Day 13: I Hate Horses.

Ray told me that I wasn't allowed to be boring and just read on the beach all day. So I looked at the map, started googling, and made some plans.

The first stop on the plan was to head a mile up the beach and see the black sand beach. It was a great hike, really easy, seemed short, and there were even some cool rock formations on the way. As I approached the black-sand portion, I scared a horse. Wild horses running on the beach! It turns out every 8 year-old's fantasy exists in the real world, and it is pretty cool ts o see at that.

The black-sand beach was more like a beach with black-sand than a beach of black sand. A lack of recent rainstorms bringing fresh sand down from the volcanic rocks higher on the island meant there was a lot of regular sand overtop... but you could scratch through to the really dark stuff. After I played in it a little bit I headed further up the beach and found a pristine patch of it. It's fun stuff with one drawback: it gets hot. Imagine all the worst parts of bare feet on asphalt and sand at the same time. On the flip side, it sparkles. The sparkling didn't show up on camera, so I folded my Culebra map into an envelope and packed some up to bring home to y'all. I give it a 50-50 chance of making it home all over my clothes vs in the envelope.

Then I headed on to stop 2 for the day: a radar installation a little over a mile from the black sand beach. This was about the point when I ran out of water, but I was still feeling good. The actual installation itself, a row of antennas, was kind of boring. But there were a plethora of warning signs, barbwire fence with acoustic monitoring (which I'd always worried about but never saw), cameras... and while programming my GPS to go to stop 3 there a security guard joined the list. The technology is pretty cool though, by using ionospheric reflection, the antennas I saw today can track things as far south as the middle of Bolivia. Also cool: I had no cell reception when I got near, and full reception slightly further away from it.

Stop 3 was a little more problematic. My GPS could not figure out that the lat/lon I gave it were on the island, it kept trying to go to the ferry and a 100 miles into PR. I still don't what it was thinking. So it turned into a guessing game. I walked up a dirt road right nearby and guessed left. If only I'd guessed right. But there were all these trails going left! Why would people ride their horses there if there wasn't something to see? So I set off, following the trails, which brings us to the title of this post. Horses are retarded. Horse trails don't go anywhere, curl back, stop abruptly, but give the illusion of being real paths. I spent an hour trying to go somewhere on them, before giving up and heading off into the wilderness: There was a road that dead-ended, similar to the road to the ruins on the map, only .2 miles from me! That's like 1000ft, can't be hard. And I was sick of trying to GPS through these trails, my GPS is terrible when you only go a dozen feet before turning. And tourist maps, with only some roads, no scales or even a consistent scale to the features... grrr. The work well at convincing security you're lost though.

It was terrible, especially in sandals (my boots were holding open a door in my room so my clothes would dry). That 1000 feet was worse than the 20,000 feet before it. Prickerbushes, cacti that grew in strings between trees, gullies, all uphill, and absolutely no paths. Almost bushwhacked into a wasp nest too, until I saw something moving on the other side of the pricker-strand I was about to kick through.

The road might have been a road a hundred years ago, but there were middle-aged trees, full-grown cacti, and thousands more bushes on it. It was better than the ".2 mile" though, so I stuck to it. Eventually I got to a real dirt road, and surprised a family of horses charging down at me, followed shortly by three Cowboys on horses. When I got to the real road there was a set of ruins right there. I took a few pictures but without water I couldn't be motivated to keep walking to see if it was the sugar mill or not. Further research says... possibly. Check back tomorrow?

Eventually, after detouring around the radar facility, covered in filth and seedpods, exhausted, dehydrated.... I made it to my hotel, where I drank a few bottles worth of water and showered. After a while, I went out to read on the boardwalk, have dinner, and drink a beer. When they offer independent beers I tend to try one. You know, experience the world. It took me the entire bottle to figure out where I'd tasted something that bitter before.... it tasted very beery and even more like acorns. (What can I say, I had a productive childhood. If you don't know what acorns taste like LMK, we can arrange something.) After dinner I watched the sunset and finished with a dip in the pool, soaking my sore legs and listening to Cauterize.

If anyone wants to examine the extent of my wandering, here. It doesn't include the fullness of wandering in circles with cartographically challenged equines, but its a general idea. Math (nigh 5 hours at between 2.5 and 3 mph) says 12 miles, so the actual answer is probably somewhere close to 11 hard miles. Which unfortunately don't get you any further than the easy ones.