Getting There Is Half the Fun

The acme (or nadir, depending on who’s telling the story) of our Puerto Rican holiday trip was our trip to the Bio Bay, one of the “must-sees” in every tour book I read about the island.
Let us take a moment to give you, dear reader, and some background. The Bio Bay is one of nature’s wonders, a location where microorganisms called dinoflagelates live and when they are disturbed by motion in the water, a chemical chain reaction is set off that results in a bioluminescent glow. According to the website biobay.com, “The defense mechanism starts a chemical chain reaction that results in a blue green glow that lasts as long as the organism is disturbed. It is not like a ‘glow in the dark’ toy that has to be held up to a light and charged up. This is a reaction that occurs because a very specific set of nutrients are available in the water to sustain these little ‘water fireflies’.”
This, of course, sounds like the coolest thing ever, right? Who wouldn’t want to go to see a bay with its own glow-in-the-dark creatures? It was definitely on my list as a destination. There are several Bio Bays in Puerto Rico, one off the coast of Fajardo on Puerto Rico proper, and another in Vieques, a small island off the coast of Puerto Rico, which involves a ferry ride, etc.
So Fajardo it was. I found some numbers to call in the book, and the one that answered was Las Tortugas Adventures. Soon I was talking to owner Gary Horne and telling him that I had twelve people who wanted to sail kayaks into the Bio Bay. We settled on a price and he said he would email me directions. He advised us to wear clothes that we could get wet and suggested we bring towels.
It was about this time that I should have suspected that perhaps we were signing up for more of an adventure than we had expected. Gary tried unsuccessfully to send the directions via email, so he gave me the complicated directions over the phone, which I frantically scribbled. He told us it would take about one and a half hours to get there, and he expected us at 5:30. It was now 4 o’clock. Yikes.
Suddenly, it felt like we were in an episode of “The Amazing Race.” Three carloads of us screamed out of the hotel, filled with nature lovers determined to see an environmental miracle.
But first we had to find Fajardo and Las Croabas Park. Fortunately, two of the three cars had a global positioning system (GPS) and we were able to plug in “Fajardo.” This got us a good part of the way there, in spite of the fact that the GPS disagreed with the way we were going and repeatedly told us to “make the next legal U turn.” Ignoring this command, we reached Fajardo, and even found Conquistador Avenue. We were so close that we figured the last part would be easy, but there were roads that “T”ed into other roads and lots of other things complicated by the scribbling and the language barrier, so by the time we arrived, we had made lots of illegal U turns and were still running late—and lost!
Exasperated but undeterred, we pulled over to ask some locals where the park was and finally squealed into the parking lot, about twenty minutes late. The twelve of us ran across to the Las Tortugas Adventure truck, where Gary and Maria were waiting for us, an intrepid band of BioBay explorers. We couldn’t wait to get our feet wet!