“¡Cabrón!” – unas vacaciones en Puerto Rico, día tres

Waking up on the morning of our third day, we enjoyed some of the best coffee at nuestra casita en las montañas bonitas. While I do miss having my morning tea (I have mine shipped in from England), the coffee here—even the coffee available in las panerías pequeñas—is so, so good. We bought a brand called Café Oro de Puerto Rico (oro means gold), and it is just so aromatically satisfying and so delectably tasteful, the complex and layered flavors soar through the sensations in a deeply profound and delightfully awakening celebration of the affections. Maybe I’ll start drinking coffee again.

Following our morning coffee (and a little toast), we had to make our way to a town to the east of us called Orocovis which is where Toroverde Adventure Park is located, the site of my first ziplining adventure! Aaron was also joining me on the excursion, and while Amy was also coming along, she was sensible enough to leave her two feet firmly on the ground when we got to the adventure park.

Before the ziplining adventure could begin, however, we had to first venture through the rural, windy roads of the Puerto Rican mountainsides. It was on this day that we encountered some of the most challenging roads to navigate. Google indicated that it would take at least an hour and ten minutes to travel 24 miles; since we had to arrive at Toroverde by 12:15 for our 1:00 ziplining madness, so we left with plenty of time to spare at shortly after 10:30 in the morning.

While we were quite used to the twisty-turny nature of these rural roads by this point, nothing prepared us for a section of road that was under construction. The pavement had been totally removed and only gravel and sand was in its place. But since rain comes and goes so frequently here, the road was more washed out than entirely stable. Add this to the thick, jungle-like brush of dense foliage that enshrouds roads that constantly bend and curve along sidewinding shelves carved precariously into the mountainsides, and it feels like you’re driving through some kind of park of the Mesozoic, as it were. It was on this day where we keenly felt the need for a Jeep or SUV, and I continue to highly recommend something along those lines if you decide to venture out into the more mountainous and rural regions of Puerto Rico.

At long last, however, after a bracing and exciting car ride through roads of the likes I’ve never seen, we arrived at Toroverde Adventure Park 45 minutes ahead of scheduled ziplining appointment. Toroverde is home to el monstruo (“The Monster”), and depending on what website you read, it’s the third longest zipline in the world (their website says it’s the biggest in the Americas), and Jimmy Fallon famously enjoyed it himself (if enjoy is the right word).

What makes this zipline particularly thrilling is that you travel on the zipline horizontally, your body prone and parallel to the earth, across 1.5 miles of cable, sometimes 1200 feet in the air, reaching speeds of up to 95 miles per hour, soaring through the air above rocky streams and those lusciously dense forests of the Puerto Rican mountainsides that I can’t stop bloviating about.

I’ve written at length here, here, here, and here, about how terribly afraid of heights I am. But I seem to suffer from a particularly bizarre form of the phobia. For example, I have a hard time walking on transparent floors open to a dizzying drop (like at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis); but also the Empire State in all its unending stability continues to frighten me to this day (“Someone might lose all control of their sanity and toss their phone over the edge!”); and even the relatively modest heights of old castles like Linlithgow in Scotland cause my knees to wobble.

And yet, without much fuss, I’m able to ride the Roosevelt Island Tramway in NYC (“It’s a big, heavy car suspended by flimsy wires that could malfunction and we’d plummet into the East River!” you would think I would exclaim), drive through the sidewinding roads of the Puerto Rican mountainside (“Those guardrails are doing nothing to protect us from plunging to our deaths!” you would imagine I would surmise), or even enjoy the views from the London Eye (“This ridiculous glass bubble suspended 135 meters in the air—the floors opaque, mind—could detach at any moment, shatter into the pavement below, and we’d all die!” you would presume I would conclude).

Through all this nonsense and for some reason, however, being suspended by wires face down all by myself encased in a kind of hospital stretcher 1200 feet above the stunning Puerto Rican landscape traveling 95 miles per hour on 1.5 miles of cable did not cause my debilitating fear of heights to rear its head to interfere with my enjoyment of something so ludicrously absurd. While I did feel some semblance of anxiety in my stomach as we waited to launch, it was more because of the feelings of exhilarating excitement due to the irrational activity I was about to partake in.

And, indeed, it was all those things: enjoyable, ludicrous, absurd, exhilarating, and exciting all wrapped in a hospital stretcher traveling 95 miles per hour via wires 1200 feet in the air for 1.5 miles.

The scariest part, actually, is when you’re preparing to depart as a Toroverde employee buckles you in (before giving you a 2 minute crash course in ziplining), suspends you using cables and carabiners, and then makes you wait a minute or two for the route to clear, your pathway stretching endless ahead of you, the ground several feet below you.

