Bree's Blog

New Year's Resolution #2: Puerto Rico, Puerto Pobre

This brothel, er, motel had rooms outfitted with lots of mirrors, for starters.

By Bree Barton

Well, we’re halfway through January. President Obama is all set for his historic inauguration. The next season of LOST is about to start. The Jonas brothers are dating again. New England is locked in a nasty winter chill. And in Dallas, Texas, it’s 65 degrees.

So I guess it’s time for my second New Year’s Resolution.

Now, as I was sifting through my experiences over the past year as I came up with three dynamite resolutions for 2009, it occurred to me that most of the terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad fiascos occurred in the same three-week stretch. The September-October period (aka, The Age of Debacles) wasn’t one of my best. As it so happens, the incident that inspired my second impassioned goal transpired a mere two weeks after I birthed my baby battery in the harsh streets of New York. Only, this one occurred on foreign soil.

Well, kind of foreign soil. “Commonwealth soil” is probably more accurate. Colonial politics, anyone?

New Year’s Resolution #2: Plan better vacations. Or, “Puerto Rico, Puerto Pobre.”

The day my car left its last dewy drop of motor oil on some ungrateful Jersey highway, I was scheduled to leave for Puerto Rico in less than forty-eight hours. It was September 23^rd.

But wait. Let’s go back a bit. When I bought these tickets originally, it was July. I was eating fresh blueberries from my backyard, watching my skin freckle, frolicking in the sunflowered fields, and having scones and tea in the sala with friends while discussing philosophy. One pleasant July morning, I woke up, yawned and stretched in the slanted late morning sun, and made my way to the computer (active addiction!) to where my weekly email from Travelzoo awaited me.

Now, as many of you may or may not be aware, someone at Travelzoo had this brilliant marketing idea to send out emails every week to travel-hungry people like me, showcasing the best deals on flights, hotels, etc. They call it "The Top 20." It's basically like parading a kindergarten class in front of a child molester. Who wouldn't jump at the bait? And sure enough, on that languid July morning, the wanderlust was just too much. A roundtrip ticket from JFK to Puerto Rico for only $230? I couldn't resist. I whipped out my credit card and purchased it on the spot.

Of course it didn't occur to me at the time that perhaps there was a reason all those flights in September/October were so cheap. A reason called hurricane season.

And so, in the midst of my car going caput and having to sell it for scrap metal, Hurricane Kyle was working its magic around the tiny isle of Puerto Rico, drowning people with reckless, wreckful abandon. In the meantime, I was fielding calls and emails from my mother, brother, and a few conscientious friends, all uniformly along the lines of, “BREE! Four people just died in flash flooding in Puerto Rico!!! Considering your recent luck…do you really want to push it?”

I decided that no, I did not want to push it. I’d just pushed a 15-pound battery through the streets of Manhattan, for chrissakes. I was all pushed out.

So I cancelled my original PR trip. Then, wonder of all wonders, they offered me the chance to reschedule it for only $100. Which is what I’d gotten for my Corolla, right? Spending that 100 bucks seemed justified. So I rebooked my trip for October 6-14^th. Perhaps this would mitigate, at least in part, that nightmarish week culminating in explosive car engines and atrophied dreams.

Of course, I wasn’t completely out of the woods yet. The whole island was still under what they call a "tropical depression." I would later find this term to be rather apt, since it could also be used fairly accurately to describe my general state of mind during the first half of my trip.

For one thing, it didn't occur to me that JetBlue's funky flight times would be an issue. "Fly out of New York at 11:59 pm and arrive at 3:47 am?" I thought optimistically to myself when I initially purchased my ticket. "Piece of cake!" What I wasn't accounting for was the very nice and well-meaning Puerto Rican man who sat next to me on the flight and talked to me the whole damn time. I would literally have my head bent in that horribly awkward angle (it's almost like some scheming airplane engineer is trying to make it categorically impossible to get comfortable) with my eyes closed, and this man would lean over and say, "So, have you thought about going to…" and thus would begin the next strand of conversation. And, because I am not very good at being a jerk, I didn't have the nerve to say, "SHUT THE HELL UP!"

Three and a half hours after takeoff, I hadn't gotten one wink of sleep. I arrived in Aguadilla (northwest tip of the island) in a total daze.

And I had to get a rental car.

And I had to drive it.

And I had no place to stay.

And it was raining.

My trip had officially commenced.

In a sense, my trip was a disaster before it even began. Let me explain. Once I'd gotten my rental car, it took me a goddamn hour to get out of the airport. Out of the airport. Not the city of Aguadilla. Not the tip of the island. Out of the Aguadilla airport. It's like I was on this endless loop and I could not get out. Ever seen that B horror movie with Sam Neill called In the Mouth of Madness? Well, it was like that, except there wasn't a Stephen King-esque closet of gooey monsters waiting for me at the end. Although there might as well have been. I finally, finally got out of the airport onto the main highway.

