Caribbean Cruise and Puerto Rico
Saturday, July 9th:
We flew out of Sacramento at 11pm and
took a red eye flight to Chicago. The
seats on the plane were horrible...not comfortable at all.
Sunday, July 10th:
We had a 2 1/2 hour layover in Chicago
then flew out to San Juan, Puerto Rico. We
go into San Juan around 1:20pm and took a quick taxi over to the cruise ship
port. It only took about twenty minutes
to get all checked in and into our room.
Our room ended up on the second lowest deck and only three rooms from
the very front. We unpacked a few
things, grabbed something to eat and then headed out to walk around old San
Juan. We wandered around through the old
neighborhoods and made our way over to El Morro, the massive old Spanish fort
at the tip of old San Juan.
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| Our cruise ship: Carnival Fascination |
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| Inside El Morro |
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| Old San Juan |
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| El Morro |
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| El Morro |
We spent
some time walking up and down through the different levels of the fort. From there we walked a bit over to another
fort, Fort San Cristobal. This fort was
unique as it had several tunnels meandering through the walls of the fort. By this time we were pretty burned out (we
were tired and hot), so we decided to slowly make our way back to the
ship. On our way we passed a small
square where a band was playing salsa music.
All of the old ladies were dancing to the music while the old guys sat back
and played dominoes. The whole thing
seemed like something out of a movie. When
we got back to the port, we realized that we only had our ship cards but not
our picture IDs. The guards saw that I
had a credit card and said that would work, but that I would have to go all the
way bay to the ship to get Becky's ID.
Fortunately, the other guard asked, "You guys have the same last
name, right?" I said we did and
they let us go. Lesson learned...take
you picture ID with you. After dinner we walked about the ship a bit to find
our way. We then had our muster drill,
which seemed to take forever. People
kept wandering in almost a half hour past the starting time, plus everything had
to be translated into Spanish (there are a lot of Puerto Ricans on the cruise). All in all, it took almost an hour for the
drill. I'm pretty sure Becky slept
through most of it.
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| Fort San Cristobal |
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Old San Juan
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Monday, July 11th:
We
arrived in St. Thomas at 7am and got off the ship as fast as we could to avoid
the crowds. We took a truck taxi across
the island to Coki Beach. Fortunately,
we were the only cruise ship in port that day (there can sometimes be 4 or 5
ships) and most of the people from our ship hadn't got out of bed yet. The water was crystal clear and had great
snorkeling, but unfortunately we left our underwater camera back at the
ship. After a few hours of snorkeling
and just when the masses of people started showing up, we decided to head back
to the ship. Our taxi driver back was hilarious. We started to talk to him about chickens and
proceeded to tell us all about his experience raising chickens growing up.
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| Coki Beach, St. Thomas |
After a quick lunch on the ship we walked the mile or so into Charlotte Amalie. The main part of town sits on a hill and is filled with little old buildings filled with shops. We walked around to some of the historic sites and browsed at some of the shops. We went back on board and sat up on one of the top decks as we set off around 5pm. In the evening, back on board, we went to a couple of comedy shows. The second lady was hilarious! Becky and I were crying we were laughing so hard. We then went by one of the clubs that had a Salsa band and a bunch of Puerto Ricans dancing. Some of the older people could really move.
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| The 99 Steps |
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| Charlotte Amalie |
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| Leaving St. Thomas |
Tuesday, July 12th:
This was our only full day at sea. Since we didn't have much to do, we literally
laid low most of the day. The water got a little choppy so I took a fair share
of Dramamine, which knocked me out for awhile (Becky has a stomach of steel and
never gets sea sick). In the afternoon
we went to the main theater and watched "Hasbro: The Game Show",
which was like a mock TV game show. It
was somewhat entertaining. After our
formal dinner we went and saw the main show, "Divas". It wasn't exactly what we were
expecting. We thought it would be
performers dressing up like pop singers and singing. It was that to some degree, but had male and
female dancers dancing along and was a little too risqué for our taste. Nothing horrible, but I wouldn't feel
comfortable taking our kids to it.
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One of the daily "animals" left by our cabin steward.
