Puerto Rico: Date with dinoflagellates

My sister and I hung around San Juan for a few days, enjoying its powdery, palm-fringed beaches and taking in the history-steeped forts and cobbles and cathedrals of old San Juan (above), an architectural treasure trove of walls and watchtowers, bastions and balconies, alleys and arches.

But Puerto Rico is a huge, lush land, and a stop in San Juan scarcely scratches the surface. “Time for a road trip, Lisa,” I said to my sun-loving sister. She wasn’t thrilled, but I promised her fun stuff, like fish that glow in the dark.

I rented a car and plotted a southwesterly traverse of the island, from San Juan on the northern coast to Lajas on the southern. Our destination was a sleepy area of Lajas called La Parguera, home to a phosphorescent bay that holds magical microscopic creatures called dinoflagellates. When the water they live in is disturbed, these fireflies of the sea emit a bright blue glow. Worth seeing, I thought.

I scoped out a slow, up and down route over Puerto Rico’s central spine of green mountains and, barring flat tires or other difficulties, we’d arrive in La Parguera just in time to catch one of the boats that nightly take tourists out for a dose of bioluminescent adventure.

Our drive across Puerto Rico brought us through highland places like Gurabo, with its great, wildy-painted staircase that cuts through the center of town; Barranquitas, surrounded by rolling hills planted with coffee and fruit; the sacred ceremonial grounds of the Taino, a subgroup of the Arawak, who inhabited the Greater Antilles at the time Columbus was poking around and who strive today to both make themselves heard and preserve their ancient culture; and Ponce, whose architecture-rich Plaza de las Delicias holds a peculiar treat -- the sprawling, wooden, red and black-striped Parque de Bombas, a 125 year-old firehouse still in use.

We arrived in La Parguera at dusk and checked into a homey little motel near the fishing docks. At the docks, we met Ed, a mechanic who worked at the village’s only gas station. Ed set us up with a fisherman whose boat could hold about a half dozen tourists. He’d be going out soon, and we paid him a few dollars to save us seats.

When we shoved off, with five travelers from California, it was dark. A beige moon splashed a thin swath of light across the water, but the captain kept to the black corners as he eased the little wooden boat into the middle of the bay and cut the engine.

He leaned over the side of the boat and passed his hand through the water. At once, it lit up like a cobalt-silver fog, and we watched millions of points of blue light flit and swim below us. We each took up a different position around the boat and passed our own hands through the water, marveling at the magic each small disturbance created.

Later that night, Lisa and I ate at a small joint packed with locals and furnished with Formica tables and naked light bulbs. We tucked into juicy lobster and shrimp better than any I've paid three times the price for, ordered a bottle of good, cheap wine, and drank a toast to the dinoflagellates.

Try this at home! Be the first on your block to grow dinoflagellates. The University of California Santa Barbara tells you how.

LoriHein.com

Jamaica: An Olympic moment

We’d had a laid-back time in Jamaica. A mellow week of food, drink, sun and fun at Montego Bay’s Sunset Beach Resort, a moderately priced, snob-free, family-friendly all-inclusive that I highly recommend. (See 11/30/04 post: “Ya mon! In Jamaica, even the soup is smiling” and read other travelers’ reviews on TripAdvisor.com.)

Other than a daily run, my heaviest lifting was getting a Red Stripe from the table to my mouth. Between beers I engaged in solo pursuits like kayaking but resisted the staff's best efforts to recruit me into group activities like the water aerobics fests staged in the main pool. Holding hands with strangers in bathing suits while swaying to Enya held no appeal.

I did pry the clan away from the free food, drinks and watersports long enough to take a road trip into the mountains above Mo’ Bay. In Anchovy, the narrow main street was alive. Women in rainbow-colored dresses shopped, men lingered outside Jerk Joint and Jerk Place, and laughing kids in uniforms walked past the Baptist and Seventh Day Adventist churches on their way to school. Cars and trucks sputtered, and the sun turned everything to gold.

Our tire went flat near an orange grove in Shettlewood, so we pulled off to change it at a small bar that was attached to a house. Out came the owner, Sharon, smiling big and sporting pink plastic curlers. While Mike changed the tire, the kids hung out in the bar with Sharon and downed tall glass bottles of Pepsi. Between sodas, Dana would step outside to chat with Sharon’s chickens.

