Puerto Rico - Day 8 - Out of the Jungle and Stuffing our Faces

Well, I would like to say that we woke up...but to be honest we hardly slept at all - between flashing our headlamps at low flying aircraft, freaking out because yet another huge bug was crawling on us, and discussing how on earth we were going to make it out of the jungle...very little sleep was had. I do remember having a couple of dreams about rescue being just over the top of the hill though and Dana had dreams of death and skulls all night...yep, that was comforting to hear. For breakfast we pigged out by splitting the other 1/2 of our cliff bar. My left arm was starting to itch like crazy and already had a fun rash on it...not to mention the dozens of bug bites. (pretty sure the rash came from a plant called Ortiga - supposidly worse than poison oak and ivy combined)

We made a plan of attack on how to get out of the jungle and began making our way slowly through the dense jungle - heading upstream. We made sure to stay within listening distance of the river at the bottom of the canyon and we tripped our way through the jungle. We were all definitely fatigued from the little sleep and even less food so we were creeping along. We kept our eyes peeled for any sign of a path and I continually peered up through the trees to try to spot another observatory watch tower across the canyon to keep our bearings and make sure we weren't heading too far upstream and missing the cave that we had to hike over to get to the other side.

I'm pretty sure when Dana spotted the orange flagging it was one of the happiest moments of all of our lives and we made sure to thoroughly celebrate the moment by splitting our other granola bar! :) We managed to follow the very sparse orange tagging until we reached the dirt road that led to the house in the middle of nowhere (this was actually on our map!) We were a little confused where to pick up the other path that head back across the river even though we had been on it the previous day so I asked the farmer in my broken Spanish pointing at his casa on the map. He pointed us on our way and we happily followed the path across the river and after another hour or so of hiking we made it back to the Observatory. We decided that it was time for a "We found our way out of the jungle" celebration picture and we posed in front of the warning sign that we had laughed at the day before.


We continued back to the car and made sure to pick up all of the fallen grapefruit that we found on the walk back. Our car was just where we had left it - parked randomly on the side of the road. We opened it up and raided the car for all of our food supplies and promptly ate everything in site.

We got in the car and started on our way to San Juan where we would stay the night before flying out the next morning. I called my mom and asked if she would find us a cheap hotel room for the night...we had all decided that we had had enough of camping for the trip. :) When you take the northern highway, it only takes about an hour to drive across all of Puerto Rico. We arrived in San Juan and promptly looked for a place to eat because we were all still starving...I guess getting lost in the jungle takes a lot out of a person. We managed to find an all you can eat buffet and we gorged ourselves with heaping plates and flowing beers.

My mom called back and gave us directions to the double tree that she had booked us at. I think us walking into the fancy hotel, covered in mud, smelly and destroyed made most of the employees days and we were more than happpy with the complimentery cookies they handed to us. It took several trips for us to unload the car and we laid everything out to repack it for our flights home the next day. The three of us headed down the street to pick up some snacks, cerveza, and a couple handles each of Don Q to bring home with us. Dana passed out after a beer, so Adam and I headed down to the hot tub alone...and even though it wasn't working - it was the perfect end to a great vacation. :)