day two: rainy day in the rainforest

when we couldn't get in to the local nature preserve due to the goodness of the friday, we decided to drive to el yunque, the only tropical rainforest in the national parks system. as it was still holy week, we expected big crowds, but the trail up the mountain was almost empty. we did encounter a few folks in flip flops at the top, but i think they had taken some sort of short cut involving a road and a vehicle, or maybe a hovercraft.

here are some photos from our day, some taken by me, some taken by matt, some taken by autotimer.

there weren't many colors to see other than green, but there were a few glowingly-bright bromeliads.

there is no way someone could have made this trek in flip flops. thank goodness for gortex.

this bizarre thing was the inflorescence on some sort of palm tree. when it opened, it was a mass of little white flowers that were covered in honeybees.

matt took about a million pictures of the bees.

this snail was roughly the size of my palm.

after two hours of hiking, we made it to the top of el yunque and were able to enjoy the lovely view of the fog.

there were a few places along the hike where we were able to see in between the trees and the raindrops and it was beautiful. the turquoise-ish stuff in the far background is ocean.

someone worked really hard to construct this trail. there were trout ponds that had been built by the CCC- i wonder if they also did some of the trailwork as well.

i'm enchanted by fiddleheads. which reminds me- on the flight home, we got to see the movie, "enchanted" which i don't think we would have ever bothered to get via netflix, but which was quite cute.

all in all, our rainforest trek was a day filled with lovely scenery. there are many waterfalls in the rainforest, and we ended our day by hiking down to la mina falls, which is the most common vacation destination in the park. i thought the weather was kind of chilly, but the falls were filled with people splashing and laughing and getting absolutely pummeled by the tumbling water. i more enjoyed the little falls we saw along the hike.