Puerto Rico is a tiny but beautiful country, with few of world’s most beautiful beaches beaches, the El Yunque rainforest, the picturesque old San Juan, terrific cuisine, extremely friendly people, and of course the biobay. Furthermore, it does not require a separate visa or immigration if you are in the USA, and one can use the same cellular services (our AT&T worked well even on Vieques island). All in all, a perfect winter destination. We went there during the New Year weekend of 2013 (the two of us along with Akshay’s brother, Devang). Here is our itinerary (like all our blogs, we haven’t given too much description of each of the places which is easily available online) :

General tips:

– The first and most important tip (and we cant stress this enough) is about timing the vacation right. Puerto Rico is no doubt beautiful at anytime of the year, but the most unique experience of this island is the bioluminescent bay or biobay, which remains maximally luminescent only 3-5 days around new moon.  So plan your trip for this time; here is a link of a website which helps in planning this http://www.puertoricodaytrips.com/biobay-and-moon. The best day to do the biobay tour would naturally be the new moon night.

– The best places to see the biobay are Fajardo and Vieques. Check online or call one of the biobay tour operators beforehand to find out which site has better bioluminescence (it is a dynamic entity and can change in a few weeks or months) at the time you are going and plan you trip accordingly.

– The two Puerto Rican islands famous for its beaches are Vieques and Culebra. Culebra has the most famous beach in the country, Flamenco Beach. However, it is often crowded and many locals do not find much difference in the beaches of the two islands. Vieques has the best bioluminescence when we had planned our trip, and so we chose to go there and skipped Culebra. If however, Fajardo has better bioluminescence when you go, then you may want to go to Culebra instead.

– Apart from the regular car rental firms, Charlie Car Rentals is a local firm which was recommended by a friend. We ultimately ended up using Enterprise as it was cheaper, but Charlie is often cheaper if booked early.

– The non-vegetarian food is supposed to be terrific, but alas, you will get only vegetarian recommendations from us, which we promise are great too! The classic dish is the Mofongo, and many restaurants serve a vegetarian version of it as well. Oh…and don’t miss the pinacoladas and tres leches wherever you go!

– As usual, we are sharing our itinerary and some vegetarian restaurants we recommend, amongst other titbits, on our google maps page. Here is the link: https://drive.google.com/open?id=19SJaI5kG6-Ad6l3pJR5xsYbg-d4&usp=sharing. Select the label ‘Puerto Rico’.

Day 1 : San Juan – Arecibo and Cueva del Indio – San Juan

We landed at San Juan in the morning, had a quick breakfast, rented our car, and immediately set course west for the Arecibo observatory (1.5 hours). This houses amongst the world’s largest radio telescopes (you may remember it from The Golden Eye) and is an interesting experience. We then drove to Cueva del Indio (45 min), a beautiful cave by the Caribbean Sea with breathtaking views; would definitely recommend it. We had to find this place using the GPS coordinates 18.491752, -66.640685; the alternative is to use google maps. We then drove to our hotel in San Juan (1-1.25 hours).

Tips: The cave has to be entered by climbing down a ladder; nothing too tough but you may want to wear appropriate footwear.

Day 2: San Juan – Vieques

We departed early morning for Fajardo (1-1.25 hours) and caught a ferry to Vieques. You cannot take the rental vehicle on the ferry, as rental insurance does not cover water transportation of the car. However, there is ample paid parking available ($5 per day when we used it in 2013). The ferry ride is approximately 1.25 hours and a quite bumpy. We reached in the afternoon and went to enjoy the Sun Bay beach, a popular beach which has bathing and changing facilities. After sunset, we walked along the Esplanade (the little happening place of Vieques) and had dinner. The pick-up point for the biobay tours is also at the entry of Esplanade. This being a moonless night, we had booked the tour for that night using Vieques Adventure Company which offered glass bottom canoe tours for $50 (I am not sure they still operate these though). The experience is exhilarating and something which cannot be described in words; a must must must do.

Food: We ate dinner at the Banana; nice but not extraordinary (but at least it gave vegetarian options on this tiny island).

Stay/ Transport: We stayed at Vieques Tropical Guest House; it’s a small hotel owned by a sweet couple and Maria, one of the two, was really nice. She would call for a cab whenever we wanted to go out ($5 per person).

