As a matter of fact, I did. I�d only have this rental car for eight hours, and I knew no one in San Juan to impress. Besides, half the time the rental car place never had any compact cars in stock, so they had to upgrade you to the next size level for free. So I said no, hoping he had no compacts in stock.
�Now about insurance,� he said.
�I�ve got insurance.�
�We have a special package for visitors. It�s $17.95 a day, it covers everything. If something happens, the police will not give you any troubles. If not,� he said, with a sincerity that only comes from polishing the same garbage sales pitch until it shines, �it could ruin your vacation.�
First of all, this guy�s assuming I�m in San Juan for vacation. It�s true, but it bugs me. Second, this policy isn�t some Puerto Rican Get Out of Jail free card, it�s just the most they dare to gauge for one day of supplemental car insurance. If I for some reason do get into an accident, waiving around a $17.95 insurance receipt will do nothing to cancel any fines San Juan cops save just for rich idiot tourists.
I passed up the supplemental insurance, saying �No, that�s OK,� eight times in a row until the guy stopped bringing up slightly less expensive plans. It did lodge the usual ember in my mind that maybe I should have taken it. A lot could happen in eight hours.
I was on an early flight from Newark that morning. I was taking the whole day for vacation, and wanted to spend as little as possible hanging around my kitchen. I was meeting three other people at the Budget rental agency at 10:30 P.M. We�d be getting a minivan to haul our gear to the various caves in Puerto Rico. But my plane was arriving at 2:09 P.M., so I had a lot of time to kill, alone.
I had spent an embarrassingly long time trying to figure out how to deal with my luggage. It would be way too much to haul around tourist sites, there wouldn�t be any lockers at the airport to use, and transferring them from taxi to taxi would be expensive and exhausting. Some time before I determined to wear seventeen layers and my caving helmet on the plane to keep my luggage down to one bag, I realized I could just get a rental car for the day. It�s be about the price of a round trip taxi from the airport, I could keep all my stuff in the trunk, and I could hit anywhere in San Juan.
So I did. My car ended up not being a Kia. It was a Suzuki Aerio, which makes Kias look like Batmobiles. But I was just one guy, and my luggage fit in the Aerio trunk despite it being the size of my refrigerator�s crisper. I closed the trunk, and had it pop back open at me. One of the attendants showed me the trick to closing it: you had to hit the trunk latch button up front, and from there you had exactly one chance to gently click the trunk closed.
If I wanted a car that needed tricks and gentle care to work, I�d still have my 89� Mercury Cougar from college. But trunk maintenance is a low priority in Puerto Rico; air conditioning is not. I soon understood this, thanked whatever gods the Tania Indians sacrificed lizards to, and agreed with the Budget mechanic whose time was spent prioritizing AC maintenance over an easy-access trunk. The island was a near-constant 80 degrees and humid when I was there. It�s a very nice temperate in the shade, but sitting in a hot car is like jumping in an oven.
I didn�t have time to look up much tourist stuff in San Juan. The big things I knew about were the forts: San Cristobal and El Morro. These were some of the oldest structures in the western hemisphere, built hundreds of years ago by the Spanish to protect the San Juan port. I didn�t know where in the city they were, but I was hoping the map from the rental agency would point them out.
Crap, I didn�t get a map.
I ran back inside, got a map from a stack, and went back to my sweltering little Aerio. I avoided the glare of the clerk who got me my sweet ride, who I think was actively rooting for me to get in an accident. �Your vacation is ruined! Was that worth $17.95?�
I got in the highway system, half-surprised San Juan had a highway system. I was under the impression that the whole Caribbean was a ring of fancy hotels surrounding tin-roof poverty. But that�s not what all the Lincoln Navigators and Toyota Tundras were telling me. Maybe there was a big car culture here, or the Puerto Rican economy was closer to the American economy than I thought, or maybe all the cars gleamed because they didn�t have to deal with rock salt on the undercarriage every time there�s a cold snap. One thing I was sure of: the worst car on the road at any given time was mine.
The police cars constantly have their rotating blue lights on in Puerto Rico. I never heard a siren, but the blue lights were ever-present. It�s a movement to make the cops more visible, or else a Kmart promotion. I have no idea if this cuts down on crime, but I was there for the better part of a week and no one stuck a knife in me. No one stole my Aerio, either, but that might have just been aesthetics.
Old San Juan is built on a peninsula encompassing the big harbor: the rest of San Juan is spread out from there. I weaved my way onto the peninsula, and was soon driving alongside the steep masonry walls of the San Cristobal fortress.
