Salinas, PR -- Caves and Radio Waves

Our second road trip took us up to the north central part of the island, through the Cordillera Central mountain range, to the caves at Rio de Camuy and the Observatory at Arecibo. There was no direct route from Salinas to the area, so we took twisty mountain roads that were in some places only one car width wide. Standard practice in such passes is to honk your horn repeatedly while continuing full speed ahead to let the people coming the other way know that you're not gonna back down. The scary part was that since there's no other way to go, the truckers use the roads on their routes and occasionally we'd turn a corner and see a big Mack truck bearing down on us. Also Puerto Ricans are nutjobs in general when it comes to driving their cars; we'd be coming down the road where there would room for both cars to get past each other easily IF we both moved a little to the right side of the road. Sounds reasonable, right? But no. For whatever reason, some people here just seem to enjoy playing "chicken" and making you slow down to a crawl and pull way over so that they can drive down the center (the mountain roads had no yellow lines in the middle), horns blaring all the way. So getting to the caves was a white-knuckle ride.

The Rio de Camuy caverns were pretty awe-inspiring. The tour took us down through a sinkhole over 400 feet deep, overgrown with lush jungle foliage. Then we entered the main room of the cavern through a small tunnel in the rock. There were huge formations under a massive domed cavern stretching 170 feet high -- clusters of stalactites clung to the ceiling like one of Chihuly's pointy spiral chandeliers, only made of rock instead of blown glass. And because the area gets so much rainfall, the cave is still "live" and water continues to build the formations up with the passage of time. At one of the cave entrances it's like standing under a shower nozzle (albeit with very weak water pressure); the drops come down like rain.

After a quick lunch we took more twisty back roads over to the radio telescope observatory. This is the largest single radio telescope in the world at 305 meters (1006 ft) in diameter, dwarfing the competition (the next largest in Bonn, Germany is only 100m, and the one in Charlottesville, VA a mere 42m). The dish is immense and is built right into a natural depression in the karst rock surrounded by hills. The disk part is stationary and they've worked it out so that only the Gregorian dome moves to receive the radio waves. It's quite a feat of engineering. James Bond fans will recognize it from "Goldeneye" where Pierce Brosnan is climbing all over the huge dish. When workers walk over the dish they use special snowshoe-type shoes that don't damage the aluminum panels. It would have been fun if that had been part of the tour. I would have settled for just walking out over the catwalk, but visitors only get to view it from the platform at the visitor center.

Where we are:
Location=Salinas, PR
Lat=17 57.653
Lon=66 17.549