Flat fixed, we said goodbye to Sharon and meandered past orchards of citrus trees and through villages of yellow and turquoise houses and rolled at day’s end into the parking lot at Sunset Beach, where we resumed doing absolutely nothing meaningful. We were in a Jamaica frame of mind, and life was sultry, steamy, slow, its tropic tempo a sweet, leisurely largo.

Which is why we were unprepared for the sight that greeted us when we entered the airport terminal to check in for our flight home.

There, standing next to his gleaming machine on skis was a fit, muscled member of the Jamaican bobsled team. Cool Runnings in person. The team had plans to be part of the next winter Olympics and was out to create awareness. They trained in cold, high, wintry places, but they came home to Jamaica to stir up support and funds.

So, before they boarded their planes to places like Boston, Chicago and Toronto, sunburned tourists in shorts and straw hats had their final Jamaica experience. They were lined up ten deep to have their pictures taken with the Caribbean athlete who rockets breakneck down slick chutes of ice chiseled into alpine peaks.

www.LoriHein.com

Forrest Gump gone global

London, Moscow, Chicago. Besides being great world cities, they now have something else in common: Jesper Olsen has run through them.

I’m in training for next month’s More Marathon in Central Park. Four hours of running through my favorite place in my favorite city. The course is 5 ½ loops around the park, where the sights, sounds and social scene keep your mind from dwelling on the masochism you’re engaged in. (See last spring’s Tour de Central Park post for route highlights.)

Marathon training is all about the weekly long runs, which get progressively longer until you tuck at least one 20 under your sneakers and start the sweet taper, which begins about three weeks before the race. This week I tackled my 18-miler.

While prepping body and mind for the 18 and trying not to think about what a scary number that is, I opened the March issue of Runner’s World and read about Jesper Olsen, a Danish political scientist who just nabbed a pedestal in the pantheon of overachieving ultrarunners, wild and crazy zero body fat folks who eat marathons for breakfast.

Eighteen miles? A mere warm-up jog for Olsen. The man just ran around the world. Six hundred and sixty-two days after setting out from Greenwich, England in January 2004, Olsen completed his "World Run Project."

16,263 miles. 26,232 kilometers. On foot. Pushing a stroller filled with 35 pounds of food, gear and extra sneakers. Moving fast. (Oh -- he did walk -- once, in Germany. For 10 minutes, to work out a knee twinge.)

I’ve posted before about interesting people who’ve combined travel with some sort of endurance challenge: Steve Vaught, who’s walking from California to New York to lose weight and save his life (see Fat Man Walking...across America); and Charles Veley, the self-proclaimed World’s Most Traveled Man (see Has Charles Veley been to the state of Chuuk? ). Vaught’s still pounding asphalt. He’s covered 2,210 miles and is now in western Ohio, some 600 miles from his finish line. And Veley’s still feverishly collecting immigration stamps. When I posted about him in August, he’d visited 518 of the world’s entities. He’s up to 570. Quite a busy six months. I can imagine Veley running his mind over his itinerary: If it’s Tuesday this must be Belgium... and Bermuda and Belize and Baja and maybe even Baker Island, if I can just catch that last plane and then a really, really fast boat and make the International Date Line work for me...

But Olsen really intrigues me. I’d love to party with this guy. (Because I certainly couldn’t run with him. He’s a 2:27 marathoner.) Some stats in Amby Burfoot’s Runner’s World story on Olsen reveal that Olsen’s longest day was 62.3 miles; he burned through 28 pair of shoes; he ran in temperatures that ranged from - 4 degrees Fahrenheit to 117; he lost 20 pounds running through Siberia because all the drought-plagued locals had to share was buckwheat.

When he’s not engaged in some ultrarunning feat (an ultra by definition is any run greater than a marathon), Olsen enjoys his hobbies. On his World Run Project Web site, Olsen shares this glimpse into his “Life besides running:”

“I like reading very much indeed. Philosophy, classical litterature, travel litterature, poetry.... Also light mountain climbing is one of my hobbyes. I have had my go at Mt. Blanc, 4807 meters, and last summer I went for a couple of week to walk in the Kaukasus mountains in the state of Azerbaijan; quite an expirience as many of the people in remote parts of the Azeri' areas has never seen tourists. On the way back I visited the huge and beautiful contry of Alexander Korotkov; Russia - what a training enviroment to have!”

