To welcome this year’s summer season, the opening salvo of choice goes to that purportedly enchanting island of Puerto Rico.
A week before the Carib outing, I was sitting in a Starbucks with my laptop and a crew of neighbors, trading stories on how the workweek was riding the usual suckage train. “Hey”, Wall Street Dude quipped, “Let’s go to Puerto Rico.” Film Girl and I instantly concurred, desperately in need of a fleeting hiatus from occupational drudgery. No further discussion was necessary. I whip out my laptop, navigate to reliable expedia.com and peruse the online deals. The site listed a reasonably priced package tour with roundtrip flights and a couple of nights at the top luxury resort on the island: the Ritz-Carlton. “Great Success!” With no further discussions, we select the package, whip out our plastic, and just like that, we were on our way.
After four hours of flying on JetBlue (Even More Legroom!) and equal rounds of inflight brewskies, we arrive early afternoon in sun-drenched San Juan. We hail a cab and check in the Ritz-Carlton, a 5-star luxury resort right smack in the superb beach town of Isla Verde, just outside the city center. After quickly grabbing an authentic Puerto Rican lunch at the nearby famous Metropol restaurant, we head straight to the hotel pool and navigate into a glass doorway which leads us straight to the playa.
I switch into vacation mode, order three rounds of overpriced, in-house pina coladas and snooze on the beach fronting the resort, overlooking the Caribbean waters, aqua blue, clear and warm as baby piss.
Three hours of lying on the beach go by and Old San Juan beckoned. We suit up, hail a hotel cab and speed into the old city. We explore the outer walls of the great El Morro Fort, a massive citadel which defended the island from marauding Jack Sparrows. The Caribbean sun goes down and we proceed to a roadhouse-type bar named No-no’s where we order a cold round of the local cerveza, Medalla, rock to hair band music and mingle with the local Latin cougars.
The impromptu bar crawl continued as we wander into Cristo Street and stumble upon a hole-in-the-wall called El Batey, a tavern which seemed like an old Spanish grotto devoted to alcohol worship. Here we meet a burly local tattooed bartender named Christian who treats us to a few shots of tequila with hot sauce. We chat about the local bar scene and discuss the intricate variances between Puerto Rican ladies and the rest of Latinlandia.
We bid "hasta luego!" to Christian, trudge along cobblestoned Cristo Street and enter the nearby wine bar El Buren, where we seize a healthy platter of camarones and a pitcher of sangria. The gang chats it up with the hip bartender and the charming receptionist and we talk about how this tiny island seemed to be truly “La Isla del Encanto”. After very little prodding, we haul the bartender and receptionist to the local salsa bar, Rhumba along the trendy San Sebastian Street where we meet up with more locals and do the obligatory rounds of mojitos.
The tenets of self-incrimination dictate that the next portion of the alcohol-induced nocturnal activities, cannot be described in this narrative. Let’s just say it involved a local cemetery, cigar skins, a bottle of premium Bacardi and a fedora.
We ended up at 4:30 in the morning at the top chi-chi club in San Juan – Brava, Coronas in hand, watching the inebriated and spaced-out local pretty people gyrate to a strange, inter-galactic mashup of techno and reggaeton.
Three hours passed by. The Caribbean sun rose like an angry meatball. Next on the program was the perfunctory tourist trap: a catamaran sailing trip around the surrounding islands of Icacos. Given last night’s blockbuster shenanigans, most of the day-long outing involved slumbering on the large net behind the catamaran and occasionally getting up to down glasses of the charter’s unlimited supply of watered down rum punch.
The sails folded up, the catamaran docked and we headed back to charming Old San Juan for a taste of the authentic Puerto Rican delicacy, mofongos at Café Puerto Rico, a remarkable restaurant near the old city’s bustling town square. Cruise ships come into Old San Juan about three times a week and the city gets busier with all the pina colada drinking vacationers in their Hawaiian shirts and obnoxious frat boys spending mommy’s dollar at kitschy Senor Frog’s. The night was young. Energized, the rum raiders proceeded to the Nuyorican salsa café, a trendy live music venue where we watch a great salsa band tear the place up. After upsetting attempts at salsa, the group, worn-out, retired to the hotel jacuzzi.
Our final day on the island was devoted to trekking the El Yunque National Rainforest. After a filling brunch in the middle of this seemingly limitless tropical jungle, we hiked the trail to the famous La Mina Falls. Frankly, I was unimpressed. Aware that our return flight was just four hours away, we hiked back to the parking lot and raced to San Juan on our rented sedan. We capped the trip off by spending the lazy Sunday afternoon at the seaside Condado district.
This narrative serves as a bonafide endorsement to explore beyond the shore and trace the footsteps of the home of Charlie Masso and the rest of Menudo. Puerto Rico, the gateway to the Caribbean, is no less than a paradise of rum and reggaeton, a unique island of the old and the new, and the perfect place to flush away that hard-earned disposable income.
