Viequation: A Story of Sand, Surf and Spanish Charades

Planes, trains and automobiles: three flights, one taxi, one ferry and a ride with some locals.  Finally, we arrive at the Casita.

Little house.  Big view.

It's dark by the time we arrive, so there will be no view tonight, aside from the twinkling of stars, street lights and incandescent bulbs gleaming from the kitchens and bedroom windows down the mountainside.  The audio is rich - women singing in spanish, guitars being strummed, the first Star Wars movie (excuse me, fourth) wrapping up off in the distance.  

It's dark, but what our ears see is vast. 

Also, there is no electricity here, so we clamber around with flashlight and headlamp, putting together a dinner of what the previous guests thoughtfully left behind this morning: soft sweet rolls, peanut butter, Nutella, bottled water.  It is heavenly.  We sleep in the open air, under the delicate mosquito net that is tucked in around our mattress, which is thin, but comfortable.  The bed platform hangs securely in the air, held by thick ropes that are attached to the ceiling by eye hooks.  Sleep comes quickly.

In the morning, we awake to the most fabulous dream: roosters are crowing, sunlight is shining through the dry morning air, and green living things are everywhere, including the lizards that will share the cabin with us this week.

After another ride from Beverly, one of our new neighborhood friends, we have picked up our rented Vitrano (everyone drives a Suzuki here, or a horse).  I completed the rental by handing my credit card to a man I didn't know in a small wooden building which held two printers (one on the floor), a MacBook Pro and the man.  Is it a good idea?  The parrots in the yard scream their objections.

We shop at the local grocer and buy mangoes at a fruit stand down the road, all the while I'm doing jiggly-armed charades in order to avoid employing my sad, donde-esta-el-bano spanish.

Vieques is a beautiful island, of course, but what is most astonishing are the number of beaches that one (with said 4X4) can access.  Each beach is slightly different from the next, like a line of fraternal landscapes.  One has black, magnetic sand, while another has cabanas made from enormous palm fronds, and the next has a maze-like coral reef, while the southeastern side has crashing waves and a public shower.  

Our favorite spot.

We spend the next four days dreamily meandering from beach to beach, miraculously finding our way back to the Casita each night at dusk, a place that upon arrival the first night, I swore we were never, ever going to be able to find again: on a mountainside, down a Z-shaped dirt road, beyond the single lane winding stretch of patchy pavement, surrounded by defunct boats, trucks and hungry, wild dogs.  

We would die before finding that cabin.  I swore it.  

C unfortunately dislikes sand and the sun, which could make one baffled that the trip was his idea, but let's face it - he loves me maniacally, and shows it by scratching my back most every night, planning beach vacations and watching the cat videos I find online.  

(hushed) Thank You.

As it would happen, apart from the food of the gods (sugary carbohydrates and Skippy), the previous guests had left behind a beacon of hope for my fair-skinned fellow: a large beach umbrella with a youthful ocean motif.  

Game on.

It was a divine vacation.  We drank instant Nescafe, read books (Steinbeck's East of Eden & Rushdie's The Satanic Verses), and people-watched as though we were secret agents.  When we looked out on the surf and saw "that crazy european couple" crashing through waves in the nude, we just chuckled and got back to snarfing down tortilla chips and dripping salsa on our book pages.  We played crazy nines, swam in turquoise waters, ate a copious amount of fruit, held staring contests with sand crabs, and counted tiny dogs.  

And we swerved to miss the wild horses.  

So.  

Many.  

Horses

Horses on the beach;  Horses in the streets; Horses on the roadsides and horses devouring every kind of living plant outside the cabin.  At 3 o'clock.  In the morning.  One of these fellows had a little white bird who seemed to travel everywhere with him, riding bareback, just like an image from National Geographic or an Outback Steakhouse commercial. 

We kept ourselves unbusy, collecting green coconuts at the beach and hacking the tops off when we came home at night, drinking the room-temperature water inside like desperate characters from Lost or brave contestants on Survivor: Dreamy Desert Island.  

