Great Last Minute Back to Back on the Summit (L-O-N-G)

[Vagabondage]

EL YUNQUE – Our other big objective in staying over in PR for a few days was to get to El Yunque rainforest, which we had missed on our previous visit. We didn’t want to do just a quick daytrip, so we booked a hotel in Fajardo for a couple nights, reasoning that this would also allow us to do one of the famous nighttime tours of the bioluminescent bay there. (There is also a biobay on the nearby island of Vieques, but that’s more complicated to get to, so we decided against that.)

 

It was pretty easy to tell which Hotwire listing referred to the Fajardo Inn, which sounded perfectly adequate for a couple nights, so we booked it for $71/nt + taxes and fees. I researched car rentals carefully, as there were some real nightmares reported about a number of the San Juan rental companies, even big U.S. branded ones. We decided to go with Enterprise since they seemed to get the best reviews on several different sites. We got a slight Costco discount. We rented the car from their location at the Condado Hilton as we didn’t want to hassle with an airport pickup. As it turned out, Enterprise was happy to pick us up at no charge the morning we checked out of the Doubletree and drive us the short distance to their office, so it was an easy rental. I believe our rate was $21/day + just a slight bit more in taxes and fees, and we were able to choose a nice almost new Hyundai compact from several available cars.

 

Driving from Condado to El Yunque to Fajardo was a snap. It really felt no different than driving anywhere else in the U.S. (after all, Puerto Rico IS the U.S.) except that it’s useful, though not vital, to read Spanish signs. Many signs are bilingual, anyway. Some of the highway to El Yunque is tolled, and in my opinion the controversy that takes up a lot of space here on the CC board and on TA about whether buying the electronic toll pass as part of your car rental is a huge ripoff is just nonsense. It’s no big deal either way. We paid for the windshield sticker and it worked just like the “Good to Go” electronic windshield passes we use here in the Seattle area for toll bridges, so we didn’t even have to slow down at toll stations. If you refuse on principle to pay for the rental agency’s sticker fee, then just get in line and pay in the manned tollbooth lane.

 

As you come through the town of Rio Grande on Highway #3, shortly before the turnoff to El Yunque, you’ll spot a Burger King on the left. (Yes, everywhere you look there are typical American fast food franchises and big box stores. Too many for our tastes.) If you take a left at the Burger King, just past it down the road by a Walgreen’s is a local bakery called La Familia. It’s not just a bakery, but a café, and a good (and popular) place to stop and pick up a delicious, overstuffed sandwich for a picnic in the rainforest.

 

The road from the highway to El Yunque is narrower and much slower, but still easy driving and increasingly scenic as you climb toward the entrance to El Yunque National Forest. Everywhere there are tulipán trees [a.k.a. Flame of the Forest or African Tulip Trees].

 

There is so much info on the net and here on the CC boards on El Yunque that again I won’t try to describe what we did in any comprehensive way. I’ve put quite a few of our El Yunque photos and comments online at http://www.flickr.com/photos/22589647@N02/sets/72157642061811715/. Do NOT skip the architecturally impressive visitors’ center. El Portal, which has exhibits, a short movie, a café, restrooms, a gift/bookshop, and friendly rangers with realistic advice about what parts of the park make sense for your particular interests and physical abilities. Moreover, it is surrounded by so much beautiful vegetation that I, a tropical ecosystem enthusiast if there ever was one, would have felt the drive from San Juan worthwhile if we had never made it farther than the visitors’ center and immediate surroundings.

 

We drove through the park up to where the road ends (there is much more of the park that road doesn’t go through – wish I could hike it!), pulling out numerous times for waterfalls, beautiful vistas, and short hikes that were manageable for me. I envy those of you younger and hardier than myself who can take some of the longer hikes into the true backcountry, which sound fantastic, but several of them have pretty rapid ascents over rough terrain and are for serious trailhounds only. The ecosystems changed in an interesting way through several zones as we drove higher. And since it’s a rainforest, yes it did rain, enough that we finally had to put on the fetching dollar store ponchos we’d been hauling around throughout the cruise. But soon the sun would be out again, we’d shed the dork suits, and the rain seemed to inspire the cheerful chorus of coquí frogs, Puerto Rico’s affectionate national symbol, to even more enthusiastic “Co-KEE, co-KEE’s.”

 

Altogether it was a wonderful day – and it was a full day. We were there till we were afraid darkness would overtake us if we didn’t skedaddle. (Closer to the equator, when they say night falls, they’re not kidding – none of the long lingering twilights of our Seattle home.) So we left around 4:30 or so to be safe.

