This is Getting Really Cool Now

The reason why I wanted to return back to the ship in a prompt manner is that I had to go back out again in the evening. Heaven forbid I should have some free time to do anything in port that isn’t planned, pre-organized, or safe. But, this one was a trip that I was really looking forward to. A group had gone on the trip the night before and came back raving about it, making everyone else who was not already signed onto one of the other trips going there scramble around furiously to try to get on. I think there was one large group that was attempting to do it independently, and I think they were able to, but there were a lot of issues with it and it gave everyone involved somewhat of a headache.

But I was on a trip that I had arranged previously with the ship people and was guaranteed a spot on line as long as I made it to the line in time, which was a concept that plagued people who don’t know how to set alarm clocks (the little dot means PM and the other dot means you set the alarm). Anywho, it was another adventurous kayaking adventure awaiting in front of me. So far, in Puerto Rico, I did kayaking more than anything else. Forget sailing to Brazil, I’m going to kayak there.

The trip we were on our way to is one of the coolest things you can do – anywhere. And there aren’t many places left where you can do it, I think they said there were five in the world and in a couple years there might only be three left. We drove to a place a mile or two down the road from where I had the previous day’s kayaking adventure, so it was a good hour and a half over to the departure point, and as always, you like to get to know your neighbors sitting with you on the bus, which helps to pass the time considerably. Not that driving through a foreign land at night isn’t enough entertainment to look at already, but we’ll call it supplemental.

The place where we were going is called a Bioluminescent Bay, and I’m going to try to describe it here, and we’ll see how well I do. If you want a better and more complete and thorough description, you can search on-line for it. I’d do it now for you, but I get charged for internet minutes, and I’m not going to waste them on blog research topics.

A bioluminescent bay is an area of water that is highly saturated in a special kind of diatom. What makes the bay unique is the environment, which aids in the incredibly reproduction rates that the diatoms have. The water temperature varies five to ten degrees year round, and there are no ocean inlets. The lagoon empties out into the ocean via a windy mangrove-laden stream. These diatoms, fed by a combination of nutrients supposedly resultant from the decomposition of fallen mangrove leaves, amongst other sources, are highly concentrated in the lagoon area. When the water around them is disturbed, it imparts a pressure upon their cell wall and, in much the same way a firefly lights up, a chemical called luciferin is activated and the diatom emits a blue light, bright enough to see very clearly with the unaided eye in the nighttime. This is completely painless to the diatoms and does not hurt them it all, and will take them about thirty minutes to recover and be able to emit light once again. When you consider the amount of diatoms in the lagoon, you can begin to imagine the effect that is produced, but we’ll get there when I do.

Our kayak leader was the same guy with long hair and bloodshot eyes that we had the day before in my previous kayaking adventure. I was very relieved to not hear him say that this would be a strenuous kayak, because I really wasn’t looking forward to battling Atlantic Ocean waves, this time in the pitch blackness of night. Yes, that’s right, we were paddling off in kayaks well after sunset. This was going to get interesting very quickly.

I partnered off with the guy I sat next to on the bus (who had not been kayaking ever, making me the most experienced person in the kayak for the first, and most likely, last time. I decided to sit in the back and steer again, feeling confident in my abilities now as a steerer and apologizer. I really felt in the pit of my stomach that this was going to be a much easier experience. Keep that in mind as we move along.

We were one of the first kayaks out into the water, and had to meet the group of the other kayaks meeting out in the water about two hundred feet out. We joined the pack with little trouble until the instructor told us that we were on the wrong side. Let’s paint the word picture to illustrate this. Kayaks are long, thing lumps of plastic. We were lining up side to side, not end to end, and we were on the wrong side. Meaning that we would have to backpaddle, paddle over to the left side where the empty spaces were located and then paddle up and grab a hold of the other side. This maneuver sounds relatively simple enough until you factor in the oncoming kayaks behind us that have the same locational goal as we do. Also, they never properly instructed us on paddling backwards, which is far more counterintuitive that one might be led to believe.

After a good minute and a half of bumbling around in the water, which was really just an additional source of further humiliation that I did not need, we joined the rest of the pack and pretended like everything was normal and we had just arrived in place from the beach.

