September 19, 2007

(Puerto Rico)…I started to wait for a bus from San Juan International Airport, but very soon realised that the Puerto Rican bus service was far from up to scratch. Get a taxi. Flying in from St. John’s in Antigua & Barbuda, I saw the old section of San Juan from high above and grew excited just looking at it. I was dropped off just off Avenida Muñoz Rivera, at the Plaza Colon, a neat, small square of cafés and shoe shiners. I like colonial places, the bright colours of its tidy houses, its small restaurants and cafés where it feels as though patrons come to the same establishment every day and tall linden trees. Walking north towards the Caribbean Sea, I discovered my first section of the city’s famous defensive walls. This was the Fuente San Cristobal.
Puerto Rico’s symbol, seen everywhere, is a turret poking out over the edge of the bluff and with a small window, and the first one I saw was here. It was very hot. Juan Ponce de León, who had traveled with Christopher Columbus in 1493, originally set up a settlement a couple of miles from the present site of San Juan. It was called Caparra. He did not live long enough to see the start of the fortification of San Juan, which started in earnest in the mid-16th century. Its most celebrated defence was that of repelling Sir Francis Drake of England. The principal defensive fort, called La Fortaleza, later on became the home of the Spanish province’s governor. I had the addresses of a few cafés and bars that looked interesting, but all had been closed down. Perhaps they were not tacky enough.
Tacky, though, is the Calle de la Fortaleza. I preferred the streets both up and across that are to the north, towards and left of the San Felipe del Morro fort. Well worth doing is the walk along the base of the wall, starting at the San Juan Gate, but note that if you walk to the right and all the way along to the end, towards El Morro, then there is no access back into town but only back from the same gate. Continue past the gate, that is, if you would be going left if coming out of town, and walk along this shorter stretch. A cool, attractive garden with a café is to your left, with sculpture and parrots. One spot I liked was the Museo Felisa Rincón de Gautier, in the last home of the city’s first woman mayor, or alcaldesa, a very colourful woman also known as Doña Fela and who in her advanced years took to wearing huge glasses and elaborate hair-dos. She was mayor between 1946 and 1968, a huge length of time for a politician by my reckoning, and died in 1994, aged 97.
The museum has numerous photographs of forgotten friends and politicians. In fact, the entire museum has an atmosphere of having passed its usefulness, which made it feel even more necessary to visit and dawdle in. I was the only one there, apart from three museum staffers. Perhaps there really was only one, the other two being friends of hers. It is at the junction of Caleta de San Juan, a treed street that drops down in large steps and is bordered by colourful, high houses, and Calle Clara Lair. (Problematic to me was my attempting to take photographs, an impossible task, of all the places where I saw seven or eight or so juxtaposed houses all in different bright colours—lemon yellow, Fanta orange, pastel blue, lime green, etc.) This definitely is a museum for Puerto Ricans, who still hold her in great esteem.
I often do not bother with the world’s great museums, preferring to see modern life on the street. In this, I am certainly not alone. My excuse is that I have little interest seeing dead people’s furniture. It does not even have a Web site, which further endeared it to me. Over the side of the northern walls, which in places is said to be 20 feet in width, is poorer housing. I did not walk down to it, which was possible, thinking that the residents probably would not appreciate me gawking at the colour that often is present in poverty, or as the Sex Pistols once hollered, “A cheap holiday in someone else’s misery,” always one of my favourite song lines.
That said, such scruples did not stop me visiting the favela slum of Rocinha in Río de Janeiro, Brazil, the name of which, by the way, means “little ranch” in Portuguese. Also to the north side of town is a parade of sculptures of heads, which caught my attention, next to a house’s forecourt of luxuriant foliage and squawking parrots, all things that are suitably Caribbean and add to the general enjoyment. Along these lines is the Butterfly People (www.butterflypeople.com) gallery at 257 Calle de la Cruz, where pinned butterflies are displayed for sale in small to gigantic picture frames. Signs deter photographs. The art is no doubt beautiful, the butterflies appearing to fly even after death. Other signs say that the butterflies are bred in the tropics especially for the gallery, rather than being plucked from some sylvan glade in Costa Rica. Prices are not cheap.