San Cristobal and El Morro are part of the National Park Service, even though they�re not in any the 50 states. El Morro, on the tip of the peninsula, was built by the Spanish starting in 1539 to protect the harbor. As the years progressed, El Morro grew. So did San Juan: it became a walled city, with the San Cristobal fortress at the other end of the peninsula, sandwiching the city between two mountains of brick and cannon.
I drove through a 10-foot metal gate to get in San Cristobal. There�s no parking at El Morro, so you�ve got to walk from San Cristobal. The parking lot was a moat. It was dry and free of alligators, but it was still a moat, one of San Cristobal�s defense perimeters. The fortress was built in levels: if attackers got past any line of fortification, you moved up one level to the next set of battle stations, ceding only a narrow no man�s land. My Aerio was now parked in this strategically useless spot.
An air-conditioned information center was built inside one of the walls, with old stone peeking past the Sheetrock. It was $5.00 for visiting both fortresses, plus a $2.00 fee if I parked in the moat over an hour. It was 4:15, and the whole place closed at 6:00. The park ranger (they all seemed to speak fluent English) said if I did a quick 45 minutes at each fortress, I could see both of them before closing. Worked for me.
A long steep tunnel took me up and out of the air-conditioned interior, into a huge stone courtyard. Half a dozen cavernous rooms had exhibits on the dress and lifestyle and history of the fortress inhabitants. Another half-dozen big rooms were just empty. That gave me more of a fortress feel: this is huge, and empty, and it�s not exactly doing anything right now, but if pirates attack this is the place to be.
Stairs and ramps led up to higher levels. A few corroded cannons were locked in place, pointing over an ocean view that only had a cargo ship to target. The outer walls here are a dozen feet thick, dense enough to protect against cannons. The parapets have slots in them big enough to walk through, and which flared out as you got closer to the edge of the walls to allow a radius of cannon shots. It felt like I should be yelled at for getting close to the edge here, or that guard rails should be up, but there was nothing and no one stopping me from walking off a ledges and falling 60 feet. Cool.
A huge wooden door led out of San Cristobal, and El Morro was within sight down the shore. On the walk I passed by old cemetery so well-maintained and covered in fresh flowers I thought it was a outdoor showroom for mausoleums. How are these graves hundreds of years old if they looked like their inhabitants died from iPod electrocutions rather than smallpox?
El Morro had the similar layered build of San Cristobal, although El Morro got older as you went lower. It started with a small defense on the coast, and built its way up to being a massive high-perched fortress; the lower you went, the further back in time you got. The lowest point is 450 years old, still with shrapnel embedded in the walls. Shrapnel older than Shakespeare.
It was 5:50. The rangers at El Morro announced that they were closing soon. I began walking back. I figured I could get to the big wooden door at San Cristobal by 6:00, weave my way back to my car by 6:05, and figure out what to do with the next four hours of my life.
Off by two minutes: I got to the door at 6:02. It was locked. I tried knocking on it, but on a massive door like that, you�ll break your knuckles before it emits a sound. I pounded on it with an open palm. I was half-expecting one of the guards from Oz to open the door and tell me to go away. But he didn�t come. Nobody came.
I�d have to go around the front then. I half-ran down the sloping road that skirts San Cristobal, and turned left to reach the main entrance. The sharp metal gates were closed, there was nobody in sight to shout to. No intercom, no buzzer, certainly no unlocked pedestrian entrance. My car was visible, 50 feet away, trapped.
I ran back to the big wooden door, uphill this time. I pounded some more. I looked between the cracks: I could see the courtyard, but didn�t see anyone in there. The doors were right by a guide booth, but that booth was vacant. When they said they closed at 6:00, they meant it: the place was empty as the Flying Dutchman.
How was I going to get my car out? I�d be happy to pay the $2, or some post-6:00 fee, but there was no one to pay it to. I�d just have to break into the fortress.
This would not be the first time I�d broken into a high-security facility. During one summer in high school, I looked after a neighbor�s house when they went on vacation. It had a security system on every door and window, and a big dog I was feeding twice a day. I never got the hang of feeding the dog reasonable amounts. I�d let him out of his cage every morning and give him a huge pile of food, he�d eat it all, and then use half a roll of paper towels cleaning up the cage when I stopped by in the afternoon.
I also never got in the habit of making sure the keys were in my pocket when I left. After closing the front door one afternoon, I realized the keys were inside. I had five days left to housesit. The dog wouldn�t last that long in a cage with no food or water.