Jesper Olsen. A guy who looks at Mont Blanc as “light” climbing, traverses the Caucasus for a few weeks when he wants some air, and circumnavigates the planet when he goes long.

LoriHein.com

Love, Italian style

A version of this story was posted in Feb. 2005.

St. Valentine was Italian.

Well, not technically Italian, as Italy didn't exist in the third century when the priest, Valentine, stood on the side of love and married young couples in defiance of Roman emperor Claudius II's decree that young men could not wed. The emperor had decided that unattached men made better soldiers than their married counterparts. Valentine, a make love not war type, performed marriages anyway and paid with his life.

It fits that the man whose life legend gave rise to a holiday celebrating love came from what is now Italy, a land to which I could return and return endlessly. Beauty and romance; gold sun and glistening moon; breeze and blue water; rich flavors and bold colors; languid afternoons and shimmering evenings. Italy isn't a country; it's a state of mind, a sensual experience to be savored.

Love was in the air when we visited Burano, a tiny island in the lagoon that surrounds Venice. Like a giant box of crayons, Burano bursts with houses painted in brilliant shades of purple, blue, green, red, orange, yellow. The streets are palettes of gorgeous, crazy colors.

As we walked Burano's main street, wide, cobbled and built aside the canal that flows through town, I saw a homemade flyer taped to the window of a small shop. Two fresh faces -- the kind Valentine must have looked on -- smiled from the poster, which read, "Walter & Paola oggi Sposi." "Walter and Paola to marry today." Cheek to cheek and arms around one another, Walter and Paola announced their love and intentions to all of Burano.

I hoped they'd put up the poster that morning. Then, "oggi" would mean "today" literally, not just in translation. Perhaps we'd see a wedding.

We headed to the broad, cobbled piazza that held Burano's ancient church and looked up at its campanile, which tilted some 15 degrees. We'd seen the askew bell tower from the water on our approach to the island, and now we stood under it, wondering what kept it from toppling into the square.

The piazza began to fill up with people in their Sunday best. It wasn't Sunday. We smelled nuptials. We were about to see Paola marry Walter.

We did our best to blend in with the wedding guests, but our backpacks looked grossly obtrusive in the sea of graceful lace umbrellas that many of the women carried to shield their creamy faces from the sun. Burano lace is prized, and each of the exquisite, handmade umbrellas -- some bright white, others a velvety black -- was a work of art. I stood behind some of the women, studying and photographing the intricate, dreamy patterns as the sun played on the umbrellas.

Just before noon, the bride appeared. The crowd in the piazza formed a hushed horseshoe as Paola walked up Burano's medieval main street on her beaming father's arm. The train of Paola's snow-white wedding dress brushed over the centuries-old paving stones as she made her way to the church door. There, her father lifted her veil, kissed her, and smiled into her eyes. The wedding party and guests entered the church.

We didn't want our backpacks to spoil things, so we watched the ceremony through the church window. As Wagner's Wedding March thundered from the organ and filled Burano with the sound of joy and hope and love, Paola glided up the aisle and joined Walter at the altar. The crayon houses seemed to break into smiles.

Oggi sposi. Married today. St. Valentine would have loved it.

Where shall we go next?

www.LoriHein.com

That's my car! En garde!

I found this tidbit on mindlesscrap.com: “Dueling is legal in Paraguay, provided both parties are registered blood donors.” I chuckled because Paraguay, which I have peered into but never stood in, seems like a place where swords at the ready are a really good idea.

We were in Brazil at Iguacu Falls (Iguazu, Iguassu), which sits in the jungle at the junction of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay. We’d enjoyed a two-day stay at the lipstick-pink Hotel das Cataratas, a place that’s worth the price of admission. The cotton candy confection sits smack on the falls, one of the planet’s wonders and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The epic cataracts, which caused Eleanor Roosevelt to utter, "Poor Niagara," thunder and foam just outside the hotel's front door.

