I sped down the narrow twisty road to the west, with plans to delve into the wildlife refuge in search of some super-cool ruins today. One of the points of interest that I had found worthy of including on my itinerary was the ruins of the former Playa Centrale Sugar Mill, built in the 1890s, and currently lost deep in the jungle. The few pictures I had seen of it made it look like something Indiana Jones or Lara Croft would be exploring, which, naturally, is the cardinal desire of every urbex0r who ever picked up a flashlight.
Still impressed with the novelty of whizzing through the sleepy countryside on this mini motorized conveyance, I started to think that I might need to own one of these things and sell my truck eventually.
I covered several miles of twisty-turnies along the gorgeous southern coast of Vieques, with a good mental picture of my map directions in my mind. Today I was much more confident in traffic than when I first started, but I still pulled aside to slow and let car traffic pass me.
So there was this huge radar base that I presume was left behind by the US Navy, and it was like right in my way. On the admittedly poor aerial imagery of Puerto Rico currently online that I used to plan my trip, it was hard to make out just what it was, whether it was abandoned, and whether I could get around or through it easily to where I needed to be. I figured I would just have to come and see; to my chagrin it was very active, and very secure, and very much an obstacle.
Worse yet, a sign on the razorwire fence indicated that "ALL ACTIVITIES AT THIS PROPERTY ARE RECORDED ON VIDEOCAMERA"...I paused here to debate my next move, while munching on the remaining bread I had bought in Isabel Segunda and looking closer at my map photos. Just as I had come to the mistaken conclusion that the base was unmanned and that I would have no problem passing through by following the prison-like fence line, a white pickup truck with US Government plates on it pulled up to the fence and stood there, in an obvious move to let me know that I was being actively watched.
Hoping that this wasn't the beginning of some *deep shit* I calmly kept about my business, slowly put away my bread, and with as much appearance of innocence as possible got ready to move along...without looking like I was trying to run away. I had considered walking up to the fence and asking for directions on how to get to the sugar mill ruins, but undoubtedly the language barrier would make this untenable.
To make myself look as touristy as possible, I shot a couple pics of the old guardhouse that stood buried in the foliage nearby:
I mean come on...this radar base is like right in the middle of a damn road...how can they expect people to not end up here confused by this?
There is the 90-degree turn south to the beach, but again, this spot obviously used to be a 4-way intersection...you can still see the old closed-off roadway leading off into the dense jungle past the guard hut, with white-painted lanes still visible on its surface beneath the carpet of vines and fallen leaves.
Oh well, I guess I will have to take the more circuitous route along the beach and back around to the other side of the base, where the sugar mill ruins were located.
The steep, cracked road dead-ended right before the beach at a locked gateway, with a National Wildlife Refuge sign indicating that I had no choice but to leave my scooter and hike for the rest of the day. Knowing that I still had a long way to go yet I contemplated bucking the rules and driving my scooter around the barricade somehow, but I would soon learn that this was about as far as I could safely go in a vehicle anyway.
Other than the government spook in the white truck that I had lately left behind at the razorwire fence, I was the only human being around for miles. The mild breeze rustled the palm fronds and waves crashed on the sandy beach just beyond.
It was clear that this wide flat trail paralleling the shore had been created recently by the action of heavy equipment, either during the conversion of the old Navy land to wildlife refuge, or during hurricane cleanup efforts.
Google Maps shows this sand path as "Laguna Playa Grande Road," but in any event it is now closed to vehicle traffic. It was already starting to get hot out, and it was barely 7am.
The tracks of heavy front-loaders were still visible imprinted in the sand from whenever they had last been here re-arranging the storm-damaged coastline. I surmised that all kinds of sand and debris had been pushed up here by the storm surge and had to be cleared.
The bridge crossed a fast-flowing inlet between the sea and the lagoon to my right:
Some erosion control measures had also recently been put in place where the mouth of the lagoon emptied into the sea.
