We made a last-minute decision to go (we booked on Sunday for Thursday departure) when Delta offered one-way tickets for $118 down south, with jet blue at $300 coming back. I got lucky – the internet was quoting the hotel room price at $650 a night (plus 23% in taxes and fees); when I called they said it was $650 for the first night, and then $350 for the 2nd and 3rd nights. But then I mentioned that I had a Puerto Rican friend and they said that if I got him to check in with us the price would be $269 per night due to a Puerto Rican New Year’s Holiday special promotion. So I recruited my friend to check us in and cut him in for a share of the wealth.

The flight to San Juan is 3:10; a bit more flying back, and there are lots of flights going there. Delta’s JFK terminal has grown and become a bit of a zoo. Jet Blue’s JFK terminal has by far the best take-on food you can buy; by comparison, Delta at JFK and the San Juan airport had nothing to buy. Delta’s snack dinner was (for us veges) lettuce with croutons, a roll and some fruit salad. You really have to bring your own stuff today. The San Juan airport has also grown quite large with lots of walking to do. Lots of Puerto Ricans aboard; they all cheered and made a racket as the plane landed. A $20 and :20 minute taxi ride to the Gallery San Juan hotel, which I mentioned in a 1998 article and now stayed at for a night. We liked it for one night but wouldn’t want to make a weekend out of it. It is a unique Bohemian-style place with live birds all around, theme rooms, strange public rooms such as a music room with a restored 1912 grand steinway piano and a rooftop with a 360 view of the city. Staff is friendly and the location is very good between the two forts along the city walls. Forget about breakfast and don’t look for luxuries, get a room with a large bed and one away from the street. The hotel has 15 rooms and represents a restored 19th century group of villas with lots of antiques and figurines and is the product of its creative owner “Jan”; expect to pay about $250-$300 per night for a decent room. Thursday night late tapas-style dinner at Amadeus, a restaurants serving Nouveau Puerto Rican, whatever that means. We found enough to eat and the food was actually decent and reasonably priced. Prices are Manhattan-level owing to the high cost of living and importing food, but there is no sales tax. 

There are policemen every few feet to make you feel safe; none of them we met spoke English. Lots of holiday lights along Cristo Street where the El Convento Hotel resides. I stayed there last time and it is the more traditional fine hotel choice (member of slh.com). The whole of the old san juan district is some 7 blocks by 7 blocks so you can walk it all in 2-3 hours. The grave of Ponce De Leon is in the cathedral just across the street from El Convento. Down the street from El Convento is the San Juan gate leading to the promenade leading to the port where the cruise ships dock. It is a nice little walk and then you can come back up into the shopping area along Cristo Street. The district is very colorful, historic, clean and some of the properties are really nice. Service here is somewhat slower than what people on the mainland are used to, but you know that. More to the point, you can count on having 3 different people deal with your various requests in a given restaurant.

An hour’s drive (add :20 with traffic) to Wyndham’s El Conquistador resort on the east side of the island at Fajardo. It was New Year’s Eve and check-in took a good 20 minutes; the Express line was no faster because the staff were gabbing away with the guests. This hotel is huge with about 600 rooms and many sections. It is important to know which section to get because it is a 15-20 minute transfer from the marina section where we stayed to the main building. We took the marina because of its ocean-front views and for a bit of privacy away from the main building circus. But you have to take an elevator, walk through a shopping area and then take a funicular down 300 feet to get to the marina. The views are not at all spectacular there. I would rather take the La Vista wing on an upper floor facing the pool and take one of those rooms closer to the outer edge of that wing (such as close to the spa). The views are good and the walk to everything else is close. All the rooms in the hotel are roughly the same; you are paying for the view. Incidentally, the rooms in the La Vista wing facing the golf course are the cheapest and they are perfectly good views; it is a pretty golf course facing the mountains and you can also see the sea in the background as well as watch the sunset (although with all the clouds and sun you get here I wouldn’t count on it).  We had a good mix of sun and clouds; Saturday was all wet and the rest of the trip was good enough with temperatures reliably around 80 degrees. 