And then I stayed in a brothel for the night.

Ok, well, technically, it wasn't a brothel. At least it wasn't a brothel per se. It's what they call a "motel," but the guy at Enterprise smirkingly explained to me that a motel doesn't mean the same thing in PR that it does in the States. Basically, a brothel is where you pay for a place to "sleep"…in six-hour increments. You park your car in a garage, then close the garage door behind you. Then you step into a sparsely furnished room which has a lot (I'm not kidding: a lot) of mirrors. Then you open up a little door in the wall, and a mysterious man comes to collect your $30 (cash only, of course) through the hole. You never see him. He never sees you. Then you are free to do whatever you'd like, with only the mirrors watching, until those six hours are up. There is no blanket on the bed. On the wall is a list of room service items, including an array of flavored lubricants, prophylactics, and oddly shaped plugs. It's basically a brothel without the hired help.

And this is how my PR vacation began: going to sleep at 6 am for 6 hours, exhausted, frustrated, and a little unclear as to the cleanness of the sheets.

Nothing nearly as scandalous happened over the next four days (that was part of the problem). I quickly realized what a very different kind of trip this was for me than the ones I'm used to taking. Case in point: I generally don't get a rental car when I travel. I mean, in Europe, why would you need to when public transport is so effective? But in PR, there's no such thing as reliable public transportation. So I had a car, which meant I was constantly getting lost (road signs are horrific) and felt like I couldn't drink (no need to say how much that sucked). There's also no hostel culture, so I was paying a pretty penny for private hotel rooms ($60-80 a night) and not meeting anyone. My general MO when it comes to traveling is to bound off alone, meet other cool travelers along the way, and pal around with them. Italy, Spain, the UK, Greece, Germany—it's always worked before. But it just wasn't happening in PR.

To make matters worse, EVERY SINGLE RESTAURANT my Lonely Planet guidebook recommended was closed. I'm not kidding. On my second night (brothel +1), I went to bed with no dinner, starving, because every freaking restaurant on the west coast of the island was out of service. It was uncanny. I kept driving to all of these out-of-the-way places, which usually necessitated driving in circles for at least twenty minutes, and then once I got there I'd discover they were closed on Tuesdays, or closed on Wednesdays, or closed during the off-season, or closed for renovations, or just closed for no reason whatsoever. It was absurd. And I couldn't even go snorkeling in the bioluminescent bay because they couldn't do a trip for one person. Talk about the lame side to flying solo.

Welcome to Puerto Rico.

So my drive down the west coast was rather disappointing. Then I went to Ponce — finally hoping I'd have some fun — and it began POURING down rain. Actually, I should be fair — racing through Ponce soaking wet and splashing through puddles was actually pretty awesome. But then I wanted to go out dancing, consulted my Lonely Planet guidebook, found several clubs that were purportedly open, and got all dressed up, only to find out that — surprise, surprise — LP was wrong yet again. There are no clubs open in Ponce on Wednesdays; not a single one. So I spent the evening in my hotel room, finishing The Unbearable Lightness of Being and crying myself to sleep. Awesome vay-k!

A sidenote here: the Lonely Planet writers are so ecologically self-righteous. I mean, I'm as green as the next graduate from a liberal arts college in the northeast. But do they really have to be so high and mighty about it? "Yes, you may want to go see the bioluminescent bay in a motorboat, and here's their info…but just know that you're killing the environment when you go." Well, thanks a friggin’ lot, you pretentious assholes. In addition to hocking up bio-toxic fumes, I am now choking on the toxic mass of my own guilt. And you know, maybe if you gave me options that were actually OPEN, I wouldn't have to go environmentally HAYWIRE on this island's ASS.

Luckily, about halfway into the trip, I finally got some ying to my yang. The weather cleared up. I met some cool people. I went to San Juan, Bayamon, Vieques. I frolicked in the ocean. I spent way, way too much money… but I had fried codfish and yucca stuffed with crab and sushi and green plantains filled with lechon. And when I finally found a bioluminescent bay tour that permitted solitary travelers (sans motorboat, of course), I swam by moonlight in a bay where every stroke was like pushing through stardust.

Sigh.

I guess, all things considered, it wasn’t such a rough trip. Still...there were some invaluable life lessons to be learned.

I think I’d like to revise my second resolution.

NYR Numero Dos: Don’t go on vacations during hurricane season. Don’t stay in brothels. And Lonely Planet? You can go to hell.

Bliss arrives, and not a moment too soon.

More adventure: being blonde in Puerto Rico.