18 05 500N 65 27 400W Beautiful Vieques
The beach that we had anchored off looked pretty amazing even in the failing light, as the sun went down we were both looking forward to exploring the next day. Sun Bay has a wonderful sandy beach, about a mile long, a horseshoe shape fringed with coconut trees. Idyllic. There is a park behind the beach where wild horses and their foals were roaming, really lovely to see them being followed around by cattle egrets (on most of the other islands we usually see them following mowers or strimmers). We walked the beach which goes around the headland into another very sheltered bay with another beautiful beach, before arriving at the small village of Esperanza. The narrow main street running along the seafront has a few restaurants and bars and a well-kept promenade overlooking the bay. It almost feels like somewhere in the Med. After sampling a traditional Puerto Rican dish, seafood ‘mofongo’, mashed green plantains served with a creamy tomato broth and large chunks of white fish and mussels (lush), we waddled to the small grocery store in search of some provisions for the next couple of days. The streets off the sea front are quiet with detached single storey houses with beautiful orange flowering trees, and fruit trees bursting with what looked like mangoes. And some random art on the equally random boulders. We certainly walked off our lunch that day, with an hours beach walk back with our groceries. The following day we walked some more, the park behind the beach has a sandy track which heads off east to two remote beaches and the bioluminescent lagoon called Mosquito Bay. Not much to see on the way, surprisingly no obvious wildlife except a mongoose who ambled across the track in front of us before racing back into the undergrowth when he realised he had an audience. The beaches were both covered with large amounts of weed, so we decided not to swim until we got back to the boat. Mosquito Bay was deserted with not much to see, we will return one evening when we have a hire car and the kayak so that we can experience the bay ‘lit up’ by the microscopic bioluminescent creatures. |