I had to find a weak spot in the security system. All the windows were wired, and all of them were locked. But one window was missing a panel. It was in the basement, under the deck. The glass had been removed so the vent for the dryer could spit out hot air and lint. I bent back the aluminum just enough to squirm my scrawny teenaged arm through. I got the window lock open, stepped in, and did not hear sirens. Yep, professional jewel thief right here. Only I didn�t get to grab plum-sized diamonds, but stuff that requires another half-roll of paper towels.
And now here I was in San Juan, with a similar dilemma. There wasn�t a dog�s life at stake this time, but a chance to deny the Budget guy from gloating at me when my car wasn�t returned on time. I�d weigh that as less important than a dog�s life personally, but given the quantity of stray dogs in Puerto Rico, a piddling grudge was worth more than dog�s life here. A pack of gum was worth more than a dog�s life here.
Again, I needed to find the weak spot. In a 400-year-old fortress. Well, munitions have come a long way since the 17th century: a bunker buster could blow this place wide open. But I didn�t get that extra insurance on the car: I would have if I thought I�d have to blow up a whole fortress.
Come to think of it, this wasn�t a whole fortress. The southern half of it was torn down to make a road through. So one of the moats was at ground level relative to me. That was the parking area, with the gate full of metal pikes. They were 10 feet high, but 10 feet beat 40 feet.
The pikes met the stone wall at a very nice spot to kick off from and vault over the gate. This was several hours of from sunset, however, and several cars drove past this gate every minute, including some with blue flashing lights. Plus there were the spikes: the stone wall around the fence had a matching jagged metal barrier. It was the post of a road sign screwed into place, with metal flanges bent out at nasty angles. It wasn�t anything I wanted to step on.
Beyond this area was another spot level to me: the exit from the parking lot/moat. It was also gated, and much more exposed than the front gate for any fence-hopping. It looked like the gate automatically retracted when a driver swiped a card. Maybe I could run inside when a car left. I waited a minute, but no cars came. There were only three cars left in the whole lot, and one of them was mine. Unless one of those two other cars left, this plan wouldn�t pan out. I waited a minute. Nobody left. Didn�t pan out.
Back to the main gate. Still just the three cars in the lot. No one coming out. My eyes went back to the jagged metal. As nasty as it looked, it was just a narrow strip. Lots of good footing all around it. And the traffic had some gaps in it, fifteen or twenty-second pauses where no cars were driving by at all.
I took my red jacket and tourist brochure and put them down by the gate. I planned which pikes I wanted to grab, where I wanted to kick off of, where I wanted to pivot around.
Three cars were in sight. As they left, one more came. As it left, two more came. As they left, no cars came. I went for it.
I jumped, grabbed a pike in each hand, and put my right foot on a non-jagged part of the wall. A few vertical step later, I had walked my feet on the wall over the pikes. I set a foot down on the top bar of the fence, twisting to balance myself. I brought my other foot down, and hooked a pant leg in a pike. I stepped up until the pike freed itself, then stepped down again. Both legs secure, on the interior of the gate. I dropped down.
I immediately tried to act like I belonged here. Hey, I�m a taxpayer; I own this place. I very casually reached under the fence and got my jacket. The car was just a few feet away now. But what if there were still people inside, people watching the security cameras?
I took my parking ticket, and the $2 I rightfully owed for parking in the moat over an hour, and walked to the front door. Locked. No slot, no buzzer, no movement inside. I knocked a few times, ready to innocently hand over the $2 without the slightest explanation of how I got inside. No one came. OK, I�ll keep the $2.
I never knew the stifling heat from inside a rental car could feel so good. I might have never felt this misery again!
I started the Aerio up, and slowly idled my way to the exit. No one was running out to stop me. A steep slope ran down to the exit gate. There was a card reader mounted on the left, and I had nothing to show it. I coasted down the ramp, hoping the gate opened on its own.
The gate opened on its own. What�s Spainsh for �Woo-hoo!�
The rest of the night was boring and law-abiding. I found some mofongo for dinner, which is a Puerto Rican staple virtually unavailable outside of Puerto Rico, possibly because its name sounds like a monster. It would be a very boring Godzilla movie, though, to have him fight a plate full of mashed fried plantains. He couldn�t even smush them: they�re already smushed.
I dropped the car off, with no damages or outstanding warrants, at 10:30. The Budget guy�s shift must have been over, since I signed the paperwork with a couple new guys. Well, so much for my gloating. I waited half an hour with my luggage, and the shuttle bus with my other three cavers arrived. They were set to start their big adventure vacation. I had a bit of a head start on them.