We landed in San Juan at about 3am on a Wednesday and checked into a hotel in Isla Verde to get a few hours sleep. When the sun was up, I went down to the beach to catch a few waves, then our party of five from Boston, San Francisco, Phoenix, and rural Pennsylvania got in a shuttle that took us to the eastern tip of the island to catch a ferry from the former Navy base called Roosevelt Roads. The crowded ferry took us to the small island of Vieques in about an hour, where a tiny lighthouse guided us to shore. Then we rented a Jeep that had seen better days, checked into a lovely Air BnB in the tiny town of Esperanza, and hit the beach before sunset.
On Thursday, I watched the sun rise above our pool, then walked to the beach to test the snorkeling under the old Sugar Pier in Esperanza. That was a bust, but I met some nice horses that were eating out of people’s trash cans. After breakfast, we all started a circumnavigation of the western end of Vieques. We started saw the oldest tree on the island, then drove to the Mosquito Pier, which is a levee that sticks a mile out into the ocean. It was an abandoned attempt by the Navy to connect Vieques and Puerto Rico, and at the end, the water is 40+ feet deep and full of fish and turtles. After looking for a while, we retreated about halfway down the pier and snorkeled a bit. From there, we went for a walk among the creepy ruins of an abandoned sugar refinery. We were bound from there to a beach called Punta Arenas, but I decided to take a “shortcut” that would allow us to see some old Navy bunkers. Good thing our rental car company had informed us that they didn’t care about the paint, because I dragged tree branches down both sides of that Jeep for about three straight miles. Punta Arenas had enormous hermit crabs living in a few of the many conch shells that littered the beach. That night, we went to a dark beach and watched the Milky Way for a while.
Friday was our chance to explore the parts of the eastern end of the island that aren’t off limits due to unexploded ordnance. I was really excited to snorkel the reef at Playa La Chiva, but Maria pretty much wiped it out, so we moved to the next beautiful beach at Playa La Plata, where we found a bunch of little fish in clear water between some rocks. After that, we had lunch and beers at Playa Prieta, where the water clarity was perfect, and we had great views of the fish among these clumps of green weeds. Then we detoured down a long road to see the ruins of a lighthouse that was identical to the one that welcomed us to the island. From the lighthouse, we went to Isabella II, the main town on the island, to pick up some supplies and visit a museum and old Spanish fort. After dinner, we met our guides in downtown Esperanza, and they took us for a late night paddle around an amazing bioluminescent lagoon. No pictures of that, unfortunately.
Our last morning on Vieques was entirely taken up with getting all our people and all our stuff to the ferry. It was during the second trip from Esperanza to Isabella II, as I gunned the rickety Jeep past a dump truck on a road that barely had one lane, much less two, that Nikki said the nicest thing anyone has ever told me. She said, “I love how no matter where we travel, by the third day, you’re always driving like a local.” The ferry took us back to the main island of Puerto Rico, where we rented a minivan and took our time getting back to San Juan, stopping for food in the kiosks in Luquillo and at a favorite beach for locals in the Piñones. After checking into a pretty nice Air BnB in the Condado neighborhood, we joined hundreds of thousands of revelers for the annual San Sebastian festival in Old San Juan.
I started Sunday morning with a brief jog through the (previously slum-like, now rapidly gentrifying) Santurce neighborhood to check out some graffiti spots. While the rest of our party went to the Bacardi distillery, Nikki and I went back to San Sebastian street for some daytime drinks, crafts, and music before touring the fortress San Cristobal. I think that was the drunkest I’ve ever been at a National Park. That night we had dinner at a food truck park in Santurce, then we all went to bed early.
Monday morning was a quieter day in San Juan, as many locals observed the Martin Luther King Day holiday. The group went back to Old San Juan, looking at the stormy waves breaking below the city walls before we began to slowly peel off and make our separate ways to the airport.