Tips:

– Reach Fajardo early if it is a weekend. We had to skip a ferry as there were no tickets available, and ended up spending over an hour extra waiting for the next ferry. You may want to read this: http://vieques.com/ferry-vieques-fajardo/

– Try to book the biobay tour as soon as your day in Vieques is fixed.

– Another option besides the ferry is to fly to Vieques; you may even fly directly to Vieques instead of landing at San Juan first and then travel to San Juan by ferry/ flight.

-If you are someone who gets motion sickness, you may want to pop a Avomine or Stemetil before boarding the boat.

Day 3: Vieques; Night at Vieques/ Fajardo

This was a relaxed day. We went to many beaches but ones we loved the most were Playuela (Garcia) Beach and Caracas (red) beach, both close to each other. There are few nice walking trails that take you along mangroves and a few panaromic viewpoints.

Tips:

You can either stay overnight for another night in Vieques and depart early next morning, or catch the last ferry back to Fajardo and stay in Fajardo. We ended up going back to the mainland as it was New Year eve and Vieques was more expensive.

-Many hotels in Vieques are not listed on booking.com or hotels.com, and have to be searched individually online. Availability queries and bookings have to be often made by calling them up. It is a little more work, but not very cumbersome either.

Day 4: El Yunque Rain Forest – San Juan

The drive to El Yunque is half an hour from Fajardo and 40 min from San Juan. For exploring a national park, our modus operandi is to always first stop at the visitor center to talk to a ranger, take a map and create a quick itinerary of things to do. We were lucky to be able to attend a super-informative two-hour ranger walk starting at the La Mina visitor center which made us appreciate the extraordinary biodiversity of the forest and understand the concept of what makes a ‘forest’ a ‘rainforest’. Besides the walk, we went up to the Yokahu Observation Tower, which gives a great panaromic view (see photo below), and enjoyed the La Mina falls taking the La Mina trail (another trail to La Mina Falls is the Big Tree trail, less prettier but stroller friendly). We also decided to walkup to the Summit; however it had gotten quite foggy by then and we didn’t get a great view, so take a call before trekking all the way up. After a great dinner nearby, we returned to San Juan.

Food: We ate at Don Pepe, amongst the best meals we had in Puerto Rico, with the most delicious Vegetarian Mofongo and Tres Leche.

Tips:

Zip lining is popular around El Yunque, with multiple adventure parks within 5-10 minutes of the park. You may want to try it out!

Day 5: Rio Camuy Cave Park

After a leisurely breakfast, we drove to the Rio Camuy Cave Park (Cavernas de Camuy-1.5 hour drive); it is close to Arecibo but we did not have enough time to go there on day 1 after landing. There was a long waiting of over an hour, and probably reaching early would have been more prudent given the holiday time. We were, quite frankly, not impressed by the experience. The stalactites and stalagmites were of course beautiful, but the English guide was basically mumbling incoherently and we couldn’t understand anything of the commentary. We later saw similar caverns near Austin, Texas, which was a much better experience. We were probably unlucky, as this place otherwise has great reviews. But this is probably skippable if you have only 4-5 days in Puerto Rico. We salvaged the evening by driving back to old San Juan and enjoying a beautiful sunset (see photo below) and delicious dinner.

Food: Café Puerto Rico in old San Juan served us a great dinner, particularly the tres leches (we had three of them!)

Day 6: Old San Juan

We checked out of the hotel and parked our car at the La Puntilla parking lot (cheapest amongst the parking lots in old San Juan). We chanced upon a visitor center 2 min from the parking place and picked up a map from there. There are multiple trolleys/buses at old San Juan that take us around for free so we could just hop on and off. The entire area is very picturesque, but definite must-dos include El Morro fort (and the beautiful cemetery next to it-see photo below) and La Princess fountain (especially around sunset). We also went to the Cristobal fort, but liked El Morro more and feel that Cristobal may be skipped if you running short on time. Definitely also have a look at one of the few narrowest houses of the world at La Casa Estrecha at 101 Calle Tetuan (5 feet wide) (see photo below).

Food: We had great food at Cafe Berlin.

We flew back to Boston that night with some of our best memories and feeling relaxed and rejuvenated for the year ahead!