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Wednesday, July 13th:
We arrived in Barbados around 7am and
again we were some of the first ones off of the ship to beat the crowds. We took a taxi up to a place called Folkstone
Marine Park that was supposed to have good snorkeling, even an underwater snorkeling
"trail". When we got there the
beach was beautiful, but definitely didn't have any snorkeling. So we walked along a walkway paralleling the
beach for a while until we found a place that possibly looked like it had
decent snorkeling and in the end it did.
One of the best things was that we had the whole beach basically to
ourselves (other than a family from England).
After a few hours of snorkeling in solitude, the tour group masses
showed up on three catamarans chocked full of people. We were finished at the right time. As we were leaving all you could see were
dozens and dozens of snorkels floating around the catamarans. The people were
so close to each other that it looked like some of them could have quite
possibly been floating on of one another.
No thank you!
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| Folkstone Beach before the crowd. |
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| The mass of snorkelers that arrived right before we left. |
Instead of taking a
taxi back into town we decided to walk out to the main road and find a bus back
into Bridgetown. We hopped on a local
bus that was completely packed with people and went blasting down the road
pumping extremely loud and horrible reggae music (the driver managed to shift
gears, text on his phone, and eat rice out of a Styrofoam container, all at the
same time). Just when you thought they
couldn't fit any more people in the bus, it would stop and pick up a family of
five. All in all, it was a fun cultural
experience that cost a buck each...a 1/10 of the price of the taxi! We got off at the end of the line, which
ended up being somewhere in the middle of Bridgetown (and by the looks of
things, not real close to the main tourist areas).
We haplessly wandered around until we finally
saw some tourist-looking people and then proceeded to look around the main part
of town. We slowly made our way back to
the ship, had a very late lunch and took a nap.
At night we went to a show that featured a singer from Georgia. She had an amazing voice and sang hits from
Motown. She was very funny as well and
overall, probably the best show we saw on the whole cruise.
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| Bridgetown, Barbados |
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| Pulling out of Barbados. Our ship was docked in the space between the yellow cargo cranes and the smaller white ship. Pretty amazing how they can park these ships. |
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| Becky at the tail of the ship. |
Thursday, July 14th:
We arrived in Castries, St. Lucia
and took a taxi up to Reduit Beach. On
the way there our driver told us about his farm and all the fruit that he
grows. He gave us a mango from his farm
and told us to eat it at the beach and tell him how it tastes when he came back
in a few hours (it was really sweet). At
first there wasn't any real good snorkeling, but then Becky talked to some
older ladies that live on St. Lucia and they told us that at the end of the
beach where it was rocky had some good snorkeling. We walked a ways out to the far end of the
beach and had the whole area completely to ourselves. The snorkeling turned out to be
excellent. On the walk back we found
some great shells and coral fragments.
We took the taxi back to the boat, ate a really quick lunch, and then
went back ashore to venture around Castries.
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| Reduit Beach, St. Lucia |
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| The snorkeling part of the beach. |
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| Lunch back on the boat. |
Castries had the best market for homemade trinkets and
gifts out of all of the ports (the rest had the same duty and tax free shops
selling the same three things: diamonds/jewelry, alcohol, and cheap
made-in-China gifts). We wandered around
through the sweltering market and Becky had her chance to bargain for some
goods. Back on board we decided to wash
our clothes. Instead of forking over an
arm and a leg for the ship's laundry service, we washed our clothes in our
bathroom sink and hung them all over the room to dry. Not sure what our cabin steward thought about
it, but oh well. We cleaned ourselves up
and had our second formal night. At
dinner we had escargot for an appetizer.
Not too bad, but the rest of dinner was way better. One of Carnival's signature desserts is
called the chocolate melting cake. It is
extremely tasty and we had it for dessert several nights. The show that night was a tribute to Motown
that featured the same group that did the Divas show. It was pretty entertaining and everyone in
the group had an amazing voice. The
ocean was a little rough that night and the boat was rocking quite a bit during
the show.
