Here are a few photos of yesterday’s beach. No matter how many other beaches I go to, having grown up at the Jersey shore I am always amazed to see both blue water and green vegetation all in the same landscape. Not just sand, but plants & grass.
This is the fort in the background:
Today, I went on a trip to Rio Camuy Caves. We stood in line for a very long time but once we got in there, the caves were pretty amazing. The took us down in a tram & they have 5 trams total. 3 are currently being repaired. One more broke this morning, it needed new breaks. As soon as we started down, it became clear why breaks were important! We went down a very steep windy road to the bottom of a 400 feet sinkhole. Inside the caves were stalactites & stalagmites in all their glory. The Rio Camuy is the 3rd longest underground river behind one in Yugoslavia and another in New Guinea. We took a bus about an hour and a half out of San Juan so it was nice to get to see other parts of the island. There are two sinkholes and the caves were discovered in 1958. A traffic-y road runs above. They originally thought the sinkholes went straight down when they built the road, but that turns out not to be true. They balloon out to the sides. So, the cars above are driving on land that is actually hollow underneath. The scenery was quite spectacular. Very lush & green, it’s part of the rainforest.
There are also thousands of bats in the cave, but we didn’t see any. We did see some lizards & some Puerto Rican tree frogs called coquis.
Tonight we have a faculty meeting at 9:00 (yes, that would be 9:00 pm on a Friday night) where, amongst other things, we’re going to try talk about scanning requests. Wish me luck! Mitch asks me to thank all the UVA scanning folks by name: June Trainum and Betty Mickens, as well as Donna Barbour who did the material retrieval for us. thank you all!
And then off to Brazil … Tomorrow I work the night shift (til 11:00).