On our last day, a guide named Stephanie escorted us to the airport after a detour to an enormous enroute souvenir shop called Tres Fronteras, where we bought bags of wood, stone, and fabric things at fabulous prices.

After the shopping spree, Stephanie told us about Ciudad del Este, Paraguay, the town that sits just over the border from Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil. “It’s a giant black market area,” she said. “Twelve million people a year come to Foz do Iguaçu. But only one million go to the falls. The rest come to shop.” And lots of them cross the Friendship Bridge over the Parana River and shop in Ciudad del Este.

Brazilians themselves pour in, snapping up cheap black market electronics and cigarettes to resell in Brazil. Illegal. “To get stuff over the border,” said Stephanie, “they do all kinds of crazy things. They go by boat, by airplane, they swim.”

If the police catch them, the cops either keep the goods or extract a monetary bribe. Some of the best rides in town are owned by police officers. “Cops have cars that businessmen don’t have,” said Stephanie. More than a black market, Stephanie called the goings-on “a black mafia.”

Stephanie wished more people would come to Iguaçu for the falls. She told us to tell our friends that “Brazil is a good place to travel to” and that “Brazilians like Americans and think they’re friendly people. Americans are like Brazilians. We both like to talk.” (I was starting to think maybe Stephanie shouldn't talk quite so much. It might get her run through by an epee...)

As we drove to the airport on a road that runs near the border, Stephanie pointed into Paraguay and said, “Paraguayans steal cars in Brazil and sell them in Paraguay. Once the cars are sold, for half the price they’re worth, you cannot get that car back.”

She said people sometimes see their cars driving around Ciudad del Este on the other side of the border, sporting new Paraguayan license plates. And there’s nothing they can do about it.

“The president of Paraguay has one of these cars,” said Stephanie, “and he has said publicly that if he meets the Brazilian who used to own it, he’ll give it back.” She let out a giant sigh wrapped in an exclamation point: “The president!”

Who was leading the little landlocked country when Stephanie told her tale I won’t say. I’d hate to have her pop over to Paraguay for some shopping and find herself challenged to a duel.

www.LoriHein.com

Night and Dachau

I was surprised to see Elie Wiesel’s Night on a recent Boston Globe "Local bestsellers" list. The 1958 memoir of Wiesel, who survived four Nazi death camps including Auschwitz and Buchenwald, was the #2 nonfiction paperback.

Why the renewed interest in Night, the spare masterpiece that recounts a young Elie Wiesel’s horrific journey through the Holocaust? I didn’t know why people in large numbers were again reaching for this work by the Nobel Peace Prize winner who said that "...to remain silent and indifferent" in the face of hatred, racism and genocide "is the greatest sin of all...," but I was glad to see it on the list.

In this age of life-cheapening videos and graphically violent games and the spoken word porn and depravity of gangsta rap, I was heartened to see that some considerable number of us were spending time with something important, something that holds a mirror up to our humanity and our inhumanity and dares us to walk away without fighting when we see hatred in any of its forms.

From Night:

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in
camp, which has turned my life into one long
night, seven times cursed and seven times
sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never
shall I forget the little faces of the children,
whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of
smoke beneath a silent blue sky.Never shall I forget those flames which
consumed my faith forever.Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence
which deprived me, for all eternity, of the
desire to live. Never shall I forget those
moments which murdered my God and my
soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never
shall I forget these things, even if I am
condemned to live as long as God Himself.
Never

With two mouse clicks, I discovered that Oprah was behind Night’s new chart-topping status. I should have guessed. While I’m quite tired of Oprah, I applaud her for advancing a book that every person should read.

I first read Night after visiting Dachau.

The concentration camp where 30,000 died is a short S-Bahn ride from downtown Munich. From the Dachau station, you walk past tidy suburban blocks of kempt houses and apartments with square front yards until you arrive at the wrought iron fence you’ve seen in photos and films.

"ARBEIT MACHT FREI" it taunts in chilling, black letters above the gate cut into the fence. Your heart cracks and your gut heaves and your breath clogs in your chest because you know you’re looking at the gate of hell.

