You’ve probably seen photos of the Arecibo Observatory. It’s been in the mass media for ages. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gn0LUCrEbd8) I remember it from grade school, when Carl Sagan’s Cosmos became an easy video fill-in for substitute teachers. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6eBmRSJE_I) But do you know what became of it? We knew before we arrived on the island, but like rubber-necking on the interstate, we had to see it anyway.

The town of Arecibo is an hour drive west from San Juan. The observatory is another forty minutes into the hills, so we got an early start. Going west on Route 22 was pretty straight forward on a weekend morning. The only downside was extended driving in the sometimes heavy tropical rain showers that seemed to be following us. The first actual challenge of the day was adding fuel to our Hyundai Accent’s tank. About half way to our intended exit, we decided to make a pitstop in the town of Manatí, where a billboard on the freeway indicated there was a gas station. I followed the signs and soon spotted our destination. I just couldn’t get to it. Highway 2 paralelles the freeway and has a complicated set of traffic lights and service roads. I wasn’t sure of the translation for some of the street signs, so our path included several unplanned course reversals. Finally, I got the gas station right where I wanted it. With a successful entry, I pulled up to a pump and made my first credit card pre-pay transaction entirely in Spanish, because it was the first pump I’d seen in ages without a credit card reader. It wasn’t pretty, and I ended up with twenty five dollars of gas on pump five instead of twenty, but in the end, Marco, I think that was his name, gave me cash change for the gas that wouldn’t fit in the car. Did I mention I took several weeks of Spanish in college? (I was never gifted in the foreign languages.)

Getting back on the highway was about the same amount of awesome navigation as getting to the gas station. Since I’d already made all the mistakes, it felt like I knew what I was doing, even if The Captain would express otherwise. We zipped down to the next exit at Arecibo for Highway 129 and climbed the the hills to the south. Understand that we are not new driving in austere environments, but this was a special kind of motor vehicle operation once we left 129. The roads were narrow, even for our tiny car. They wandered all around, and up and down. The consequences for leaving the road surface were serious. Steep drops and jungle awaited the unlucky driver. When we finally arrived at the lower parking area for the observatory, there was only one other car. Not a surprise, considering the drive was about as uncomfortable as the previous day’s ferry ride.

The climb is no joke. It is, however, worth the effort.

Speechless. I had no idea! The now destroyed 1000’ dish was suspended on cables and was made of mesh aluminum panels like the section in the foreground.

For scale, find the big yellow backhoe parked next to the antenna array at the bottom of the dish.

The visit to the Observatory was kinda sad, like the previous day’s visit to the old Navy base, but it’s something we had to do. We were in the neighborhood, right? There has been speculation about rebuilding it, but it was obsolete years ago. There is still science happening there. The analysis of the decades of data collected by the giant antenna will be for the basis of many PhDs in the future. (More information about what happened here: https://youtu.be/mwLDhTRX18A)

We rounded out the day trip by driving back to the north coast of the island and the old colonial town of Arecibo. Founded in 1556 at the mouth of a small river called Rio Grande, the town isn’t a vibrant metropolis and doesn’t have the charm of Ponce, but it does have a harbor, light house, beach, and some side-show attractions.

When we arrive on the coast, all we really wanted to see was the light house. Our guide book said it had a nice view from atop a large stone outcropping called Punta Morillo, but it didn’t mention what it took to get there. It turns out there is a kind of amusement park and aquarium between the road and the light house. For $15 each, we could park, watch the fish, play on the kiddie pirate ships, traverse the haunted house style pirate caves, see a live burro and tortoise and then climb the hill to the light house. We did most of that in half an hour, and then went up to the light house. If it was anywhere in the continental US, we’d have bypassed it, but since it was in Puerto Rico, why not? The typical Spanish lighthouse was built in 1898, the last one built before the US took over. The view from the observation deck was nice, and offered an unobstructed panorama of the coast and the karst hills rising behind the coastal plain.

Looking west from the top of Punta Morillo. Pirate ships in the foreground and the town of Arecibo across the bay.

There is a small display of locally collected historical artifacts in the lighthouse.

The final stop on our way back to home base was the Birth of the New World Statue. Heading east along the coast on highway 681, the statue is visible for some distance. Our guide book describes it as Puerto Rico’s biggest and most bizarre new attraction. The work of Russian sculptor Zurab Tsereteli is 362 feet tall and is the symbol of the north coast’s effort to revitalize as a tourist destination. It’s also the source of some controversy among descendants of the Taíno tribes. The oddest part for us was that you can’t really get to it. It is fenced off on a hill about a quarter mile off the road. There isn’t even a pull-off to stop for a photo. Honestly, it was just the oddity we needed to encourage a hasty retreat to the hotel pool. So, with the quick snapshot recorded, we called it a day and retreated to Condado.

New Year, New Adventure - Part 4 of 5

New Year, New Adventure- Part 5 of 5

New Year, New Adventure - Part 3 of 5