Puerto Rico: Exploring God’s Greenhouse

Story and photography by
Nancy & Eric Anderson 

 

Columbus called the island San Juan Bautista. Juan Ponce de Leon christened its rich port Puerto Rico. The names stuck -- in a way. The sixteenth century mapmakers, in error, transposed the words on their charts leaving us for all time with an island, Puerto Rico and a port, San Juan. Today's 21st Century tourists make a mistake too. They arrive in their thousands -- most heading for the rich port San Juan with its white sands and green waters, never thinking of the island beyond.

There is another side to the mountains but few American visitors find it. That's understandable. San Juan is exciting but its people are no more the real Puerto Ricans than New York taxi drivers are the true Americans. To discover what lies out on the island requires a certain amount of curiosity and initiative. By mainland standards most of the roads are still poor, road signs vague and local people inept at giving directions. Younger people are likely to speak English but not the older generations, though they'll send for someone who believes he can, and you'll wait forever until the arrival of the interpreter who says "Hey! You from New York?"

"No," you say, "California but you got the right country," and you'll show him the road map with your question. He looks at you and says "Hey! You from New York?" and you get a sinking feeling in your chest. You notice too that he's holding the map upside down and you wonder how you can move on without being rude. You nod your head in understanding as three hands point the way in three different directions, you stammer "Gracias, muchas gracias," and you manage to drive away, the interpreter's farewell salute still ringing out to impress his older friends, "Hey! You from New York?"

Off you go again on roads that vary from a San Juan Ponce turnpike as good as any interstate in America to a Ruta Panoramica which at its best is like a goat trail along the Appalachian crest and at its worst like something Walt Disney or God conceived when angry. The road surfaces vary too from excellent to muddy potholes. You'll never complain again about Interstate 15. Traffic can be busy especially if you're out on a Sunday and everyone is on the road to visit Grandma. Some of the hotels aren't as fancy or comfortable as San Juan's, nor the plumbing as dependable. And finally to discourage you, the charges made by the car rental firms continue the pirate traditions of the Caribbean.

So why go? Why take off into the unknown, into a land that doesn't need more traffic and seems content with, if not an earlier century, at least an earlier decade? You go because it's there, beckoning, teasing, welcoming. Because it's the side of Puerto Rico the traveler misses. Because it seems fair that if you are to visit and observe a country you need perspective.

You have to be in the mood. You shouldn't tackle the mountain goats and hairpin bends until you've soaked for a few days in San Juan's sun and got burned or bored. Better spend a few hedonistic days first at, say, the Caribe Hilton, then when you've knocked back a few Piña Coladas and seen a few sunsets, snorkeled in their private reef and gained a few pounds in their Rotisserie restaurant, you're ready for the road.

And what a marvelous road initially. It sweeps in great swinging curves through the green mountains of this island -- the only tropical part of the United States. Wooly-headed foothills and peaks wraithed in cloud form your boundaries as you head for Ponce, the second largest city and Puerto Rico's largest Caribbean port.

At Salinas you can shake free of the turnpike if you wish and follow the old route 1 to Ponce. You pass the town-square of Santa Isabel, its citizens huddled under the shade of their Maria trees. Outside the city limits, the town dump is a profusion of wild flowers and beside it tall sugar canes sway in the constant breeze. Long-legged seagull-like birds stand mute like sentries in the plowed fields - they are martinetes named, the legend goes, for a man who once waited forever by the water for his sweetheart.

Man is not so silent. You will be greeted from the roadside by rural entrepreneurs barbecuing chickens and calling out dining suggestions as the spits revolve. Brown-eyed urchins cheerfully wave bunches of plantain. And quietly sitting under the flamboyan trees, Spain's vivid vermillion umbrellas, are patient farmers holding a few pineapples or bananas and waiting for the occasional customers who make it all worthwhile.

And finally you come, lost, to Ponce. If you're not lost, you haven't reached Ponce yet. This city of 200,000 souls sprawls across the southern coast and rambles up and down the rolling hills facing the bay. Ponce is a strange contrast of a former rum-capital that dearly needs its share of the tourist business to survive, yet hasn't somehow worked out what it needs to attract them. A paradox because in this old town with its narrow streets and whitewashed houses is surely the jewel of the Caribbean, its Museum of Art.

Here the most unexpected of art treasures are displayed in a museum beautifully designed just for this collection. Amongst brilliant examples of Constable, Rubens, and Van Dyke are two special canvases: Flaming June by the English painter Lord Leighton where a young woman's brightly painted dress leaps out from the frame and The Baptism by the Italian Giacomo di Chirico where the excitement and happiness of a family leaving a church has been caught forever.

On one of the upper floors is a teasing donation by the dentists of Puerto Rico, a statue of Santa Apolonia, created by Escuela Cordobesa in the eighteenth century and representing the saint pulling a tooth with a pair of pliers.

