“I didn’t stay in a hotel, I stayed in town, I ate Puerto Rican food. That’s different than being a tourist.”
Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator of the musical Hamilton and performing arts polymath, felt compelled to make the point when after recent returns to his ancestral Puerto Rico he told The New York Times about what’s traditional and also new that he recommends to visitors.
Miranda grew up in New York. Puerto Rico is four hours away by plane. He is staging Hamilton at a performing arts center in San Juan among many gifts to his people.
Why do I think of his visits as Travel to The Deep Nearby?
Why do I think of my own visits that stick with me through decades, especially from once having cycled the island for 11 days, yet like Miranda, also having flown in — in my case with my bike on the plane from Miami?
Travels to the Deep Nearby
The idea of The Deep Nearby originates from the urgency of global warming and from questions about how leisure travel might contribute to the drawdown of carbon emissions.
The Deep Nearby is complex in a way that mirrors our individual adjustment to something few of us have considered before, which is shared personal responsibility for living on Earth.
So yes, it’s about transitions and about short-distance travel with the least carbon trace. It’s about places that hold themselves out for feeding people farm to fork, for trail-building, for recycling and for intimacy more than for dazzle.
It’s also about authentic one-of-a-kind places to visit and for originality in places to stay.
The intimacy of bicycling
Once, when high in the mountains where I stopped, an old man approached. He had ridden bikes till bad knees got him. How were my knees? Was I having any problems on the road? Where did I stay overnight? At a little store higher up, Jose Antonio said I had to come back and look for a place to live there.
“Fellow on a bicycle,” he said, “would love this country.”
He gave me a black coffee, sold me a couple batteries, told me to say hello to Richie, his stepson, who works at a fruit market on Washington Avenue in Miami Beach.
If there’s a chance that leisure travel might contribute to drawdown at all, we also have to show up respectfully.
Respect and humility
Respect is more about learning from where we’ve traveled than it is about the money we spend. Humility toward our own adjustment plays a large part.
This can’t be passive. It has to be talked about in a way that assures the range of people we interact with that we might be only one alone or a couple, but that we’re among growing numbers of purpose-driven travelers that respectfully want to learn as much as to benefit.
So does talk with locals about climate action in which we’re engaged back home. A recent study of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication finds that the more we talk about climate change and climate action, the more that others engage.
If we do continue to fly, it’s about a high level of offset.
Do we make a case for Miranda because of his singular contributions to traditional culture in a place where recovery is still incomplete from Hurricane Maria in 2017 that precipitated mass exodus to the U.S. mainland and the hollowing out of agriculture?
I would ask no dispensation for myself. I would put me and the bike on a ship.
Not that we visit Puerto Rico or anywhere as bible-thumping missionaries. Everyone knows we’re there to relax, enjoy and indulge, but by our choices we assure that it’s not at their expense. Rather as part of their own ongoing renewal by protecting and creating more of what makes their own lives pleasurable.
Miranda names his favorite places to eat in San Juan that specialize in the cocina criolla, he adds one hotel — repurposing of the Carmelite convent in Old San Juan that’s now El Convento, where I had already stayed years
ago. I also indicate a few more in the notes that follow that excel in food and lodgings.
Further encounters
I also think back to the time I met Rádames Rivera, an artist and librarian from the University of Puerto Rico, who frequently drove the few miles weekends when he helped family run a guest house at a coffee plantation west into the heartland.
Rádames talked with me for hours (in plantain-accented English, which someone everywhere speaks in Puerto Rico). He had given up high living in San Juan to move to the hill town because of a traditional Puerto Rican urge: the obligation to support a family endeavor. Brother Luis had fallen in love with the place. Luis knew he could make a small hotel of the estate house with family support.
“It was very hard to convince me,” says Rádames. “I was a city man.” Now he had relocated his atelier to the family’s little Parador Hacienda Juanita.
“Last night before I went to sleep,” Rádames said, “I felt anguish. I want to stay here but I don’t want to stay here. I think the anguish will pass.”
I felt a wave of recognition pass between us.
NOTES
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/19/travel/lin-manuel-mirandas-san-juan-puerto-rico.html
https://www.open.uwi.edu/sites/default/files/bnccde/antigua/conference/papers/davis.html
https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/106261/ap-114.pdf?v=1765.7
Recommended for cocina criolla in Moca, noted for its handbobbin lace in the far northwest, El Platanal, https://www.tripadvisor.com/Restaurant_Review-g1675688-d1545801-Reviews-Restaurante_El_Platanal-Moca_Puerto_Rico.html
About the Puerto Rican paradors that now number 13, all family run, https://www.discoverpuertorico.com/article/escape-to-parador-puerto-rico. Alas, Parador Hacienda Juanita under different owners closed in 2011.