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| Castries Market. |
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| Downtown Castries. |
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| Just in case you feel so inclined... |
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| Second formal dinner. |
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| Another animal left for us. |
Friday, July 15th:
This morning we arrived in
Basseterre, St. Kitts. We wanted to go
out to a place called White House Beach which was supposed to have great
snorkeling, but the taxi driver cartel said that no one else was going
there. So we had to wait for another
group that was going to a beach close to that location and the driver would drop
us off at our spot after he dropped them off.
The drive out to the beach was very scenic and winded down to a narrow
part of the island. Even after the
driver dropped the big group off at their beach, he kept telling us that the
beach at White House was, "No sand, just rocks and no people. You still want to go there?" We told him that was exactly why we wanted to
go there. He looked at us as if we were
crazy. There was only one person along
the whole beach (a security guard watching a restaurant that was closed for the
low season) and a few sail boats anchored in the bay. We had read that there was a sunken tugboat
somewhere along the beach. We walked
along the beach until we found a spot that looked pretty good and had a white
buoy floating about 150 feet off shore.
We snorkeled out there and found the sunken tugboat. The whole area had the best snorkeling of the
whole trip. We stayed out there for
several hours. We took a break and
walked along the rocky shore and found tons of older conch shells and several
intact dried up sea urchin casings (these are rare to find completely
intact). Finally, after several hours of
quiet solitude, a small tour group arrived and swam out to the site.
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| White House Beach |
We arrived in Phillipsburg, St.
Maarten around 7am. The island is the
smallest in the world that is jointly shared between two countries, the
Netherlands and France (we landed on the Dutch side) and also has an open border. So that we could see both sides of the
island, we decided to rent a car (this was also the only island that we visited
that drove on the right side of the road, which makes things a bit
easier). First we drove over to Maho
Beach, which is a small beach at the end of the airport runway. We watched a few small planes come in and
land, but found out the bigger ones weren't coming in until the afternoon, so
we decided to come back later. We then
drove over to the French side to the town of Marigot. We drove up to Fort
Louis, which overlooks the whole town and bay.
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| Maho Beach |
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| Fort Louie, Marigot, St. Martin |
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| Marigot, St. Martin |
We then drove up to some of the highest parts of the
whole island, which had some amazing views.
We continued around the island in a clockwise direction, going up and
down on some very curvy and steep roads.
We stopped at a place called Little Bay and hiked up a hill to the ruins
of Fort Amsterdam for a view over the Great Bay back toward the cruise
ship. Becky snorkeled a bit down in the
water. We then made our back to Maho
Beach just in time to watch one of the bigger planes land right over the
beach. Then we got to watch a 737 take
off. The planes come right up to the
fence and the beach, rev their engines and shoot down the runway. People were hanging on to the fence so they
wouldn't get blown over. Becky tried to
record the take off with our video camera, but the blast from the engines blew
the screen closed. If you are standing
on the beach (which we were) you have to turn away or get sand blasted. This was a really cool experience. We watched one more big jet take off from the
other direction and fly right over the beach.
By this time we were getting close to our ship departure time and had to
get the rental car back.
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| Great Bay, St. Maarten |
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| Maho Beach. Runway is just to the right of the beach. |
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| We got sandblasted by this one. |
Back on board we went to the top of the ship and watched
as we left St. Maarten. We went to dinner for the last time (we had to get the
chocolate melting cake again). We then
went to a magic show, which seemed shorter than the other shows. We then went back to our room and packed up
our stuff.
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| Our room |
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| Last dinner on the ship |
Sunday, July 17th:
Since all we had was our carry-on
bags, we were able to eat a quick breakfast and disembark from the ship quickly
at the port in old San Juan. We made our
way to the rental car place and got our rental car for the next couple of days. Fortunately the rental car company had run
out of compact cars and gave us a free upgrade to a bigger car (a Hyundai
Sonata). Before the trip I had read and
heard that driving in Puerto Rico is nerve-wracking due to aggressive drivers
and poorly maintained roads. In reality,
though, the driving wasn't too bad. For
the most part the drivers weren't any more aggressive than drivers in big
cities. The roads in the countryside
were very narrow, curvy, and full of giant pot holes, but overall not the worst
I have ever seen or driven on. We drove
around the outskirts of San Juan and headed west over to the observatory at
Arecibo. This part of the island is known as Karst country and is made up of
large limestone Karst mountains that are very hilly and green. We wound our way up to the Arecibo
observatory, which has the largest radio telescope in the world (if you've ever
seen the movie "Contact" or the James Bond movie "Golden
Eye", this is the place). The dish
itself is 1,000 feet in diameter and sits in a giant natural hole between the
limestone hills. The antennas hang almost 500 feet in the air above the
dish. Some of the greatest astronomical
discoveries have been made here.