 

I know many cruisers who have time to kill before a flight home on debarkation day take a very brief tour to El Yunque as a final ship’s expedition before being dropped off at the airport. I’ve gotta say, I personally think this is a waste of time. I just don’t see how you could see enough of El Yunque to get much out of it this way. Much of the magic of the place is just taking the time to listen to the birds and try to spot them, stand by a waterfall and feel its mist in the sunshine, sit and take in a panoramic view, and marvel at how much of the Caribbean once looked like this before we Europeans with our notions about “improving” land that was “useless” and “unproductive” utterly transformed it. Even St. John, with all its greenery, is almost all second-growth, on land once totally cleared for sugar cane, and the same is true of most of the rest of the Caribbean that we saw (Dominica being a major exception). But here in El Yunque, it’s the real deal – native, primary growth tropical rainforest. So if you’d really like to see El Yunque and not just flash past it on the ship’s add-on tour, adding just one night in San Juan (yes, it’s easy to do as a daytrip) or Fajardo plus a day of car rental to your cruise plans will yield a great deal of pleasure! Big thumbs up from us.

[Vagabondage]

FAJARDO -- I wish I could say we loved Fajardo as much as we did El Yunque, but we didn’t. Not much at all, actually.

 

Our online map to the Fajardo Inn turned out to be useless: we turned off the highway much sooner than we needed to, at the first “Fajardo” sign, and had to c-r-a-w-l through the entire length of town in bumper-to-bumper end-of-day traffic (our fault for lingering so long in El Yunque), and we just didn’t find the parts of town we saw charming at all. Ditto with the Fajardo Inn, once we finally found it (not even the GPS on my phone had helped much, and signage was nil till you reached the actual driveway). Our room was clean but worn and very basic, Motel 6-ishly austere. The pools are the inn’s best feature and looked quite nice, especially for kids thanks to the waterslide, but it was windy and not pool weather and they were deserted. Ditto with the miniature golf – not our thing, but I’m sure families would love it if the weather had been milder.

 

And when we decided we were too tired after our full day of exploring El Yunque to venture back into the other part of town (Fajardo Inn isn’t really near much of anything) in search of a charming or authentic local dinner spot, but would rather just eat in the casual downstairs restaurant called Blue Iguana, we soon decided the whole inn would be a great candidate for Hotel: Impossible. Watching the lone cook who didn’t look like he knew what he was doing working in the open kitchen, which looked amazingly underequipped and far from shiny, did not inspire confidence in either hygiene or cuisine. I ordered the simplest thing possible, a quesadilla – an item hard to ruin – and it was not a winner. Tasted like cardboard. The restaurant itself was bare and starkly lit, dominated by pool tables, and all but one other pair of the patrons were locals who looked like they’d been parked at the bar a good while. In other words, there wasn’t anything desperately wrong with Fajardo Inn – just lots of wasted potential that better management could fix. I guess that’s why the motel, which is large (a former U.S. military R&R facility, I think I read somewhere), didn’t seem to have many customers even in high season. Perhaps I’m being too harsh – in truth, we really didn’t give it that much of a fair shake, and we were tired so probably cranky, but that was our take on it.

 

Meanwhile, the weather was making the prospect of a biobay jaunt the next night less and less attractive, since you’re out paddling around in kayaks in water that was looking pretty choppy, and it’s been years since we’ve done a lot of kayaking or canoeing on our own. (Our kids and grandkids can all paddle circles around us on our family camping trips, while these days I’m perfectly content to just sit in the boat and enjoy being a parasite or stay on shore and take photos of their adventures as they roll their kayaks just for the fun of it. In retrospect, I think when I planned this biobay tour I was in total fantasyland, picturing us gliding around as effortlessly as our kids do, whereas in reality we’d probably have swamped ourselves in the middle of the lagoon in no time. Physically, I just turned 70. Mentally, I think I’m around 30 – endless enthusiasm for various new adventures, but sometimes reality sets in – often at the last minute!)

 

As we were getting into bed with our lumpy pillows and well-worn sheets, I asked Jim “Are we having fun yet?” and he snorted sarcastically in response. He coined an amusingly derogatory name for Fajardo which I won’t repeat here. I said “You know, to hell with frugality and plans -- let’s just throw away tomorrow’s prepaid night here and head back to San Juan early if I can find something decent on Priceline or Hotwire.” He said “Fine with me!” and that’s all the encouragement I needed. I leapt out of bed with new vigor, fired up my trusty iPad, and within 5 minutes had determined that, though I could scarcely believe it, what looked almost certainly like La Concha Renaissance was available on Hotwire for the next three nights for $100/nt + taxes and fees. Since its going rate on other sites rate was $299+, I kept thinking “No, this has got to be some dog hotel that only shares some of the features of La Concha – but at least it’s back in San Juan, in Condado where we know we’ll have fun.” So I clicked the buy button, and HALLELUJAH! It was La Concha! Talk about happy!

