Puerto Rico Day 3: It's a Jungle Out There

We woke up to another rainy day. We would be spending the day in the rainforest where it's rainy and humid anyway so we didn't think it would be much of an issue for us. We set off for the hour or so drive to El Yunque National Forest, the only rainforest in the US forest system. At only 28,000 acres, it's small compared to other rainforests. The US forest service does NOT make it easy to visit. You can't just drive up to it. There is a small window of time exactly one month ahead where you must buy a pass online for a set time frame to enter the park. I respect that they are trying to limit visitors but this seems like not the way. Our timeframe was 8a-11a. We didn't have to be in/out during that time, we just had to arrive by that time. And we were running late.

We did decide to stop for breakfast on the way at Rico Pan Bakery where we got ham, cheese, and egg sandwiches.

We made it to the park just in time before 11a only to find out that several roads were closed due to flooding so they weren't letting people in to certain parts of the park. We decided to stick around and see what we could so we stopped at a little river to eat our breakfast.

We then decided to do a short hike down the Angelito Trail, less than a mile to/from what I assume is another section of this river.

My rainforest hair has already activated.

We get to the end and what do we find? A local playing Candy Crush by the river.

Other locals were more unplugged.

We drove further into the park and came upon a ranger station where they were checking passes. It was after our designated time but this wasn't supposed to be an issue according to the website. The ranger was an absolute jerk though and tried to tell us that we were past our time even though the park roads had been closed during our window of time. After some discussion, we were able to talk him into letting us go through. We stopped at Yokahu Tower to climb the 69 foot tower for the view across the island.

We decided to turn from there and head back to the entrance, stopping at Coca Falls along the way.

Rainforest hair looking worse and worse.

We exited the rainforest and stopped off at the zipline center just down the road. We joined a group and had a great couple of hours of ziplining thru the forest. Just as we finished, the torrential rain started again so we got out of dodge and started back towards Old San Juan. Since it was on the way, we popped into the outlet mall to visit the Polo store then went back to the apartment for a while to clean up, dry off, and chill.

We didn't have dinner reservations for the night so we thought we'd try the restaurant directly across from our apartment. It was part of a hotel. Not having a reservation didn't seem to be an issue.

Dinner was an order of chicken wings and grilled octopus.

We weren't ready to call it a night but this place wasn't it so we walked over to our hookah/empanada bar we discovered on our first night.

We hung out there for a drink or two then walked over to another bar right off the square, Red Monkey.

It was empty as well and the owner was about to close up. He kept it open for us so Alex repaid him with a couple of whiskey shots.

We detoured on the way home to walk by the waterfront.

Alex was hungry when we got back so he took his fancy Marmalade leftovers from the night before and ended the night with a ramen concoction.