Cacti and noisey noise

I just about cannot imagine anything more indulgent than this.

I've been living on the sea, in a beach house just about overhanging
the water. (west coast by Rincon) This place goes for $200 per night
but we are staying here for free. The owners of the bed and breakfast
farm in the mountains, where I spent a winter working and feeding
horses and harvesting bananas, own this place now. And there is not
much work to be done this week so we are hanging out.

Who is "we"? My biking buddy, Lady Elise, from my southeast Asia trip,
and her two friends. So we are 4 farm-working women, glorying in the
sun, loving the absence of winter. We seamlessly are preparing food
together: someone makes a smoothy, someone else a salad, and someone
else is washing the dishes. We've gone hiking, swimming, shopping
together, and much of it is done in companiable silence: no need for
chatter filler or unnecessary drama. We're like a little flock of
happy birds, just less frenzied. All of us unabashed lovers of fruits
and vegetables. After the few days alone in the capital city, I am so
happy to have companions, now a mix of alone and together time.

This morning, under the auspices of the moon still, we set off in the
early darkness for the dry forest of Guanica. This place is amazing,
for while the rest of the island gets plenty or a reasonable amount of
rain, this little rain-shadowed location has cacti. Cacti growing
right in the sand on the beach. Other small enduring low-growing
bushes, all prickly, ranged over the hillside. Epiphytes, like
vivacious up-does clung to other plants, while others drifted
gracefully towards the earth like many strands of beards.

Neither the guidebook nor any interpretive signs offered us anything
approaching a map, so we wandered on the marked trails we haphazardly
found, in quiet happy appreciation. Until by the middle of the day, we
found ourselves on a trail which was unceremoniously becoming more and
more insubstantial, until we found ourselves without any indication at
all of where to place our feet.  But we knew where the ocean was, we
could see it, and so we picked our way gingerly forth through the dry
mass. The forging was incredibly slow, given the pokiness of the
environment (cacti and all that). But I commented at least it wasn't
muddy. Not exactly the most forgiving forest to be ducking through,
but when we made it to the paved road I shouted indeed and there was
much rejoicing. I picked hairy sticky free-riders from my legs, and a
substantial star-fish like spine from my sneaker, and all was well.

It is noisy here, at this beach house. One might expect the endless
crash of surf to be the dominant sound-track--and even that is so loud
we must raise our voices to be heard even in the living room. But over
the surf are a karaoke bar, a salsa club, and a disco-tech above us on
the hill. The grace-less sounds of their merry-making are indicators
of humans as capable of great celebration but also of irritating
disruption. Noise is fine if YOU are having the fun. It's also very
loud noise, as is the case for most noises in Puerto Rico.

This noise situation actually encompasses a truth of this island: an
enchanted greenly beautiful tropical ocean-surrounded nugget that is
also one of the most densely populated areas on earth. (Taiwan, for
instance, does top the island) Loud salsa music and crashing surf
illustrate this.

The girls handed me plush over-sized earplugs on my first night, and I
was sure I would need them because I could hear, in full detail, the
parties just up the hill. But, as an experiment, I tried going without
them. So the first night--astonishingly--I fell asleep amidst a salsa
dance, and the second night I drifted off to the bass-heavy
irreverence of reggaeton. (I'm rather proud of myself)