The main feature of Bahia de Boqueron is the beach, all two miles of it. It has been developed as a state park, with cabanas and apartments for rent, and so it is kept quite clean. In the summer (I am told) it is crowded, but even in the winter people come from San Juan and nearby Mayaguez for the weekend.

Easter weekend is especially busy, and the Thursday before it the streets were filled with delivery trucks and also with beer salesmen pushing full pallets of Medalla on dollies where their trucks could not go. During the days the beach was crowded, and evenings there were noisy parties with several bars pumping out music at very high volumes.

Not much has changed in Boqueron since last year (see Cruise08_7.html ), but there is one good-sized new condo building going up. I suspect that these condos, like the gated condos with the private marina, are intended as summer homes for wealthy Puerto Ricans from San Juan, rather than as winter homes for mainlanders.

Since we like quiet and privacy, we usually anchor well out and away from the other boats, but we have discovered an interesting phenomenon.

Alert readers of these pages will have noticed that we have used the tiny bar "Sunset Sunrise" as our entree into this world. It is, of course, our practice when cruising to find a congenial bar and move into its society, and here we settled early and have never regretted it. Lizette, the owner, expressed interest in Barbara's professional life, so I made for her a little plaque with appropriate pictures of Boqueron harbor and "Sunset" and "Sunrise" in Akkadian.

It is not at all uncommon to see a horse clattering up the street with a rider sitting very erect, often bareback with just a hackamore instead of a regular bridle. The riders are always men, never women.

On our left, the world went straight up and was tree-
covered, with vines and flowers, and sometimes a house inserted at the edge of the road. It was suddenly cooler, and dark.
We could see gardens of vegetables or banana or plantain trees edging down the steep hills, row by parallel row cut into the hillsides. This is dogged, laborious farming, with a machete, mostly.

Wrong, as it turned out. We saw no sign of any and when we asked, people suggested San Juan or Fajardo, neither of which seemed appealing. We were about to give up when Barbara saw one of those blue signs with a bed, indicating lodging. It didn't take us long

We, however, drove back into the park and up to a trailhead, where we left the car and walked along the edge of a valley, almost even with the tops of the trees below us, to a pool at the foot of a high waterfall, where families swam and played in the water. The forest is a magical place, with flowers by the road and trails, flowers in the treetops, frogs calling in the coolness, and birds all over with high fluting voices.

[Barbara] Once in a while we would come to a gap in the trees and look out over mountain slopes, wooded, plunging miles down toward an empty forested valley, and out beyond, more sharp, wooded peaks. On the trees near us, vines hung heavy and clumps of epiphytes, white ghostly plants, perched on the branches, their roots hanging down into air from twenty feet above our heads. And flowers in the trees, bursts of intense yellow or bright red-orange.

The park has an elegant interpretive center, an open, airy building (really just a roof, for the most part), approached by bridges over ravines full of tall tropical trees and with water running below. On the side of a hill, it is at treetop height and birds fly around it and through it.

We walked down a paved (!) path for about forty-five minutes to a waterfall full of families playing in its pools. This was very pleasant, but not very pristine. We knew there were other trails, but left them for another day and went back to the highway to head for San Juan. As it was a holiday (long) weekend, the traffic in the opposite direction (toward the beach) was very heavy, but we found San Juan almost deserted. A friend in Boqueron said that everybody in San Juan was in Boqueron, but I know for a fact that some of them were in Luquillo (another beach resort), too.

We could not see the whole city in a day, but we walked up one beautiful streeet after another, and when we were tired or thirsty there was always a cafe where we could get out of the sun, get a drink, and rest.

Between the fortress and the town is a fairly narrow neck of land that was cleared and kept open to give the fort a clear field of fire against attacks from the land side. Of course it is windy, and people of all ages, often in family groups, come here to fly kites.