Mercifully, my only real bug encounter during our tropical expedition were sand midges at the beach (no-see-ums to us from the North), a large, dead cockroach at a public bathroom (a prime reason why I relieve myself in the forest in nearly all cases - living things die in public bathrooms), and a spider the side of my hand, perched perfectly above the entry to our Casita bathroom, which I found with my headlamp in the middle of our last night there.  No, I did not scream.  Yes, I did pee my pants, but I'll have you know that the timing and location worked miraculously in my favor.  Phew.

The Casita, and for that matter, the entire trip to Vieques was special - ironically - not for what it had, but rather for what it did not have:  no electricity, no phones, no Facebook, no work, no alarms, no deadlines, and no snow.  Because it lacked these things, we could more easily see what we intrinsically had:  peace, freedom, connection, patience, light, and something to wake up for.  We possessed these things before we left home and we have them still, after our return, but there is something so refreshing when you rediscover that what you've been given is truly so deep, so overwhelmingly full, and so hilariously good. 

Thank you, Vieques.  Thank you, little Casita.  Thank you, God.  

And thank you to that questionable car rental man, who has refrained from riding off on a wild horse, with my identity in one saddlebag and my credit score in the other.  Thank you.

I Allow Myself One Huge Mistake Per Day, At Least

It’s taken me a little while to sum up our events by a daily schedule, so allow me to take this post to catch us up a little.  Where did we leave off?  Oh yeah, showering in the cave.

After Canyonlands, we planned a few days to base our activities out of the town of Moab, a perveyor of outdoor magic and bliss.  Apart from eating at the Moab Diner every morning and getting gelato every night, we explored a bit.  Here are a few things that what we did.

Here I am, weirding out all the German tourists.

Arches: We hiked the slickrock to Delicate Arch (barefoot) and then Landscape Arch from the Devil’s Kitchen area.  Like I said in a previous entry, though beautiful, Arches is a madhouse.  Go in February.

C under Delicate Arch

Hole N'The Rock.  I both highly recommend and adamantly warn you against this excursion.  This day was “M makes all the decisions“ day, which is why our activities were comically strange and anticlimactic.

Hole in the Rock is a 5,000 square foot home that was blasted into the side of a mountain back in the 1960’s.  The couple who owned the property ran a diner out of a portion of their home for a time, which eventually became a gift shop.  The home itself is dark despite the large windows that were erected on the external edge of the cave, er, house.  The husband dabbled in taxidermy, and there is a large mule resting near a window and a mustang in a corner near the bathroom.  You are never alone at Hole in the Rock.

Another reason that you’re never alone is that across the parking lot from the home is a private zoo.  Nestled near the two story outhouse and “sasquatch sighting” sign were a collection of animals: turkeys, peacocks, pygmy goats, a pig, a couple of American bison, 3 alpacas, a family of deer, two terrifying ostriches, and a bactrian camel named Kramer.  We bought a bucket of food that we could feed the animals, which was nice, but the ostriches pounced on the bucket with such terrifying strength that if I had used my hands to hold out the treats, I would have no hands.  Really.

Slickrock Trail: C spent an afternoon mountain biking the famous Slickrock trail on the edge of Moab.  I declined to go because a) I would weigh him down (there was a very high probability that I would either pass out or crash and C would have to carry my body the 5 miles out - I would literally weigh him down), and b) we’d decided to stay at a hotel for a couple nights, and it had an outdoor pool.  From his immediate feedback, I’d say that C loved it and periodically thought he might die, which is our favorite recipe for success.