My main beef with this place is that for a flagship Wyndham resort, the food and beverage should be better. It is like a Marriott; almost all the food tastes middle-america pre-fab from a central commissary and it is being sold at rather high prices. Kids are walking around eating cheap ice cream cones everywhere and David’s Cookies are the pastries on offer. For a hotel charging $800 a night, I want my $16 poolside pizza to have fresh vegetables on it, the $15 fish and chips to be fresh, and for the $8 slice of cake not to be stale. At Villa D’Este in Italy, you also pay the same price for the poolside pizza but it is one of the best pizzas you ever ate. I have this bad feeling about the invasion of chain hotels all over the world; we were told that the hotel was sold this past week but who cares? All around the world at these hotels you are going to get Pillsbury rolls with your dinner and, frankly, we can all eat better at home. Next door to the hotel is this little town-house section called Las Casitas; it is for family-style vacationing. There are 15 restaurants on the property but a good fish one with outdoor seating by the marina is called Stingray. There is a small french-style restaurant called Le Bistro that only has 5 tables per room and two rooms. The food is better and only costs about 20% more than the other restaurants. It features guitar players, a cozy ambience and an excellent chocolate souffle. Call the hotel’s restaurant reservations line to book it in advance of your stay. 

Friday night in the lobby was New Year’s Eve and they had 2 bands with a midnight balloon drop followed by fireworks and a big TV showing Times Square. It was a fun latin-style evening and, strangely enough, by Saturday afternoon, the resort was pretty much emptied out with nothing going on the remaining two evenings except the casino in the lobby. The hotel’s spa is OK but nothing special and very pricey on the treatments. A unique feature of this resort is its private beach island Palamino Island reached by a 20 minute ferry that runs from the marina every half hour during the day. The island has beautiful blue water, pretty peaches, and lovely flora. We went horseback riding with a guide along the island trails and the 45 minute ride was wonderful with post-card views from the top of the island’s high points. Ocean was a bit coolish for me and the pools were chilly. The airport sedan taxi costs $90 and takes an hour, as long as you are not in traffic. Bring your own food to this airport and don’t count on finding US newspapers there in the morning.

Some weird observations: When we returned to our room one evening, the chambermaid put on the radio – to a Christian evangelical station. It wasn’t a mistake; she changed the channel from the previous night’s station which was Latin Jazz. Here’s another: We were fidgeting around in the dark near the townhouses and the various hotel rooms, all of which are complicated to reach. The signs feature Braille in places that no seeing-person would ever notice. Now, it’s hard enough for a person with eyesight to get around this place; how would a blind person ever expect to reach these sections of the resort by himself to even know there would be Braille on the signs around. We thought it was really silly. 

Our driver told us that even in the lower class neighborhoods, 40% of families send their kids to private school on their post-tax dollars. Private school costs about $6,000 a year, which is 25% of one’s income. The cost of busing takes the bill over the top, and there are almost as many cars here as people (3.1 million cars to 3.8 million people on an island 35 miles by 100 miles), and father’s drive kids to school on the way to work, so public schools and private schools start and end at different hours to make traffic bearable. Americans tend to make fun of Puerto Ricans and probably don’t think of education as being relevant to these people. Undeserved image. Reminds you that people all over really want the same things – good education opportunities for their kids. What I don’t understand is if so many people in this territory favor private schools, why they haven’t either fixed up the public schools (answer is that the officials stole lots of the money) or allowed tax breaks. Puerto Rico just installed a new governor after a bitterly fought election that was settled in court after 2 months; the new governor is somewhat anti-mainland and there is worry that the Island will suffer for its antagonistic policies. There is also worry that if Cuba is opened up, Puerto Rican tourism will be adversely affected. Meanwhile, the 9/11 drop in traffic has rebounded, and I can report that over Christmas/New Year’s, the prices all over America for travel seem to be quite high with hotels and airlines full. Except for the fact that we got awfully lucky finding bargains between the cracks, it is the worst time of the year to try and go anywhere.

Click here to see photos.

Click here to read the 1998 article on Puerto Rico in Global Thoughts.