Day 8: Arecibo!

So I got up, and after checking a few times and confirming that it was Wednesday, and that they said Wednesday, I decided to go for it again.

Yesterday, on my way to the hotel I saw something called "Bosque Seco." I kindle-wikipedia'd it, and all I saw was blah blah nature habitat blah blah ruins of an abandoned spanish lighthouse in a fenced off area. Well, enough said. They just hit 4 of my keywords in one sentence. So I figured it might be worth doing if my path took me past it. And, well, my path went past and I had 2 hours extra on my trip (one of which I knew would be eaten. Puerto Rico is the only time the "projected arrival time" goes up on my GPS, not down...)

So I got there (soapbox friends: look at the terrain map at 17.979999,-66.879401, just know 334 goes through with a few switchbacks barely 2 cars wide) and set off hiking down the mountain through the woods toward the shore. Then the trail evaporated. This happened several times on me. Obvious trails, marked with signs and dayglo-tagged trees just disappear. So I hiked down a storm-wash until I got to a road and the sign said: Special nature area, special-permission access only.

I had assumed that a "fenced off area" was a hundred feet, stone-henge style. This was area-51 style, you can't get close for miles. So I turned around, and started back. And ran into dense scrub, etc etc... pulled out my gps and found a road and set off back towards parking. Now would be a good time to explain what "Bosque Seco" means. It means: Dry Forest. What's that mean? It means a normal, MD forest except with some cacti thrown in for good measure. Oh, and it's hot as balls. And to get from the coast to the forest its uphill.

Its tiring to recount, so... an hour+half after I set out, covered in sweat, no water left, and covered in thorns and seed (they even have double-poiked pricker bushes, where they stick out in each direction, razorwire style) I emerged and set off for Arecibo, having used up all my buffer, meaning I might end up bumping against closing time at the end of my visit.

The drive was much the same as it was yesterday, with one exception. The observatory is in the rainforest. Thus, it rained. A lot. And I had to run uphill (deja vu) to the visitor center.

The observatory is pretty cool. It uses a spherical instead of parabolic reflector so that it can be aimed without moving the dish with a consistent distortion correction. The major ball thing there is about house-sized, with a lab inside of it, along with secondary and tertiary reflectors. The cord going to it is a bundle of cables and a walkway. Pretty sweet

I watched a somewhat-interesting film made in the 90's about the dish and then went out to the observation deck, where we got rained on, hard.

Here's one of the towers begging for it. I didn't, but I wanted to so hard. They have massive budget problems, so if we ever stop radaring space to detect inbound asteroids, I'm booking another flight because the only thing that would make this place better was no adult supervision.

For dinner and a hotel I drove down to Salinas. But at 7pm after dinner the hotel office was closed, so I went down the road to the Parador Carribean, which was a good call. And Jeremy, if you can't tell, I love your lens more and more every day.