Once we were all in the pack, the goal was to move from where we were in the ocean to the mangrove stream and then spill into the bioluminescent bay. We were a couple hundred yards from the entrance to the mangrove stream, so that was the first course of action that we took. Unfortunately for us, who knows what was wrong, but we had some difficulties going in a straight line. I later learned this was because one of us was paddling harder than the other one, and after thinking about which way we kept moving, it was apparent that I was at fault for paddling too hard, which was a good thing because I was the DA (designated apologizer).

We drove into two or three parked boats that were in no way whatsoever in our way or intended path. We just tended to gravitate towards them, as if there was some kind of subterranean magnetic field at work here. As much as that probably wasn’t the case, it’s the best excuse I could think of as the chief apologizer. We were a good fifty feet away from the entrance when, out of nowhere, the kayak makes a sharp left turn and we end up beached on the sand and immobile. To this day, I don’t understand how in the world we turned so sharply and headed directly for shore, at this point about twenty feet away. But, I’m happy to report, it was all downhill from here, even though that’s not saying a whole lot.

We straightened out, got turned in the right direction, and then cut into the oncoming train of kayaks entering the mangrove stream. The pace was leisurely, but because the mangroves grew over most parts of the stream (think when in Pirates of the Caribbean when they went to go see the female witch doctor, but without all the lighting), the task was then inherently much more difficult than it would have been in the daylight. The only saving grace that they provided for us was that every kayak in our group had a blinking red light on the back of the kayak. So all you really had to do was following the magic blinking light in front of you and hope that they were not veering off course.

The trip was falling into a pattern for us, we were still veering across the stream far from a straight line, but we were staying with the group and keeping up with them. I think we became a little on the confident side and began to lose our focus. That’s when we ran into a mangrove tree. Unfortunately for us, the other people who ran into the trees were able to bounce off and continue. The mangrove tree’s root system tried to eat our kayak. I think I saw teeth, although it might have been something else, it was awfully dark after all.

Impressively, and without losing our place on the kayak train, we extricated ourselves from the ravenous mangrove tree and caught back up with the rest of the pack. The national animal of Puerto Rico is a very tiny little frog that makes a peeping noise, some people call them peepers for reasons that I won’t get into in this blog. When you’re on a ride at Disneyland and there’s a soundtrack playing in the background, it feels sort of like you’re there, but unknowingly takes you to a mild point to desensitization. When we were paddling through the mangrove stream, you really have to sit and think to yourself that what you’re hearing is real. Those are actually real frogs and you’re actually paddling up a mangrove stream. The longer it went on, the more surreal the entire experience became. Even before we got to the lagoon/bay, the paddle in was one of the most unbelievable experiences I have ever had. It was incredible and I felt so privileged to be able to do what I was doing. And this was all before we got near the diatoms.

The paddle into the bay lasted about twenty-five minutes, and about fifteen minutes in, we started to notice that when we dipped our paddle in, those weren’t splashes our bubbles that we were seeing. I had to do a double-take at one point because the water was illuminating itself. It’s just not something that you get to see everyday. I’m running out of words to be able to describe what I was seeing, but I’ll fall back on the term I coined when driving under the mighty Californian redwoods and use it here – the bioluminescent bay was spendictacular.

I was so distracted by the water, as well as my kayak buddy, that our steering sort of fell by the wayside a bit which was especially not good once another group was coming back from the bay on the other side of the stream, going in the opposite direction. This meant that not only did we have to avoid the trees, but we also had to avoid head-on collisions with the other kayaks as well as trying not to be hit in the head with a paddle from the oncoming kayaks, who really had not idea where heads are and where heads are not. I narrowly missed an oncoming paddle, and avoided hitting my paddle against anyone, but did his quite a number of oncoming mangrove branches. The last one we had to duck under, and I made it under when it was inches from my face. Take my word for it when I say that it was kind of hard to see.

As we exited the mangrove stream, a thought occurred to me. I was in the middle of Puerto Rico (underneath the island’s second oldest lighthouse if you’d like to find out where I was, I don’t know either as a matter of fact), paddling through a bioluminescent bay – one of the most surreal things I have ever seen in my entire life. I’m in a bathing suit in a kayak above water in the sixties and air in the seventies. But what really got me was where I could be right now. I could be in New York or Pennsylvania, supposedly freezing (I don’t get that weather down here, is it actually chilly up there?) and spending my day rushing from class to class in the blustering cold and snow. Instead, look where I am. It doesn’t get any better than this. It just doesn’t. I really don’t like to brag, but in this case if it’s bragging, then it’s something that I’m quite alright with. I don’t care.