I took no photographs of Dachau. The thought of shooting pictures in and of this place bothered my conscience. Like most visitors around me, I walked through Dachau in pained silence. Head bowed, eyes tear-blurred. Barracks with plank bunks stacked floor to ceiling; gas chamber disguised as communal shower with a welcoming, happy note above the entrance door and fingernail scratches on the walls; crematorium with brick ovens crafted in a hideous, benign design, as if built to bake bread.

Spending some part of one’s journeys at places like Dachau where men have reduced themselves to soulless murderers and their fellow human beings to dust is, like reading Night, difficult but important. For man to be his best, he must recognize himself at his worst.

While I took no pictures at Dachau, people like Philip Greenspun have. Unrecorded atrocity is a cry God hears but man can’t learn from. Greenspun’s Dachau photo essay is at photo.net. The Web page also contains comments from scores of Dachau visitors.

Andorra: Go play in the snow

Next week, all eyes will be on Torino and the Italian Alps, where Bode Miller, Daron Rahlves and a fired up U.S. Ski Team threaten to replace the Austrians as kings of the mountain. The Olympics’ downhill events will take place at Sestriere, a posh resort north of Torino (Turin).

Europe’s big-name ski resorts – St. Moritz, Davos, Kitzbuehl, Chamonix and their ilk – sit in the Alps, but there’s also great skiing in that other European mountain range to the west. The Pyrenees offer big runs and big air without the Alps’ cost, crowds and glitz.

And, if you ski in the tiny Pyrenean principality of Andorra, you can have the added experience of visiting three countries in a single day. Wedged between France and Spain, Andorra, which Lonely Planet calls “a nano-nation with more mountains than culture,” is a sea of stunning peaks surrounded by border crossings. Get your passport out of the hotel safe and have it ready, because Spain’s Cerdanya region and its French incarnation, La Cerdagne, are just a mountain road away. Ski, then sightsee.

On a glistening winter day, the kids and I woke up in Spain. We were in Puigcerda, an old Catalan village that sits high above the Cerdanya plain and is ringed by majestic, snow-capped Pyrenees. The hotel breakfast room was filled with Spandexed skiers who’d be boarding the 9:15 bus to La Molina, a Spanish ski resort. Bode Miller would get along with these guys – some of them passed on the coffee and orange juice and fueled themselves instead with red wine. Only time I’ve ever seen wine served at breakfast. As I had a driving date with the 70 twisting kilometers of high altitude asphalt that would take us to Andorra (photo above), I went for the OJ.

Our hotel sat a few yards from the French border, and after a passport check, we were cruising through downtown Bourg-Madame. Just-baked baguettes were stacked in the window of the Boulangerie. Bienvenu a La Cerdagne.

As we wound through ancient stone villages, we tuned in radio stations broadcasting in French, Spanish and Catalan. We threaded our way up into the mountains, then entered a high tunnel. When we drove out the other side, we found Pyrenees practically in the car with us. We’d been deposited into an ice-blue miracle world of snow and sunlit summits. We were still in France, but about to enter Andorra at one of the planet’s most beautiful border crossings.

While the border guard checked our documents, we were checking out the scene just in front of us. Pas de la Casa, Andorra’s biggest ski area and highest lift-served terrain, filled the windshield. A 360-degree vista wrapped around our car, and a good 200 degrees of it was devoted to the skiing life: slopes of deep powder dotted with little figures having fun on fiberglass; hotels, condos, shops, bars, restaurants; tan, ski-toting tourists in mirrored sunglasses wandering the main street; cars with full ski racks sniffing out parking spaces. And everywhere, chairs cycling skiers and boarders up into the air to the tops of various peaks, all lit like golden fingers in the sun.

We didn’t ski. When I travel alone with the kids, I strap on a mother's super-sensitive set of risk antennae. While skiing at Pas de la Casa looked like it would be heaven on Earth, I imagined the transatlantic phone call: “Hi Mike. It’s me. I’m in traction in Andorra. Can you fly over here and pick up the kids? What? Your passport’s expired? Hmmm. I’ll have to see if they can live in the hospital room with me until you get it renewed...”

We did, however, schuss. On our ski bums. We slid down a slope on vinyl raincoats I’d stashed in the trunk. Then we drove to Spain.