the nicest area we toured. We did the cat walk around the fort (see last year blog for pix). Ate lunch at a sidewalk place that still tasted better than anything on Vieques. We discovered why the ferry terminal had to be moved to the east side of the island - the old ferry terminal was now the new cruise-ship terminal. Two gigantic ships and one that maybe only carried a few thousand. Needless to say, the area was a lot more crowded than last year. Dinner at Cervecería del Callejón,

my favorite place to eat in that area, still undiscovered.

We scootered part of the way back to the airport hotel. The San Juan Airport hotel sucked, BTW.

January 11. Time to go home! But the FAA decided that we weren't ready. They shut down air travel for the morning.

Always good to have emergency response capabilites at airports!

Instead of getting in late Wednesday, we were getting in early Thursday 😒. Well, not so early Thursday because Southwest really knows how to make a bad travel day worse. After waiting for our luggage not to show up at ABQ, and checking with the Southwest luggage rep (she was very nice) to hear that our bags were in Denver, we got home at 3 am. Our luggage got home at 7 pm. Too bad we did not catch the delivery person and engage in conversation to stop her from trying to take SR126! She got stuck in the snow and our fire department had to go save her. I missed the call because I had one-day COVID.