After just a few hundred yards into my hike the clear wide trail ceased to be clear, and showed signs of having been abandoned for some years. So much for "Laguna Playa Grande Road"...
Here I could see a clear view of the radar base in the distance over the lagoon. It was basically just an open area with a bunch of antennas:
Flowering vines and other fallen palm tree parts made this trail about as efficient as walking the beach, so I switched over to the latter so as to hopefully catch some more of the breeze.
I was already sweating, profusely.
There was not a sign of another human as far as I could see in any direction...
...and other than the loader tracks in the sand behind me, there wasn't even any sign that another human had been here anytime lately. I was starting to get back some of that exhilarating feeling I had while on my Europe-Africa trip six years ago.
I had gone on this trip in part out of some faint desire to keep alive that same spirit I had back then, which had unquestionably lain dormant for several years possibly never to return, in the face of many new adultly responsibilities. However, it was abundantly clear to me that this was not the same experience as before; I was older, and in light of the major shift in my life direction since the Europe adventure, there would be no getting that back. All the same I was enjoying the hell out of this brief respite.
Suddenly the path (which had started out as a road) now tapered out into complete nothingness, and I was left scratching my head and rechecking my map photos.
I knew that it was time for it to veer back inland and north toward the road the radar base was on, but this abrupt end to the trail was not doing my confidence any favors. I dropped my backpack and took a water break, retied my boots, and sifted my thoughts. As I sat on the driftwood palm log catching my breath, I decided that I would follow the multitude of hoof-prints from the wild horses that roam the countryside...surely, if they are leading off into the bush in a straight line, they must follow some sort of trail to somewhere.
Letting the horses lead the way, I trudged through waist-deep foliage as fallen branches crunched somewhere under me. I just hoped that my ankles wouldn't suddenly be chomped by some scorpion or venomous snake. This was what my "trail" looked like currently:
I did bring my compass by the way, and I was beginning to wonder whether it was almost time to start using it.
I breathed a sigh of relief about 100 yards later when the sandy trail reappeared and I had something real to follow again. There were a few unfamiliar flowers in bloom here, one of which reminded me a little of Lady Slipper back home (below). Keep in mind, this was mid-November...
Suddenly I came to a locked gateway at a 3-way intersection with an actual gravel road meant for vehicles. I decided to turn to the right, back toward the radar base, since the sugar mill ruins were just on the other side of it. Not much further on I had to pass yet another barred gate:
Since this seemed to be the only road to or from the radar base, I hoped that I wouldn't run into that white government truck again...if he saw me now he would almost certainly think I was some spy, terrorist, or environmentalist saboteur trying to enter the base, and detain me. My current-military-issue backpack and makeshift t-shirt turban did not help my appearance.
Looking at my maps, I decided that I was actually going the wrong way and should have turned left (if I understood my position correctly). So I turned back and began heading west, through the 3-way intersection again.
After a few hundred yards of hiking uphill to the west, I became convinced that I was going the wrong way again. I stood at this high-point where I had a decent view of my actual position relative to the town (instead of being completely surrounded in a wall of foliage). Was this actually the beginning of the overgrown Bunkers Road?
I sat for another rest and contemplated my maps again. Clearly I had misunderstood where I actually was on the map...the trails were very hard to make out from the poor aerial imagery, so it came as no surprise. One thing I was sure of was that this trail appeared to be bounding off into the mountains and hug the southern coast, which was not where I wanted to go. There was literally nothing out there:
Even if it was the Bunkers Road, I would be hiking for perhaps 18 hours before I came to the actual bunkers. I did want to still try and see the bunkers, but if I did so I would approach via scooter from the highway along the north side of the isle.
I decided to turn back to my original course and keep going this time.
I hiked on through endless thickets of ferns and flowering vines, and it wasn't long before I realized that the constant ambient buzzing I heard was actually from honey bees...
The hills were absolutely alive with billions of honey bees. There were flocks of many different types of butterflies as well.
If you're wondering why I didn't just cut cross-country at any point during my trip, these next photos illustrate just how thick the growth was on either side of me...
