El Yunque & Bio Bay /Day #2 (Sat Feb 22)



Saturday morning we woke up early and ventured our way inland to go hike around El Yunque National Rainforest! It was about an hour and a half drive from our hotel. But along the way we started to wonder if we should have purchased some ponchos. So on the way there we ended up going on a wild goose chase to find some ponchos. After finding a Walmart and standing in a ridiculously long and slow moving line, we got our ponchos. Which in the end we didn't even need them. Isn't that how it works though? If we didn't have them, we would have wished we had them, but then having them we didn't need to use them.

 

There is one road going into the rainforest. Only one way in and only one way out. Which for tourists like ourselves simplifies things. The road was narrow and the drive was beautiful. It was just so green and lush. 

We stopped at the visitor center to figure out what we should do and see while we were there. They gave us a paper map of the trails. (I found this one online and drew the route that we hiked so you could get more of a visual of what we did).

We parked our car at the Big Tree Trail Head and that's where we started.

This is us along the trail headed to La Mina Falls. This part of the trail was concrete, but it was kinda wet so it was a little bit slippery. Thankfully we had good shoes on. But look at that scenery. It's not every day that you get to experience that.

 This is us when we arrived at the falls. There were several people getting in the water to swim around. But we weren't interested. You can tell by the picture how much mist there was. We continued from there to head on to the Peak trail.

 We noticed that this trail wasn't as popular as the falls one. It was suppose to take 4 hours round trip, but we knew we could do it a lot faster. Along the trail we would see waterfall after waterfall. It was like we were hiking inside a postcard picture.

 Jesse has a great eye for spotting things that others wouldn't notice. He saw this SNAIL climbing up a tree. When he pulled it off the tree the snail retreated into it's shell. I couldn't believe the size of this thing. Only in the rainforest.

 When we finally made it to the top of El Yunque Peak it was surrounded by clouds that we couldn't see anything, but whiteness. Not gonna lie I was really bummed. The reward for reaching the top is the view.

This trail was a lot more primitive than the concrete one to the waterfall. I liked it. And again...The scenery is to die for.

The trail split off and we could go back to the bottom or over to this tower. So we decided to go see the tower.

 The top of the tower had a way better view than what we could see on top of the Peak. So I was very happy we chose to see the tower.

 At this point we had met 3 guys and we got talking with each other about where we were from, what we had done and why we were there. Ya know? All the tourist talk. They offered to drive us back to our car since we left it at the start of the waterfall hike. It was very nice of them to offer. We were going to just walk down the road once we came out of the trails, but this worked too. We were feeling hungry and thought it would be nice to get going. We had hiked for 5 hours through El Yunque and our little snacks weren't holding us over anymore.

On our drive out we stopped to get a picture by La Coca Falls.

At this point we headed to the city Fajardo to continue our adventurous day. On the way we found a yummy Mexican restaurant and a frozen yogurt shop (not the greatest, I was wishing for some YogurtLand at the moment). Trying to kill time before our Bio Bay tour started at 8:00pm. Thank goodness for smart phones to gives us GPS directions and restaurants near our location.

We got to the bay and checked in with our tour company. All the while we were waiting for them to get things started I sat and wondered if I dared bring my camera with me. We were going to be on a kayak for the next two hours and my camera isn't waterproof. So it made me nervous to bring it along. But I wondered if I could try and risk it and just be careful? No. It wasn't worth losing my camera and not having one for the rest of the vacation. Jesse brought his GoPro camera with us, but we got this one and only picture from it. For some reason it stopped working after we got started. Such is life. I'll just have to explain things the best I can because this was one of the coolest experiences we have ever done.

I pulled some pictures from the web to try and give a good feel of how things went. You can see in our picture above it was pretty dark. So they fashion each kayak with a glow stick on the front and back. We were all to follow the guide in a single file line with another guide at the end. We paddled out of the bay and they took us into a channel with mangrove trees. Once we got in there is was really calm and dark. Next thing we hear the guide yell back to us "Put your hand in the water". So we did and we were amazed to see it start to glow neon blue with the touch of our hands.

It was something like this. Again I found this picture online, but it gives you a glimpse of what we saw. Truthfully pictures don't do it justice. It's one of those things that you have to experience in person.

How does it glow? Well, the water has microscopic plankton called,  Pyrodinium Bahamense that glow when they feel threatened. So with the touch of the paddle or our hands the water around it glows. Almost sparkles really.

The channel that we were kayaking in was a mile long and it leads to a lagoon called Laguna Grande. It wasn't very wide and each side was full of mangrove trees that were so thick they met in the middle like a tunnel. It made the channel very dark, so this is where the glow sticks on the kayaks came in handy. Besides the glowing water, the glow sticks were the only light we could see.

As we got closer to the lagoon the glow seemed to get brighter and brighter. Every so often we would see a streak of blue under the water left from a fish swimming away really fast. Seriously the whole time, Jesse and I were just like kids in awe of this unbelievable experience.

Once we got to the lagoon the guides let us paddle around for a little bit before we had to head back through the channel. We were told that the night we chose was perfect. There wasn't a moon out and the current in the channel was perfect to see the glowing water through the channel. I guess you can't always see the water glowing in the channel. And we were able to see it going in and going out. We felt very fortunate.

As we started to head back to the bay, and Jesse and I wanted to stay in the back of the line. We started to talk with the guide that was bringing in the rear. He was telling us that he had been doing his job for about 8 months and every night was like experiencing it for the first time. Never got bored of it. What a cool job?

We made it back into the bay and was sad that our tour was over. But VERY satisfied with everything about it.

What a great day!!!