Later in the day we saw the Guanica Dry Forest, and as the website I linked points out, it is a neat counterpart to the more tropical rain forests near us in San Juan. There are cacti growing (can you see them in the picture above? They are the green, stick-like things), and other flora that require less water. In the middle of PR are some large mountains, and most of the rain gets dropped on the north side of the mountains, making them wet and jungle-like. The south side of the mountains are more dry. This is noticeable even from the road, because the open land goes from what looks like jungle near San Juan to prairie-like grass as we approach Guayama.

At night, we saw the phosphorescent bay at La Parguera. In the water of this bay, there are bioluminescent bacteria that are excited by motion. We went on a large, glass-bottomed boat (this was not what we thought it would be - is was actually a solid-bottomed boat with about 6 windows cut into the bottom of the boat near the perimeter) and took a short trip out to the bay. At the bay, the boat company had several guys (from their company, not passengers) jump out and swim in the water, and they brought a bucket of water up as well. The swimmers glowed in the water, and when we swished our hands in the bucket the water twinkled, like tiny fireflys were swimming all around. The Lord must have had a mighty good time creating these twinkly little bateria!

We spent the night in Mayaguez in a hotel and experienced many things that have been completely typical of our time in PR. Summary: things were not quite what we thought they'd be. The good parts: it was clean, and the A/C worked.