Sharp cacti and other pointy plants were so densely packed and sewn together with an impenetrable skein of vines that I could scarcely have made progress at a rate of 10 feet per hour through this wall of foliage. I was no more able to veer out of my lane than if I were a bowling ball on bumper league night.
Eventually my path degraded from a recently-cleared road to an overgrown two-track, but I was more confident this time that I was heading in the right direction rather than straight back to the other side of the radar base. I could hear the increasingly louder sound of whatever generator or other machinery was powering that site, but I knew that I was skirting around it to the north now, which was more what I wanted.
Some of the trees here were magnificent, and like the other plant species I was seeing, all of them were unfamiliar to me.
I still wasn't sure precisely where I was on my maps, but since forks in the road were practically nonexistent I had no choice but to keep going straight.
Oh hey, here are my horses that I was following.
Ironically it was right here that I also saw the first actual side-trail of the day, so I decided to follow it for a bit to see what it did. Maybe this was the trail to the sugar mill ruins? It was a pretty faint trail, and soon I saw this MASSIVE tree off to the side, with yet an even fainter trail branching off and leading toward it:
A trail that leads to a tree? Well, since I already wanted to check out this tree closer, I clearly was meant to follow this side path as well. Almost immediately I saw something half-buried in the ground, and since I had just turned on my "ruins radar" any manmade objects automatically jumped out at me. It was not a piece of a sugar mill, but an old rusty machete, whose wooden handle had rotted away:
Did this mean that some previous adventurer had met their fate at this location, possibly devoured by a chupacabra leaping from the thicket? I was more off the beaten path than ever, and aside from the occasional distant sounds from the radar base, I was completely awash in wilderness.
This was about as close as I could get to the tree, which had to be hundreds of years old:
I couldn't see the trunk, but each of these limbs had an astounding reach of about 40 feet from it, and were themselves thick enough to be the trunk of a mature tree. I wondered whether there was something special or sacred about this gargantuan tree, seeing as there was a trail leading to it. It was definitely of mythological proportions.
As with many of the other trees that I had passed, this one was enveloped in a curtain of vines hiding much of its structure, but if there was a trunk in there it must have been 15ft. in diameter.
Returning to the previous trail that I had branched off of, I now continued along my way.
My trail now varied from imperceptible footpath (above) to severely compromised gravel road (below). I had traveled probably half a mile or more since I had turned off of my original main trail where the two horses were standing. Luckily I had been doing much better on energy today, and I took many breaks to catch my breath and drink water. I was gushing sweat like Niagara Falls.
Just as I was beginning to think this trail went really nowhere, I was startled by the sudden presence of a large hole hacked into the solid foliage to my right, exposing yet another minuscule side trail leading down into a dark black jungle glen:
It was so dark that I had to adjust my camera's shutter speed several clicks to take these photos...knowing that I was now on a side trail of a side trail of a side trail, my feeling was that I was way too far off track. Something wasn't right and I should head back to more defined trails. Nonetheless I decided to take a quick peek at this curious hole in the jungle...the change in foliage (especially the hanging vines I remembered seeing in photos online), led me to think that hey, maybe this is the sugar mill ruins? Someone had obviously cleared this opening recently, so maybe this was it? After all, the actual ruins are not visible at all on aerial maps because they are totally concealed under the jungle canopy, so all of my navigation was essentially based on guess work.
When I saw old iron wreckage on the ground, I knew it had to be:
I started to get excited as I moved briskly ahead.
Brick, and other foundation signs on the forest floor:
Well, here we have a narrow-gauge steam locomotive, or most of one:
Now I wondered if this was something separate from the sugar mill, because I had not seen any photos or mention of a locomotive anywhere online...am I the first person to put these photos online? Was this trail carved out because the locomotive was only recently discovered by locals?
Even if I wasn't in fact at the site of the sugar mill, I knew that this had to be connected to it, and I must be close. It was hard to believe that there was a railroad here...where was the clearing for the tracks in all this jungle?! It was as if this train had just fallen out of the sky and landed here.