We had to do the silly paddle parallel into a group thing again, but we made sure that we were in the right side of things this time, and then grabbed onto the adjacent kayaks to stabilize our own motion. The instructor gave an account of what was happening with the diatoms while we all tried to pay attention while playing in the water lighting them up. Each diatom produces a huge amount of light for its size. With the naked eye, you can’t see the diatom, but the light emitted is about the size of the average pupil of the eye, if you want a comparison.

Then they let us jump into the water. My kayak partner and I made the error of jumping out the same side and then when we grabbed onto the kayak to hold ourselves in the area, we nearly tipped it over. I made the journey around to the other side of the kayak and we were able to hold the kayak steady in a degree of equilibrium. Seeing your entire body light up underwater, if however somewhat blurry, is really cool and makes you feel like you should be some kind of bizarre superhero, like Light-Up Boy (the females in the group would have to have been Light-Up Girl).

After being in the water for a few minutes, we realized that we would have to get back into the kayak to paddle back. I didn’t learn how to do this part yesterday. Thankfully, I never fell out when in the ocean. We worked out a complicated strategy where we would both pounce ourselves on top of the kayak simultaneously and he would situate himself in the kayak while I kept it steady and then once he was in, I would turn myself around into the seat. We did a remarkable job, especially because when I jumped on, my head was where my seat was, so I had to turn over and around, which was more complicated than it should have been, but we made it fine. I think some other groups just went in one at a time and I guess that worked out for them, too. But our way was far more exciting.

We had to paddle back to the mangrove swamp and leave the bay behind us. It was a truly remarkable experience, and it wasn’t over yet because we still had to paddle back through the somehow darker mangrove stream. And there were even more groups going in the other direction on the way back. But, after the coordinated effort on the way in, we did a really good job on the way out to the point where I would consider myself an amateur kayaking now. Forget beginner, I know how to steer now. We only ran into the back of the kayak in front of us once, but that was a victory in and of itself. I have no complaints about the trip. How could you? I also don’t have any pictures because it was too dark to take them, and I really didn’t want my camera to get wet.

The paddle back was just as great as the paddle in, but this time there was a euphoric feeling of accomplishment on seeing what we just did. It really was spendictacular.

When we exited the mangrove stream, we had to paddle back to the original point where we were in formation and get back into the similarly shaped formation. We did fine joining in with the pack until the instructor told us that we did a good job getting in line, but nobody was holding onto the kayaks holding onto him, meaning that we were not stationary, but drifting away. Now everyone tried to paddle laterally left, which is not possible to do in a kayak as far as I’m concerned.

Somehow, after much disorganization and fervent paddling, we were able to arrange ourselves into the silly pattern. Then they started to send us a couple kayaks at a time back to the beach to disembark the vessel. For the past two days, I never once tried to race the kayak. I wanted to be the first kayak back to the beach in the worst way. Once he said, “Alright, next four kayaks,” I pushed off the kayak next to us and paddled my heart out. We beat a kayak of two girls by about five feet, and they were behind us to start, but that’s beside the point.

Off the kayaks now, soaking wet and feeling the cool ocean breeze blowing in, we were cold. They had small vanilla cookies and a cold bottle of water for us, which we quickly grabbed before we jumped on the bus to dry off. You would think that the bus driver would have expected our wet return. He had the air conditioning going full-blast since we left the bus. We went on the bus and froze. We did get him to begrudgingly raise the temperature, but sitting in a wet bathing suit on a bus for an hour and a half can only be so pleasant.

We got back to the ship shortly before midnight and passed at least twenty people on their way out to bars in the hundred yards we walked back to the ship. You’ve read my comments on this earlier, and I don’t feel like repeating them now. You’ll be bound to hear them again. I had a trip leaving at eight again the next morning, so I’m looking at my watch thinking that I had to get back up to the room and complete my showering and bed prep in record time if I want the maximum amount of sleep. That’s what I tried to do and was in bed within an hour from arrival at the pier.

The next morning, our unfortunately last morning in Puerto Rico, I got up for the third straight day before seven. Sleeping is highly overrated, and I had stuff to do every day. After breakfast, I left the ship again and stood in line for the trip we were taking to the Rio Camuy Caves in the northwestern sector of Puerto Rico. It’s supposed to be a handful of miles from the giant radiotelescope that’s sitting somewhere on the island.

