The next day, we decided to go to a limestone cave because it was raining. Everyone I have talked to about rain in a tropics has said that it’s not a big deal–there’s a little sprinkle and then it clears up. I beg to differ:

Of course, it didn’t rain like that the whole time. The rain came and went with confusing frequency. I am used to clouds pulling in, settling over an area, raining steadily for a long time, and then going away. The clouds in Puerto Rico appear suddenly, pee on you, and then disappear. It’s disconcerting. It would be sunny one moment and then pouring the next. Kyle and I got soaked more than once.

So we went to a cave. To get there, we rented a car and drove. I have never been to Hawaii or any other tropical place–unless Forida counts–so I had never seen a landscape like Puerto Rico before. It is the first place I’ve been that is prettier than Sonoma County. There are giant flowering bushes everywhere you look: trees covered in what look like hibiscus blossoms, orange magnolia-like plants, pale-pink jacarandas, bright yellow crepe myrtles, and so on. This is in the middle of tons of palm trees. I saw coconuts and breadfruit and other weird fruits all over Puerto Rico. It would be impossible to starve there. A typical hillside might have a maga tree, a wild cotton plant, a fruiting plantain, palm trees, and vines. In the middle of all this tangle, a horse may be grazing, or someone might be holding up a land crab for sale at a roadside stand.

I took hundreds of pictures of the countryside, but not many came out because Kyle couldn’t pull over for me to take pictures. That is because Puerto Ricans drive like maniacs. They don’t signal, they cut across lanes, they swerve around you for no reason–they basically do exactly what they want at any given time. It made a sense to me because that is how I would drive if I weren’t oppressed by the possibility of traffic tickets. However, it was a little scary at first. This is the best I could do with pictures on the way to the cave:

Typical countryside that in no way illustrates how pretty it is there. That is a maga tree to the right, I think. Imagine it covered with red flowers.

Pretty girl with her schoolmates

A large, but typical, house

Fruit stand

The cave was closed because the generator was dead and there was no power. I knew this was a possibility, so we went to the largest telescope in the world, which was a few miles away. It’s the Arecibo Observatory, owned by Cornell University. It’s a giant satellite, the kind that takes pictures of galaxies and the close-ups of Mars.

It was humongous. It’s built on a giant sinkhole, and really my pictures don’t get the size of it very well, so here’s an aerial view from Wikipedia:

Imagine if they took the girders and cables off the Golden Gate Bridge, strung them across a crater-sized hole of aluminum grids, and you’ve got the observatory.

I wanted to go up in the satellite, but we weren’t allowed. It made me wish I had gone into sciences.