a photo tour of our final day on vieques

Hi you all! I hope you had a great weekend! Are you getting bored with looking at beach photos yet?! I am! It seems a little mean when you are sitting in cold weather, but i'll torture you a bit more with our last day in Vieques (which happened to be Christmas).

 

 Vieques was/ is partially owned by the US military, and there are old bunkers scattered throughout the island. It's kind of creepy to be driving along a road and realize that all those hills in the distance are actually concrete bunkers.

Vieques Day 2

Our second day in Vieques happened to be Brian's birthday as well, so I surprised him with a night kayaking tour in one of the best bioluminescent bays in the world! Mosquito Bay's luminescence is caused by mico-organisms, called dinoflagellates, which glow whenever the water is disturbed, leaving a trail on neon blue. It was an amazing thing to see! The kayaks looked like they were floating in neon blue and when fish swam by, they made eerie streaks that looked like snakes. Unfortunately I don't have any photos, and i'm not sure they would have turned out in the pitch black anyway...but if you've seen the Life of Pi, it is kind of like that!

 

vieques day 1

 After soaking up the sun and absolutely frying our pasty white skin in Culebra, we hopped aboard  another ferry back to the mainland (aka Puerto Rico). When we planned this trip, we thought we could take a ferry between Culebra and Vieques, which are both within a few miles of each other, but we sadly found out, the hard way, that we needed to get to Fajardo and board another ferry to Vieques. So that's what we did. We loaded up and made the 6:30 am ferry.  Two ferry rides and four hours later, we were on Vieques. This year Vieques was voted the best island in the Caribbean by Travel and Leisure, so we were definitely excited to find out why.

We spent our first day in Vieques getting acquainted with the town of Isabel II. We rented an apartment through Air BnB and once we found that, we took our cameras out for a walk. Isabel II is still a little rough around the edges. There isn't much of a tourist infrastructure, which is good and bad. There are no resorts, no high-rise hotels, no Mcdonalds, which is all great. The downside is, there really isn't much of anything else, outside of two cute boutiques and a handful of run-down bars.