We boarded the bus at 8 and sat down for what would turn out to be a nearly two hour transfer over to the cave park. The roads that we were taking were nothing like the roads we had taken the past two days because we were going west instead of east, always remaining within viewing distance of the Atlantic Ocean to the north of the island. As always, I made conversation on the bus because, as I stated earlier, sleeping is highly overrated, and who wants to spend the bus ride sleeping when I could be looking out the windows at the landscape sweeping by the bus windows. The drive was much more scenic than drives have been in the past.

Upon our arrival at the Rio Camuy Caves, they unloaded us off the buses into the incredibly hot and humid air. It’s the heat that just sucks the energy out of you the more that you’re in it, so we all moved over to the entrance area and waited to go in. And waited. And waited. And we had no idea what we were waiting for until they told us that the second bus coming to the caves was the one that had all the tickets. Once that bus arrived, they loaded our first bus into the small movie theater to watch a preview of what we were about to witness.

I’m going to use the term movie theater with a grain of salt. It really wasn’t a movie theater. They had a twenty inch television at the front of a room with fifty or so seats. That’s not my idea of a movie theater, but I went with it.

After the short film that was clearly made over ten years ago, we waited for the tram to pick us up. And waited. And waited. Are you sensing a theme here, because there is one. Each tram that comes by a little over every half hour can carry twenty-five people and there’s at least eighty people on line in front of me. If you’re even half decent at math, you know that we waited on line for the tram for over an hour and a half. It was a long wait that was tough to pass the time on. Eventually, once you start talking about the name of the place where the person on line got their cat, you’ve been on line too long.

They only had one tram running because the other one was broken. They said it was being repaired, and I think they’re liars. I’m not sure how I know, but I smelled a rat somewhere. Once the tram picked us up, we went down a steep hill that we could have walked down in less than an hour and a half. It was a windy road that pops into a sinkhole and switchbacks down the side until reaching the bottom, where they drop you off at the entrance to the caves. The ride would have been fine had the exhaust not blown in our faces for the entire ride. The dizzy spell went away a few minutes later.

I’ve been in a cave before. I was at Howe Caverns in upstate New York, so I knew a little about what to expect. Howe Caverns had a meandering one way in, one way out path following a running stream, and that’s what I expected here. They took us down a ramp and into the main chamber of the cave. Let me explain to you this: I’m an Earth Science guy, this is my thing and I’ve learned and seen this kind of stuff before, but I was blow away. The main chamber had to be 75 feet high and at least the same width across for most of the chamber. It was oblong shaped and from one end to the other was about two or three football fields, but not along a straight line, the chamber had a kink in it.

I ended up taking well over a hundred photos in the cave, only about a third of which are in focus and able to be seen, but those are some great photos I have. I’ve got a couple interesting ones coming up, so stay tuned for them. Going through the cave, I used the same technique that I did the previous day at the rainforest hike – I hung in the back of the pack so that I could take my time with the photos. As a result, I didn’t hear a word that the tour guide said, so there’s not a whole lot I can tell you. If you want more, search for Rio Camuy Caves. You’re bound to hit something.

The interior, and I know I’ve said this already, was incredible. I’ve never seen such a large interior space that was naturally created. It really was a sight to see. With the humidity pouring in through the openings on the ends of the cave, it was pretty wet and humid in there, but cool enough and out of the sun, thankfully. I didn’t see any bugs either. Puerto Rico is the dengue fever capital of the world, you know. Or at least that’s what the travel nurse says.

I think we were in the caves area for about an hour walking around and taking photos, as tourists do. Here are my two favorites, both of which, coincidentally enough were taken in the back part of the cave where a sinkhole formed. The only way in and out of the sinkhole (without repelling down a rope) is through the cave system. I’m very fond of the second one.

Coming out of the caves we, you guessed it, had to wait for the tram to come back down to pick us up, and there was another group in front of us waiting for the tram to come down. Luckily, once we emerged the tram came to pick up the group that was in front of us, so we only had to wait about a half hour. However, there were two trams, which you would think would be a plus. Oh contrare. There were two smaller trams, combined still only able to hold the twenty-five or so that the big one can manage.

