A couple hours of strenuous hiking along the eastern and northern coast cliffs will bring you to a sight few humans have ever seen - a growing colony of boobies, better known as "goony-birds". Three species nest there - the red-footed, blue-footed, and brown boobies.
As you walk along the broken, jagged terrain, it sounds as if you are walking on fine china and smashing it to pieces. The dolomite(a form of calcium carbonate or limestone) is pitted and cracked and there are many pieces laying about. The surface is so rough that it chews thru hiking boots very quickly; I actually wore out a brand new pair of Army boots in only one of my 5 trips to Mona!
The vistas are incredible:
Man, that first step is a doozy! There's nothing between you and over 400 feet of shark-infested water
except 300 feet of air!
Since the limestone is porous, there are many caves
throughout the island. Mona is one of the few places on earth to have cave
pearls; these are little spherical rocks formed of precipitate that are
contained in their own individual pools of water deep inside the recesses
of a particular cave. There, the floor is covered with a few dozen of these
tiny pools, linked together like a honeycomb and each with its unique "inhabitant".
As you can see from above, one mis-step could have serious consequences...if you survive the fall to the water below you only have seconds before sharks appear! The sharks have learned to associate any splashes with a meal of goat meat; during open season when goats are hunted, if one is wounded it tends to run straight for the cliffs instead of back inland...to test the sharks' reaction times, we tossed several large pieces of rock over the cliff edge...in each case it took less than 40 seconds for at least a dozen sharks to appear, swimming agitatedly, darting back and forth looking for their meal...
Now, here's something that has NEVER been seen before on Mona:
That's right, waterfalls! But wait, if there's no fresh water on the island, how can this be? Well, on one trip to the island, it rained cats and dogs for three days straight! After raining that long, the water had no place to get soaked up so it just flowed until it found a way down...here it actually formed a triple waterfall going over the edge of the cliffs behind Pajaros Beach. Near Sardinera Beach, a bit inland, a small lake was formed, which lasted for almost a year before drying up.