And then, you’re off! And what an experience it was, flying through the air, the wind bracingly whipping about you, the world ahead of you, zooming by from an incredible vista the likes of which I’ve never experienced. If you are at all afraid of heights (but perhaps you suffer from the very same comical rendition of the phobia I have that allows you to enjoy this preposterous activity), then you simply must go ziplining. Absolutely. Hands down. Just do it.

When you get to the end of the second of two ziplines for el monstruo, you have to wait a bit as a truck comes to pick you and others up. As we waited, Aaron and I had a lovely conversation with a group of women who were ahead of us. They asked me what I thought about it (earlier I had remarked to them as we were waiting to fly off, “Haco miedo,”) but at the end of the two trips I exclaimed, “Muy divertido!” They then taught me some more colorful ways to describe how fun it was using the exclamation, “¡Cabrón!” which—as far as I can tell—translates literally as, “Dumbass!” but seems to be a multi-use word in the same way we use f*ck: “Dumb as f*ck,” “Cool as f*ck,” etc.

And so, as you can imagine, Aaron and I worked up an appetite, so we discovered a nearby restaurant called Roka Dura, where we got our first real taste of the local cuisine, la comida criolla. While the direct translation is Creole food, it’s not exactly the same kind of Creole cuisine you might find in, say, New Orleans. The Puerto Rican variety is a mixture of African, Spanish/European, and Taíno, the original inhabitants of the Caribbean.

We decided to enjoy mofongos rellenos (stuffed mofongos). The word itself stems from the Kikongo word mfwenge-mfwenge which means “a great amount of anything at all,” and it’s prepared by lightly frying plantains until they’re soft, mashing them with garlic, salt, and oil, and then shaping them into a bowl. You can then fill the bowl with whatever you like with chicken, steak, seafood, vegetables, etc. We opted for mofongos with red snapper (and another fish that’s escaping me right now), and it was all really quite delicious, especially as we were sitting outside on a raised deck that overlooked the gorgeous Puerto Rican landscape.

We next stopped off at a liquor store nearby called Bajuras, where we accidentally discovered that the locals seem to use ron (i.e. rum) to mean any style of spirit in the same way the U.S. South use Coke to refer to all pops. There also was a kind, young gentleman who asked if we had come from Toroverde, and we both talked a bit about how much we enjoyed ziplining. I also apologized for not knowing nearly enough Spanish to carry on a conversation (his English was excellent), but he told me not to worry about it. I continue to be so astonished (in a good way) about how friendly Puerto Ricans are, from the women who ziplined with us at Toroverde, everyone in Bajuras, and everyone else we’ve interacted with. That said, knowing even a little Spanish will help you along a good way, so I can’t stress enough how important it is to try even just a little bit.

Before making our way home, we stopped at a supermercado to buy food to make dinner: chicken, peppers, onions, carrots, and this delightful sauce called sofrito, a puree of onions, garlic, an assortment of peppers, tomatoes, cilantro, and vinegar. The cuisine here uses it in many dishes (kind of like curry powder or paste in other countries), including their beans (where I consistently tended to detect a hint of vinegar whenever I had them due to the sofrito). At the time, we didn’t really know what we were doing with the sofrito, so we used it to marinade the chicken and then grilled it in tin foil, but it turned out so, so good! Of course, no meal is complete without bebidas de ron, which we enjoyed immensely as well!

The night was waning fast, so we retired for the evening, our next day awaiting us, an adventure to Puerto Rico’s second biggest city, Ponce…

Spanish lesson for the day:

1. I’ve previously written about how helpful the verb queren (to want) is. Another one is tener (to have). Tengo means “I have,” and tenemos means, “We have.” For example, “Tengo una reserva para tres,” is, “I have a reservation for three [people].”
2. Another word the ladies at Teroverde taught me was puñeta, which seems to translate directly as, “Damn!” Like cabrón, it can also be used in many colorful ways.
3. Lastly, locals might ask you, “¿Como estas?” which means, “How are you?” You can simply respond, “Bueno” (masculine), or “Buena” (feminine) to say you’re doing well, but don’t forget to be polite and ask them as well with, “¿Y tu?”

Travel tips, day three:

1. If you want to go ziplining at Toroverdo, make sure to get your tickets ahead of time. They have other ziplines routes in addition to el monstruo, so go check them out!
2. Rice and beans always seem to be served together here, and servers might give you a confused look if you ask for one and not the other. So remember: “Quiero arroz y frijoles, por favor.”
3. Lastly, while we tend to have pretty good cell phone service in towns and cities, sometimes service cuts out. Your GPS should still keep working, but just keep this in mind.