I can’t complain, though. I’ve never ‘hung out’ in a sinkhole before. There’s probably some sound logic behind that, but for the amount of time that we were down there waiting, I didn’t feel like I was in any mortal danger. Once the two small trams came pummeling back down the mountain, we boarded and went back up, but not to where we started, they took us to a gigantic sinkhole a few minutes away. This thing was huge (or ‘uge’ as Trump would say it). It really was very impressive that dissolving rock can do so much. As a science guy that’s kind of the way that I look at that stuff. We were there for a good three minutes before they boarded us back on the trams and back to the initial point of departure.

By now, it was early to mid afternoon and we were getting hungry. There was a middle school class at the caves the same day (who we heard the entire morning…) that was dominating the snack-type restaurant, and we really didn’t want to eat there. Luckily for us, they took us over to a little picnic area where they contracted a caterer to prepare lunch for us, and I can’t complain – it was pretty good. And it was nice to sit down and relax for a while without the constant annoyance of waiting for something to happen.

After about an hour of sitting in the shade, we were all starting to get a little hot and bothered, so we decided it was time to board back onto the bus and start heading back to the ship. We don’t want to be late getting back there. On-ship time is two hours before departure, so we had to be back by 2100 or 9pm. It was around 2, but we were ready to get going anyway. If you arrive back to the ship late, you get what’s called dock time, which is basically a restriction on when you’re allowed to leave the ship at the next port of call. Nobody wants that.

We sat on the bus for another almost two hours on the way back to San Juan harbor. Upon exiting the bus, people were debating whether to go back into Old San Juan once more before departing. Now that was just five hours away. I was fine staying on the ship. I didn’t need anything downtown and was ready to have a relaxing afternoon and evening. After all, I had to caption all the blurry photos that I took at the caves.

Much to my happiness, the afternoon and evening were boring. We were scheduled to leave the dock at 11 and did so a few minutes early. As opposed to coming into port at sunrise, we left in the dead of night now, which as I learned earlier in the day, does not do wonders for photographing, especially when the ship is moving the island is not. But, we were on our way.

Leg 2: San Juan, Puerto Rico to Salvador, Brazil

I stayed on the back of the ship as we sailed along the coast of Puerto Rico for a while. It was pretty seeing the island’s lights as we went by, slowly moving further and further away from the island. I would have stayed on the back of the ship a little longer, but the next day was the first day of our B classes, and the last thing I wanted was to be asleep in my first 8am class the next morning, so I went to bed after everyone else started to trickle elsewhere. I don’t think all of them were going to bed. I was.

After waking up before seven for three days straight in San Juan, it was almost a thrill to be able to sleep until 7:10. That was, until I remembered the date. It was Saturday February 10. Saturday. We have classes on weekends. It’s not fun. The only good part about it is that even this early in the trip, we have lost a complete sense of the days of the week, so while it was Saturday, as long as you didn’t think about it, it wasn’t that bad.

So anyway, I was at my 8am class (on Saturday), which was the history class that I signed up for. It looks like it will be alright. The professor seems like she’ll be awake at that time of the day, which is more than I can say for the rest of the class who somehow actually managed to make it to class in the morning. I thought it was a strong showing, even if it was the second day of classes, a week into the trip.

Falling into a schedule hasn’t been easy on class days. By the time I get out of class, I’ve got about an hour in the morning, then its lunch, then another hour until my afternoon cinema class (which I’ll talk about shortly) and then another hour until dinner, and then it’s the evening already, which you can’t spend the whole time reading or studying because otherwise you’d go nuts before we hit Africa.

I spent most of my time organizing my planner so that I knew what I was doing for each of my classes, because after a while they all start melting into one, especially the two that meet in the same classroom, one of which is my cinema class. I’ve never taken a film class, and I figured it would be interesting and a class that was not absorbed into seventy-five minutes of note-taking. Looks can be deceiving, but on the first day, I have no complaints. As it is with all of my classes that I’ve had now, it is very hard to form an accurate opinion after such a small amount of time interaction with the class and the professor. We’ll get to a point where we can iron out something sometime.

That night we had the big activity fair in a room that was not large enough to hold everyone that wanted to sign up for stuff. I think a lot of people had the same strategy that I did and signed up for a bunch of stuff, and as time goes on, we can figure out what we have time for and what we want to spend the majority of our time on. I don’t even remember a bunch of the stuff that I signed up for, but as meetings for them roll along, you’ll hear about them then. There’s a couple I’m real interested in, so we will see what happens with those.

Next time on the blog: The days fuse together as the voyage moves further towards Salvador, and Tutu emerges.