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| Arecibo Observatory |
After Arecibo we took a very curvy drive around the
countryside to a historical area called Caguana. We walked around the ruins and petroglyphs
from the Taino Indians. Most of the
ruins were the outlines of ancient ball courts.
There wasn't a ton to see, but the grounds and surrounding area were
very beautiful. Once we were back on the
main highway we wound our way over to Aguadilla on the west coast and spent the
night.
Monday, July 18th:
We drove a long and curvy road up
in the high inland mountains called the "Routa Turistica" for most of
the day. It should have been called the
Rio Turistica, since we got pounded by a huge rain storm and for a while the
road literally turned in to a flowing rust-colored river. When there was a break in the weather we
climbed up to the top of Cerro de Punta, the highest peak in Puerto Rico at
4,390'. I should clarify that we were
able to drive a good chunk of that and only had to hike a steep half mile to
the top. The top was covered in radio
towers and fog, so we really couldn't see much.
The rain started coming again, so we jogged quickly down to the car and
only got mildly soaked. We ended up
driving a few more hours and tried and tried to find a hotel, motel, hostel,
covered patio, anywhere to sleep. There
are just not a lot of sleeping establishments in Puerto Rico. If there are, they are not well marked (which
isn't a surprise, since nothing is well marked). After driving for a while in the dark, we
finally found a small hotel right on the beach in Luquillo. We were so exhausted that for dinner we
ended up eating our leftover sandwich items from lunch.
Tuesday, July 19th:
We liked the hotel we found so
much that we decided to stay another night (partly because we didn't want to be
out looking for a hotel late at night like the previous day). We drove up to El Yunque National Forest. This is the only rain forest that is part of
the US Forest Service. They have a great
visitors center there and a few hiking trails.
We decided to hike down to a place called El Mina Falls. There were a lot of tourist groups and locals
there, so the place was crowded. Once we
made it to the falls, the place was like Disneyland! People were all over the place. We swam for a second, then decided to
bushwhack and boulder hop our way down stream to another place that only had a
few people. It wasn't very far from the
main waterfall, but it was a lot quieter.
We played around in the water, then hiked back up to the car. By this time the whole park was overloaded
with visitors. To make matters worse,
they were doing major construction on the main road in the park, with caused
huge traffic jams.
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| El Yunque visitors center |
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| The crowd at El Mina Falls |
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| Our own private pool just downstream |
Once we were out of the park, we decided to head over
to a town called Loiza, which is supposed to be famous for making traditional
masks. The directions in our guide book
were very misleading and the sign in town wasn't very clear which was to
go. After driving back and forth several
times and asking for directions, we finally found the artists' workshops. Overall, it wasn't very impressive and the
masks were very expensive. We then went
over to the Luquillo kiosks, which is a line up of about 60 restaurants and
shops. We looked around a bit and
decided to come back later, since we were only a half mile or so from our
hotel. When we came back in the evening
we decided to walk down the beach to the kiosks, which was a lot more enjoyable
than trying to drive there and find a parking spot. While walking back to our hotel we saw two
guys swimming out in the ocean with their horses. They were out there for a good fifteen
minutes!
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| Luquillo Kiosks |
Wednesday, July 20th: We left the hotel and stopped by a
strip mall for a couple of last minute souvenirs for the kids. One of the funniest parts of the whole trip was that people kept thinking that Matt was Puerto Rican and always spoke to him in Spanish. Even the security people at the airport spoke to him in Spanish. Then we said goodbye to Puerto Rico and flew
off on a very bumpy flight back to Chicago, then finally on to Sacramento.
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| Our hotel on Luquillo Beach |
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| View from the hotel's breakfast area |
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| Breakfast before the flight home |