I made my way past the steam engine to check out the surroundings a little more.
When I stepped out onto this old cement staircase and could see something bigger looming through the trees ahead, I knew it was time to take off my backpack and get ready to explore.
Wow...
This was perhaps the base of a chimney, made out of very old brick.
It was dim enough in here under the jungle canopy to where I had to go get the mini tripod out of my backpack in order to get proper photos.
Some of the structure had been scabbed onto with later concrete additions, but even those were probably around a century old:
But despite its originating in the 1860s, this ruin did have a much older feel to it. I guess the jungle has that effect.
There were little gecko lizards scampering around on everything, but they were so small and so quick that I never got a picture of one. This was not only true of the ruins, but of almost everywhere I went on this trip...geckos were everywhere, horses were everywhere, chickens and roosters roamed the streets, and I even saw an iguana or two.
Holy crap was this cool...
This must have been some sort of central powerhouse or boiler-house (there was a large iron boiler in there).
Sugar was Vieques' only real industry before the Navy and tourism came, and it once had five sugarcane plantations, each with its own mill. Blogger Julia Wertz presents what little history there is online about this place, and has a few better photos than mine. Playa Centrale Sugar Mill was constructed in the 1860s, and operated until 1941 when the US Navy bought up Vieques. It was the last of the five mills on the island to close down. The other plantations were at Arcadia, Santa Elena, Santa María, and Esperanza—perhaps that was the ruins next to the road I was wondering about where I got off the bus.
The heyday of the sugar industry on Vieques was from the early 1800s to the 1920s. It began to slide into a downward spiral during the Great Depression, but sugar prices had been going down since the US acquired Puerto Rico after the Spanish-American War in 1898.
I stopped and checked myself for a moment, remembering that I was in fact still in America (technically speaking), and not somewhere deep in Peru or Cambodia. Despite the feeling of extreme remoteness and otherliness, these ruins were listed in our National Register of Historic Places, and the Vieques Conservation and Historical Trust has occasionally offered guided tours.
I was noticing a few marking ribbons posted around the site, and a few places where branches had been pruned back, which made me think that some historic conservation was underway, and possibly an improved interpretive trail was being planned. For now however, this seemed to my every impression like I had just parachuted into the set of an Indiana Jones movie. I still marveled at how I had bumbled my way in here at all! In retrospect it was practically an accident.
Wertz writes that these mills were operated by slaves until 1873 when Puerto Rico "abolished" slavery. America was already in the Reconstruction Era by that time, but remember Puerto Rico was not part of the US until 1898. Although Spanish Puerto Rico stopped slavery in 1873, slaves had to "buy their way to emancipation," so with no other way out, most continued to work on the plantation as before.
In 1874 there was a workers' revolt at this mill, in protest of the conditions and of their treatment by the owners and the government. The Spanish Civil Guard was dispatched from the fort in Isabel Segunda to quell the rebellion, which lasted weeks. The workers burned the fields, and attacked the soldiers with sticks and stones. One worker was killed, several were injured, and dozens were jailed at the fort.
Work terms changed on the cane plantations in subsequent years, but it was still essentially indentured servitude, and the yearly off season left the work force to sustain themselves by fishing and scrounging.
Part of one of the many old tunnels that are said to run through this complex of ruins:
I get the impression that one could spend a lot more time here exploring, but the absolute impermeability of the aggressive surrounding foliage makes it an impossibility to just wander off away from the already-cleared areas. I mean, when you talk about ruins that have been swallowed up by nature, this one is firmly in the belly of the whale.
This reminded me a lot of my trip to the Marlborough Ruins back home in northern Michigan, with the scale and abstractness of the ruins, and level of overgrowth.
There was a bit of a pit I could go down into here, where it looked like some of the structure had once collapsed, and look up at the many brick arches that were in this particular spot, although the glare of the sun was an issue:
I don't know if these arched cavities represented some sort of ovens that had something to do with refining cane sugar or what...sugar mill anatomy is not my area of expertise.
