Little Yellow Dune Buggy

A tropical rainforest is no place for a car with no roof!

We took the Travel Bugs on a trip to Puerto Rico’s rainforest, which is a fabulously maintained national park. We saw beautiful waterfalls and miles and miles of lush tropical jungle. We climbed the 96 steps to the top of a neat old stone observation tower and marveled at the views of the colorful flowers. It rains 1600 times per year in the rainforest for a total of 240 inches of rain. Holy cow…and we thought Seattle was rainy! It was hot, humid and sunny the say we were there.

Although Puerto Rico has been a commonwealth of the United States for over 100 years, it still has an inherently Spanish nature.

English is spoken and understood in most of San Juan (the capital city); on the rest of the island, Spanish is still numero uno. Local currency is US dollars. “Old San Juan” has 16th-century restored buildings, 200-year-old houses overlooking cobblestone streets, museums, art galleries, bookstores, and more, all within a 7-block-square neighborhood.

The government runs 13 public beaches, each with lockers, showers and picnic tables. One is designed to be completely handicapped accessible. Snorkeling, scuba diving, windsurfing and deep-sea fishing are all great almost anywhere on this big (3,500 square mile) island.

Little Yellow Dune Buggy is still driving through the Caribbean! He stopped by the cruise ship dock in St. Thomas.

Once the home port for notorious pirates Captain Kidd and Bluebeard, St. Thomas became the shopping center of the Virgin Islands early on…it was rich in loot stolen by the pirates of the Caribbean in their attacks on galleons laden with treasures from the New World.

St. Thomas has been controlled at one time or another by Spain, England, France, Holland and Denmark. The islands have experienced over 400 years of hostile European takeovers, wars, lootings, pirates, slave trade, revolutions and liberations. In 1755 the Danes made St. Thomas a free port, and in 1917 the US purchased St. Thomas (and St Croix and St. John) for $25 million. Even though English is the official language and the currency used is the US dollar, the islands are an unincorporated territory of the US so the residents are not protected by the US Constitution, do not vote in presidential elections, and have no vote in Congress.

We took the Travel Bugs on an underwater adventure excursion (it was sort of like riding a moped underwater, while wearing an astronaut’s helmet which allowed us to breathe underwater). The snorkeling was awesome, too…we swam with turtles, rays, countless brightly colored fish, and we marveled at the beautiful underwater plant life.

[This entry was edited by GeekGirl on Monday, March 07, 2005 at 5:14:45 PM.]

The dune buggy drove around this side of the island and out onto Devil's Bridge.
If you want to read more about Devil's Bridge (and Antigua in general), just read the previous log. 😎

It is said that there are 365 beaches in Antigua…one for each day of the year. Many are inaccessible, but most are popular sugar-white beaches wrapped around aquamarine coves, ideal for swimming, snorkeling and diving. Antigua (pronounced An-tee-ga, not An-tee-gwa) is quite small (16 x 12 miles), and about a third of the population lives in the capital city of St. John’s.

Nelson’s Dockyard and English Harbour Town is on the southern tip of the island. The British Navy used it from 1707-1900, and it is now completely restored. It reminded me of a small British version of Virginia’s Colonial Williamsburg. We hired a cab (a minivan, really) along with 5 others to take us to visit the Dockyard, and we stopped to take a few pictures along the way. Some of the most beautiful views on the island are near the “Fort Berkely” cache site!

On the way back to the ship we drove on a winding road through Antigua’s rain forest. There were farmlands filled with banana, mango, and pineapple groves, but even though it’s called “Fig Drive” there wasn’t a fig in sight. It turns out that “fig” is the Antiguan word for banana, and there were plenty of those!

We still had some time left before we had to board the ship, so we hired a cab to take us out to Devil’s Bridge. We were the only ones there, and the views were awesome. Devil’s Bridge is a natural bridge carved into the stone and coral reef by eons of water crashing into it. Back in the days of slave trading here, many jumped to there deaths from Devil’s Bridge rather than be forced into a life of slavery.

Grenada (pronounced Gre-NAY-da; Gre-nah-da is in Spain) is known as the spice island. They produce vast quantities of cloves, cinnamon, and mace, and they produce one-third of the world’s nutmeg (yum!).

Grenada was “discovered” by Christopher Columbus, and of all the Caribbean islands he visited, Grenada best approximated Columbus’ original goal—to open a source of spices to Europe by sailing west instead of east. Grenada was granted full independence from Britain in 1974.

Maintaining the environment is top priority here. No building can stand higher than the tallest palm tree, and national parks continue to be developed. Grenada is only 21 miles long and 12 miles wide at its widest, but it includes an astounding variety of terrain: lush green jungle-covered mountains, crop-covered hills, rushing rivers, cascading waterfalls, placid lakes, an extinct volcano, and 45 of the most picture-perfect white sand beaches anywhere on the planet.

The country was hit hard by recent hurricanes, and evidence of the destruction is everywhere. We saw damaged buildings, missing roofs, and a large stadium that was completely collapsed.

We walked up the steep, narrow roads to reach the site of a former military fort to check out the attached lighthouse and the views from the top of the capital city, St. George’s.