 

The next morning, brightened by having so impulsively scuttled our plans and knowing what a treat we were headed for, we bid goodbye to the expressively squawky parrot in the lobby who had been our favorite part of the inn even though we felt sorry for him in his cage. On the way back up to the highway we stopped and had a cheery and mighty tasty breakfast at the little mom-and-pop Golden Sweet Bakery, which was bustling with locals. We paid ¼ of what breakfast at the Fajardo Inn would have been and got to soak up a lot of local atmosphere along with good café con leche. Definitely recommend it.

 

On our way back to San Juan we also passed, as we had the day before, all the often-praised funky seafood kiosks along the highway by Playa Luquillo, but they were closed both times (wrong time of day) so we haven’t sampled them. They looked definitely worth trying. Ditto with Playa Luquillo itself, which was a beautiful beach but lots of whitecaps when we passed by.

 

So would we come back to Fajardo or vicinity? Sure. As I say, our experience wasn’t very great, but I can’t in all honesty say we saw or tried much of it. I think next time I’d much prefer much-less-developed, slower-paced Vieques, reachable either by ferry from Fajardo or by short flight from San Juan, where if you want to do a bioluminescent bay trip you can do it in an electric boat -- but if the weather were right you might even talk me into trying the Fajardo Inn (though not its sad restaurant) again.

 

BTW, if you’re wanting to do El Yunque and/or a biobay adventure, there are fancier lodging options in and near Fajardo and Rio Grande, some of which are usually on Priceline or Hotwire, but they actually don’t get much better ratings on TA and various other sites than the cheaper Fajardo Inn. So by all means, try the Fajardo Inn, but for heaven’s sake take a good map and/or get very specific driving directions from the hotel, hope for good weather to enjoy the pools, and eat somewhere else!

 

I didn’t take many photos in Fajardo, but what I do have are here:

[Vagabondage]

As you can see, I'm plugging away at these trip report installments rather slowly, but I'm coming down the home stretch. I'm currently editing my photos from San Juan and will put that report up ASAP. I'm also in the process of organizing my photos from the port stops I haven't yet posted links to, as well as a few photos on Summit herself.

 

Thanks again for your comments so far, and if you look at the pix on Flickr, do read the captions as they sometimes contain more trip info that isn't here on the CC board.

 

Cheers!

[Kim in CA]

Judy, I was very interested in your assessment of Fajardo. Alan and I are also spending two extra nights in Puerto Rico post cruise, and we originally planned to rent a car an stay somewhere other than San Juan. We spent a lovely day in El Yunque on our previous visit.

 

I had a huge interest in doing the Bio Bay kayak tour, and perhaps a sailing/fishing charter. My research pointed me to Vieques, but the timing of the ferries would have made it impossible for us to get to the airport in time for our departing flight on Monday. Therefore the Fajardo area seemed like a good second choice. We had even made a reservation at a seemingly nice little B & B called the Ceiba Country Inn.

 

But then, I heard from the highest rated Bio Bay tour company that they were closed the weekend we were there because of the Easter crowds, and I kept reading that something has affected the luminescence lately and it is not as bright and that the kayaking experience can be challenging.

 

Therefore, we completely changed our plan and rented a small "apartment" right in Old San Juan at Caleta 64, and we are going to just stay right there the whole time exploring the historical city and eating and drinking local food and cocktails.

 

Your review of Fajardo makes me think that we made the right decision.

 

Kim

[Vagabondage]

Your review of Fajardo makes me think that we made the right decision.

 

Kim

 

Hi Kim --

 

Thanks for your note. I'm glad it was helpful. Your choice sounds like the better one to me, too.

 

I feel sort of guilty about posting negative feelings re: a place we really didn't give much of a fair shake to, but the whole point of these boards is to share the negative experiences along with the positive ones.

 

I, too, have heard that the bioluminescence is not as dramatic as it used to be, which is sad. I think this is the primary reason people are no longer allowed to swim in the bay during the tours. OTOH, promoters of the biobay experience say the dulling is just a temporary problem -- so who knows? I'd sure like to read reviews from folks who've actually taken the tours recently, both as to the difficulty of the kayaking and the quality of the "light show."

 

Best of luck on your trip. It sounds great!

[Vagabondage]

Hi everyone --

 

I just posted my fairly long (147 shots) San Juan photoset on Flickr with so many comments under each one that I decided there isn't much more to say here than I've already said there, so I'll just give you the link:

 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/22589647@N02/sets/72157642062364943/

 

Beware: some of my captions are a bit long and/or opinionated!

 

Now over the next few days I'll go back and post Flickr photos to accompany the reports I've already posted here on the first week of the cruise, plus a final Flickr photoset about Summit and the whole Southern Caribbean experience in general.

 

Salud!

[Vagabondage]

The ones to accompany my report on Barbados are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/22589647@N02/sets/72157641812831185/.

 

Duh! Going back to look at them months later, I see that I never flipped the switch from private to public. Now they're visible. Sorry!

[Vagabondage]

Forgot to say that it was Deep Bay, Antigua. Lovely!