I have only explored one other sugar mill before, in Longmont, Colorado, and it was much more modern.
Suddenly I found myself on the other side of the boiler room, and the two big boilers were fully exposed:
An extremely narrow stair led back down to ground level.
Kind of an interesting set of walls peeled back here:
It was a pretty long stair...
A large concrete section was attached to the side of the older brick ruin:
This tree has plausibly been growing here since 1941 when the mill closed:
Up in a large hole in the concrete here, there was a beehive about the size of a beach ball. There was probably a few hundred pounds of bees visible on just the part that I could see.
I guess that makes sense, given the sheer multitude of honey bees that were abundant in this region. There must be some huge hives in some of these ancient trees I've been seeing, too. Encouraging, given the relative scarcity of honey bees back home in mainland America these days. I guess it goes to show what closing off an entire wilderness area for 80 years can do for local ecosystems, even if the Navy was dropping bombs all over the place.
Looking up to the top of the concrete portion of the ruins makes me think that this might have been where an elevated railway grade passed over part of the mill, perhaps to drop coal into bins for powering the boilers?
I became aware that there was evidence of more ruins sprinkled out further beyond this central structure, and there were some hardly noticeable trails that snaked to and fro amongst them.
I followed a couple trails and saw this large iron...pendulum? push rod? piston rod? sticking out of the ground...
The shape of it reminded me immediately of the old iron bits of the Cornish stamp mill I had found near an old copper mine in the wilderness of the Porcupine Mountains back home. The bottom end of this gargantuan piece of iron was buried well down into the ground, however.
I was surprised to come across what looked like the base to another chimney, well removed from the main ruins site that I had started at. It was a square-based pyramidal shape whose top I could not see due to the dense foliage. I walked around three of its sides.
Guess what kept me from the fourth side? If you answered "dense foliage," then you are correct.
I was beginning to think of the long grueling hike back to Esperanza in the smothering noontime heat, and the fact that my water was running low. So when it started raining, I headed back to where I dropped my backpack and prepared to get into my raingear (even though I would probably sweat so hard inside of it that I would get wetter than if I just went without).
Before I could do this however, the rain stopped. This was to be the repeating formula of all the rain events during my stay in Puerto Rico; just like in Michigan's fruit belt, the average weather was 10 minutes of rain, followed by 10 minutes of glorious sun...10 minutes of rain, followed by 10 minutes of glorious sun...and often both simultaneously.
So I just started hiking, retracing all of my steps through all of the side trails I had taken, and finally back to the main trail that led back to the beach. I marveled still at the pure dumb luck that brought me to my vine-shrouded destination...I still don't know how I pulled that off, in view of how dubious some of the trails were (see photo above) and I have done a lot of backcountry and off-trail hiking. But following a faint trail is one thing; picking the right one to get to your goal is another.
I breathed a sigh of relief when I finally stepped again onto the shores of the Caribbean Sea...
I was ravenous. Upon arriving back at Esperanza an hour or two later, it was definitely past lunch time. I had cashed out the last of my smooshed bakery bread I bought way back in Isabel, so I decided to finally frequent the food cart that was located at the highway intersection that I had gone past so many times now. I literally just gazed at the entirely unfamiliar menu and randomly selected something that seemed good and if I recall correctly was called ensalata pollo, pintos, y arroz (chicken, beans, and rice salad), before trying to communicate competently with the lady at the counter. This was one of those times where I mentally rehearsed and spoke my order in good enough sounding Spanish to convince someone that I was not some clueless gringo tourist, which resulted in them immediately hitting me with a full speed barrage of more unexpected Spanish questions that caused my eyes to glaze over like some clueless gringo tourist. I capitulated, and after a long requisite pause said the old familiar phrase, "¿Habla Inglés?" Soon enough I was gobbling away at my huge portion of simple yet delicious Caribbean food in a shady spot.
CLICK HERE FOR PART 4
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