Jetboat Ride to Remember:  For the second real gem of “M Day”, I booked us a dutch oven dinner followed by a jetboat ride up the Colorado River featuring a light show.  I work for an outdoor outfitter.  I have no excuse for neglecting to ask the right questions.  The first would be, “I’m looking for something fun and exciting – is this the right booking for me”, and the second would be, “Can you describe the light show”.  This would have avoided a lot of nervous hand-fiddling at dinner and juvenile giggling on the boat ride.  C and I arrived at the base and immediately knew that I had made [yet another] mistake.  We were surrounded by a sea of white.  I have no problem sharing activities with my elders, so I don’t want to come across like an entitled little brute, but I think I expected that our ride might have some element of speed and vigor, and that…. Well, I guess I just expected a more diverse crowd, all around.  There were exactly zero families with children.  We were one of three, yes three couples that were under 40.   Out of 100 or so people.   We made friends with two young newlyweds from California that sat across from us at dinner and adjacent to us on the boat ride.  The other young couple was on their own somewhere.  The food was a real high point of the night – a variety of slow cooked meats, scooped pound by beautiful pound onto your metal plate (didn't they used to use metal plates in prison?).  After dinner, we ambled out of the dining hall and made our way to our assigned seats on the jetboat.

This is Dee, our riverboat guide.

The ride itself was nice, but instead of learning about geological formations, we spent our upstream ride looking for the face of Winnie the Pooh in the canyon wall, and our downstream ride listening to a pre-recorded tape of cowboy stories and natural history (with some strong LDS undertones).  The “light show” was actually a truck that drove along the river’s edge with a spotlight in its bed.  As we floated downstream, a staff person shone it’s beam on one side of the canyon, then the other, but the truck kept plugging up traffic, and C and I had a hard time muffling our laughter when 8 or 9 cars kept coming to a crawling halt behind the truck, getting the same light show we were.  My bet is that they also were wishing for something with a little more speed and vigor.  Somehow, this still turned out to be a Moab highlight.  Or a lowlight, depending on how you look at it.

We did a lot of walking around in Moab, which is really a great little town, though I’m sure it’s becoming more touristy with each passing year.  Then one morning, we packed up our gear, threw it all in the Caliber, went to Denny’s, then headed northwest, back to the city, dust flying in our wake.

I Once Was Lost... Again

Needles District, Hike #2: Druid Arch via Elephant Hill 11 miles

Let’s just start off by saying that I should never be allowed to navigate anything: an atlas, a road trip, a relationship, or yes, a hike.  My sister, parents and husband (as well as most friends) could tell you that my sense of direction is just terrible.  You’d be better off consulting a street map of the wrong city altogether than letting me guide you around my own neighborhood.  But sometimes, C lets me feel important by giving me the reigns for a bit.  Unfortunately, he chose the wrong day to let his crazy wife steer the ship.

We began our hike from Elephant Hill (a correction to my previous hike entry, which actually began at Big Spring Canyon Overlook).  From there we set off toward Druid Arch, a cool rock feature that is accessible by following a network of trails that trace a number of river washes in surrounding finger canyons.  This place was a total maze of deep crevices and lots of random footprints, reasons that are not a complete defense, but at least makes me feel less foolish and slightly more reasonable.

I started things off with a bang.  Rather than follow the given (read: boooring) route that would lead is to the arch in a generally direct path, I subconsciously chose to take us for a scenic detour, though an area called Chesler Park, following a 3.1 mile loop through an open valley, which was really very pretty.  We were still following signs for the arch, and were still headed in the “right” direction, but in a flash of irony, we found ourselves moseying down the path in Chesler Park in almost a complete ring. Were we going in circles? Of course not.  I laughed it off as someone’s bad attempt at trail design.  Clearly their fault.

We did make our way to the arch eventually.  It took us a little longer because not only did we add this Chesler Park deviation to the hike, but we also managed to follow some ghost tracks up a river wash for around a half hour before finding the real trail again.  When we reached the Druid, we scrambled up past the trail terminus, which offered a stunning view of the arch (pictured above) to a totally unnecessary perch high on the cliff above, all because we followed some stray, misleading cairns.  This is not a part of the world in which to mess with people’s cairns.  Come on.

So, 14.1 miles later, we arrive back at our car and returned to our sweet home in the desert.  By this time, we were verrry grimy - coated in the accumulated dust and sweat of the last four days.  So we did the only thing a pair of desperate hikers could do.  Remember those water jugs I mentioned in an earlier post?  And the campsite that was nestled in among some boulders?  Well, there was a small slit in the rocks behind our fire pit, with a dark space deep enough that we were mostly out of the line of sight of our friends and neighbors.  

