Friday, November 23, 2012

How to hitchhike from San Juan - Puerto Rico - Direction to Arecibo,Mayaguez,Aguadilla,Isabela

I moved lately to carribean to make some diving courses and my first stop was San Juan. This time I came by plane flying from Frankfurt direction to San Juan.

I was warned several times by the people that hitchhiking is impossible here in Puerto Rico. And trough my 2 weeks experience here on the island I found that this claiming is absolute nonsense. As there is almost no public transport on the island hitchhiking is very easy and most of the people are very helpfull.
Despite high paranoia of the inhabitants of the island and claims of high crime rate till now I didn't have any singl enegative experience and in comparation with South America you will find here just extremely nice people with a huge amaount of curiosity and will to laugh and help. The waiting times are bit bigger than in other places - but I never crossed the line of 10 minutes of waiting,even though we have been hitchhiking 2 people.

MANUAL

And now exactly how I got out of San Juan and the recommended get out way :)
Take a metro in San Juan direction to Bayamon.

Estacion Bayamon


Get out on the last train station called Bayamon. Bayamon is not anymore San Juan even though it's considered more or less satelite city.
The ticket cost $ 0.75.
Funny price for such a good service and such a distance. But most of Boriquas doesnt use public transportation - as everybody has it's own car.





Estrella del norte

In Bayamon - you just get out of the metro turning to the right on the exit, go down the stairs - passing some college and there you will get to one intersecction. Turn to your right, cross the road.

And there you will see this kind of thing with a name Estrella del Norte - Star of the North.
Avenida Bobby Capo
You cross the road again to get to the Avenida Bobby Capo.
Stay on the right side of the road.
The road you happen to be standing on is the Road number 2 and this road leads directly to west side of the coast. It's not a highway,even though it's looks like one and it's for free so many people take this road.  And because it's not highway you can stand freely on the safety line which is wide enough for cars or trucks - it's much wider than in Europe. And in Puerto Rico all the roads has this line.



And here come the video - where you can see exactly how the spot looks like and you can find it as well with english subtitles :)


I haven't waited more than 10 minutes on this spot to get picked up. It's very good spot,as the cars are going very slow,because of the trafic-lights just at the beggining of this road. And if you have a paper where are you heading to the success has a very high percentage. In case of the rain - there is a bridge under which you can hide at the same time hitchhiking.