An itinerary was put together to cover all the Caribbean countries I hadn’t visited yet, and we proceeded to travel through them all by plane, catamaran and cruise ship on an expedition that was dubbed CaribEthnoExp.

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CaribEthnoExp. Part I. Puerto-Rico

March 14th ... April 5th, 2013

We are here.

San Juan

Aerousique is ready.

Our suitcases are ready.

Off we go. We check into a guesthouse. The last time this place was renovated was before the American invasion.

An AC condensate drain.

The light in the bathroom.

A 19th-century security camera.

Water gushing from a broken fire hydrant. It looks more spectacular in the movies.

Highways are denoted with pictograms.

The main ethnographic event in Puerto Rico is the cockfight. The public at the fights is more or less the same as at the Moscow Hippodrome, only the security guards aren’t boneheads and don’t try to stop you from taking photos.

Before the fighting begins, the gamblers size up the combatants, take notes and set up bets.

Meanwhile, special professionals prepare the gamecocks. First, they give them pedicures, sharpening their claws with a file.

Then they attach plastic spurs onto their feet using wax.

Round one. A box with the first two participants is lowered down from the ceiling.

The cocks are put into bags and weighed to demonstrate that they’re in the same weight category. Then they’re held face-to-face to rile them up.

A stuffed rooster is used to rile them up them further.

And then the fight begins.

It’s like a cross between ballet,

boxing,

and gladiator games.

Vieques

What’s the hurry? We are in Vieques.

The waterfront promenade.

For many years, the island of Vieques served as a US military base. The army stored bombs on one end of the island and had a shooting range on the other. The base was shut down about ten years ago, but people haven’t started coming here in droves yet, so it’s quiet, peaceful and uncrowded. If you decide to break out of your beach resort, you won’t find anything to see. So just sit back and relax.

Abandoned ammunition depots.

We went searching for an open bunker. A crack in a door revealed secret US military stockpiles.

Finally, our persistence was rewarded. We found three open bunkers. Some scattered papers: medical records, reports, time logs, etc. Ambulance doors. Cockroaches, centipedes, bats and pillbugs of some kind.

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Puerto Rico was to be our point of departure twice — first by plane, then by cruise ship. An iguana on the flight strip marked our departure by air.

Flowerpots atop a model of a cruise ship marked our departure by sea.

They’re very strict about not letting people bring more than two bottles of wine per cabin (not even per person) for the duration of the entire cruise. Because the main source of revenue on the ship is booze.