For a look at another culture on the island go to the an Indian Ceremonial Batey Park outside Ponce. Seven years ago, floods and winds exposed strange areas demarcated by rocks and stones, and varying in size from a squash court to a football field. Indeed that is exactly what archaeological research has shown, that this open area was a ball park where the Indians played their prehistoric game of batey with a ball made of tree resin and with rules like those of present day soccer. With a difference. Teams consisted of 20 to 30 players and the winning team was allowed to sacrifice a citizen to the gods. Such was the native belief in reincarnation that those chosen would face their death with apparent equanimity. Under the elarios boundary stones of one of the larger courts, the Batey del Cemi, have been found 13 skeletons, the bones dating back to 925-950 AD. The game lasted a long hectic twelve hours, the length of a working day in that primitive time. "No wonder there were sacrifices," said Pedro Melendez, a former island guide. "After playing that game for twelve hours you were ready to kill someone."

There are other traditions in Ponce. The Hotel Melia, for example, goes back a century to when Bartolo Melia, an accountant, came from Spain to liquidate a business and stayed to start another one, a hotel. An air-conditioned haven it was later run by his grand-daughter Mayi and her husband Nick Albors. The hotel restaurant is another cool rest spot in a hot land. Up comes Vitin your waiter to take complete charge. He moves you to a special table which he knows is cooler, listens vaguely to your discussions on the menu, then somehow suggests you'd prefer to leave it all to him. Back he comes, with a smile, bearing two Piña Coladas, a freshly picked avocado, some fried ripe and green plantain, some newly caught Red Snapper and two cups of steaming Puerto Rican coffee. It will be the best meal you've had in Puerto Rico and it cost at that time only twenty dollars for two. Your waiter symbolizes the true Puerto Ricans, the gentle trusting country people met over the mountains. "People so sweet they'll break your heart," an experienced American tourist once said. They serve without servility; bow, smile and perform their functions with pride. And unlike some other nationalistic groups in the Caribbean they seem to love Americans.

And so, refreshed, you bounce and shudder in your Avis Colt to the fishing village of Parguera. Here, in a cross between a Coney Island boardwalk and a Mexican marketplace a swarm of locals converge for the night excursion to Phosphorescence Bay. The bay has vast colonies of dino-flagellates that give, when disturbed, a natural fluorescence to the water. The boat trips are so crowded at weekends that you may wish to charter a local fisherman. Some Americans may find it all too much a bother especially since they would be a bit frustrated at not being able to take photographs.

And more than a bit disgruntled at the road surfaces of the secondary roads in the southwestern corner: an area where you wish you'd rented a jeep. But nothing prepares you for the panoramic drive across the backbone of Puerto Rico. Twenty miles up from the city of Mayaguez lies the town of Maricao, with your destination the Parador Hacienda Juanita.

Maricao is like something created by John Huston for a screen location. It hangs below mountain ledges over rocky valleys. The town bulges with chickens, goats and cows which graze in streets, city squares and baseball diamonds. Every corner on the winding road brings a new adventure or a new challenge. Broken bamboo, rotting fruit, scattered rocks and snapped tree limbs vie with gallivanting mules, straying Chihuahua puppies and wandering geese to make you curse the day you declined to buy the car rental insurance rider. The corners that don't have any animal strolling by actually have basketball nets set up on the overhanging rock just to keep you on your toes. An occasional palpitation is provided by the automobile wrecks scattered indiscriminately belly up like dead fish along those mountain roads. Don't expect safety signs as you sweep along a mountain track giddy with the wayside smell of fermenting fruit and jamming on the brakes at yet another rain forest road washout. Don't demand signs saying "soft shoulders," or they'll ask you, "You mean there's another kind?"

Finally in a torrent of rain you arrive at the Parador, one of several traditional hotels run by the state. Originally the site of a coffee plantation it still grows its own coffee beans. The restaurant sits on a rustic deck overlooking the tropical gardens and the valley below. If you're not yet ready for the criollo native cuisine why not swing on the hammocks sipping an antebellum tonic or a rum punch? But don't take one for the road because tomorrow, having driven up a mountain, you have now to get down.

And down you go scurrying before a torrent of rain along a route more suitable for the Kenya safari or the Long Beach Grand Prix. Down you go skidding under a barrage of huge crabapples and big yellow mangos which drop with such clunks from the skies that you feel like Chicken Little running for help down the mountain. There are many other places worth seeing out on the island: The beaches at Rincon, the Arecibo Ionospheric Observatory, El Yunque Rain Forest, and finally, when you lay down your wheels at rest, Palmas del Mar on the east coast and billed as the American Riviera. It's all there waiting for those tourists who remember there used to be a bit of adventure to travel, who don't need lavish casinos and extravaganza reviews, who want to see the greatest resource any country has - its people. Puerto Rico with its warm sun, sweeping vistas and Garden of Eden foliage is surely God's greenhouse. It's all there waiting on the other side of the mountains.