So, we showered, one by one, by holding water jugs in the air.  It was hilarious and terrifying and cold, but we emerged refreshed and clean, which was worth every awkward glance we received from the older man and woman one site over.

This was one mistake I could live with.

I Still Think Disney Filmed The Lion King Here

Needles District, Hike #1: Confluence Overlook via Elephant Hill, 11 miles

I'm sure you agree.

What a smashing day. We learned our lesson from the disaster of Murphy Loop and brought ample water, good eats, sunscreen and our A-game to this new landscape.  I wish I could fully describe how otherworldly the terrain is in the Needles district of Canyonlands.  We were in the southeastern slice of the park, and our hike led us to the Confluence, where the Green and Colorado Rivers meet and run on together through Cataract Canyon toward Arizona and the Grand Canyon itself.  I know some folks who have a permit to raft the Colorado in January of next year, and all I can say is buckle up kids, because this terrain is knock-your-socks-off, slap-your-grandma spectacular. 

The three districts of Canyonlands are geographically divided by water, but could also be identified through their gradual inaccessibility.  Island in the Sky is nearest to Arches National Park and the bustling town of Moab, where everyone in their right mind stocks up on water (no potable water is available in Arches, Island in the Sky or the Maze) and all other necessary munitions and luxuries (Ice!  Lattes!).  I’ll talk a bit about Arches later, but HOLY COW there are a lot of people running around that place, and each of them must drive at least three cars simultaneously.  I swear.  Needless to say, we didn’t spend much time hanging out with the masses there.

As I was saying earlier, Island in the Sky is nearest to outfitters, amenities and supplies, and therefore seems to be the most populated of the Canyonlands districts (which means that it is still “cricket…cricket” quiet compared to Arches).  The Needles is next in line with a far less dense group of visitors.  The Maze, an area that we unfortunately didn’t get to (it takes about 4 more hours to reach) is unmanned by the Parks Service and has been deemed “primitive”, which probably means “totally awesome and you should have come here”.

For us to reach the Needles, we journeyed an hour or so south from Moab, then turned east and slithered into the park near the small, sleepy town of Monticello where I purchased one of the most disgustingly sweet root beer slushies I’ve ever had.  Once you pass through the park gate, you still have another 22 painfully gorgeous miles to drive before you reach the Squaw Flat campground.  Even though we had left Moab fairly early, we were still pretty nervous that we’d get all the way in and find no available sites, only to have to drive all the way back to the Needles Outpost, a privately owned campground near the park entrance.  Anywhere else this might have been our fate, but not there, not then –the place was only half occupied, and we still got to choose – choose, I tell you!! – our sleeping quarters.  The sites were nestled in amongst gargantuan (read: McDonald’s-sized) boulders that were perfect for scrambling onto in the evenings to watch the sunset burn down into the horizon. 

The other glory of the Needles is that they somehow manage to pipe potable water in to the Visitor’s Center as well as the campground, which felt like a real lucky streak for dirty, thirsty visitors like us.  It would have been unfortunate to have to cart in a trunk-full of water without having to leave our clothes behind in town.  Exhibitionism in the desert is not highly recommended, unless you’re ready to paint your body in what C refers to as "sunscream", Australian zinc oxide sunscreen, which I’m not.  

The hike was meandering and the terrain diverse, with great “needles” or pillars rising above us in one moment, then a great savannah surrounding our tiny footsteps at the next, and we were constantly aware of the real possibility of catching a glimpse of a mountain lion or stepping on a diamondback rattlesnake.  By the time we returned back to the campsite and caught a Ranger talk on Ancient Puebloans, we were ready to cram some dehydrated Kung Pao chicken and rice down our gabbers (not so good if you’re curious) and slip into our two person Big Agnes sack (wicked good if you’re curious) for some sweet dreams, because let’s face it, the scenery was nice, and neither of us smelled like dead fish yet.