Sometimes the best travel stories begin with the place you didn’t get to visit.
On May 11, 2016, my son and I left early with my parents for a couple-hour drive toward Arecibo. Our destination was the famous Arecibo Observatory, and my dad was particularly excited for us to see it.
We never made it inside.
Instead, a disappointing morning and a change of plans sent my son and me beneath the mountains of Puerto Rico, into an enormous limestone world shaped by water and time.
There were giant cave crickets, creatures I recorded in my journal as “scorpion spiders,” a massive sinkhole, and somewhere beneath our feet, an underground river we could hear but couldn’t always see.
And because no Travel Made Personal story is complete without at least one questionable decision, I also made the mistake of taunting Murphy’s Law.
That part would become important approximately thirty minutes later.
But first, we had a cave to explore.
The Road to Arecibo
We started early that morning because we had a long drive ahead of us.
Before getting too far, we stopped at a restaurant for breakfast. While we were there, a man sitting nearby struck up a conversation with us after hearing that my son and I were learning to speak Spanish.
It wasn’t a landmark. There isn’t a photograph hanging on my wall commemorating it. I couldn’t even tell you the man’s name today.
But I wrote about him in my journal that night.
Those are the little pieces of travel I’ve come to appreciate more as the years pass—the encounters that never appeared on an itinerary but somehow became part of the story anyway.
After breakfast, we continued toward Arecibo.
We stopped along the way to take pictures of a river, passed plenty of cow farms, and generally enjoyed the drive through Puerto Rico.
Then we reached the Observatory.
And discovered it was closed.
The Arecibo Visit That Never Happened
My dad was especially disappointed.
He had really wanted my son and me to see the Arecibo Observatory, so we did what travelers always do when something doesn’t work out.
We said we’d come back next time.
At the time, there was no reason to think we wouldn’t.
Of course, history had other plans.
The Arecibo Observatory suffered serious damage decades later in the life of the facility, and in 2020, failures in its supporting cables ultimately led to the collapse of the massive instrument platform suspended above its famous radio telescope.
There would be no future visit to the Arecibo that my dad wanted to show us.
I never did get that next visit, although Grandpa later took my son to see the Observatory while I stayed behind nursing the broken ankle I’d acquire later that afternoon.
That’s one of the strange things about revisiting old travels.
You realize how often you walked away from somewhere assuming it would still be there when you returned.
Sometimes it isn’t.
But on that May morning in 2016, we knew none of that.
We just needed a Plan B.
And Plan B was the Río Camuy caves.
A Hidden World Beneath Puerto Rico
Northern Puerto Rico sits within an extraordinary karst landscape, where water and limestone have been working together for an almost incomprehensible amount of time.
Rainwater absorbs carbon dioxide and becomes slightly acidic. As that water finds cracks and weaknesses in limestone, it slowly dissolves the rock.
Not dramatically.
Not quickly.
Drop by drop.
Year after year.
Given enough time, tiny weaknesses can become passages. Passages become caverns. Portions of the surface can collapse into sinkholes.
And rivers can disappear underground.
The Río Camuy is part of that subterranean world, flowing through a sprawling system of caves and passages beneath the landscape.
Standing above it, you could easily miss how much is happening below your feet.
We were about to go find out.
Grandma and Grandpa Stayed Above Ground
When we reached the cave park, Grandma and Grandpa decided not to take the tour.
It would have been too physically demanding for Grandma.
So my son and I headed underground without them.
We boarded a trolley that carried us down toward the cave, leaving the bright tropical landscape behind as we descended into an increasingly different world.
There’s something wonderfully disorienting about entering a cave.
One moment, you’re surrounded by green vegetation, sunlight, heat, and all the familiar sounds of the surface.
Then the temperature changes.
The light begins to disappear.
Rock rises around you.
And eventually, the landscape that had been beneath your feet becomes the world above your head.
We were given headsets for a guided tour and started exploring.
That’s when we met the locals.
Cave Crickets and “Scorpion Spiders”
I had seen crickets before.
Apparently, I had not seen crickets that had ambitions.
The cave crickets were huge.
My journal specifically mentions them because I couldn’t believe how large they were.
Then we encountered what I wrote down as “scorpion spiders.”
Those were even worse.
What we were apparently looking at were tailless whip scorpions—arachnids that aren’t actually true scorpions and aren’t spiders either.
This distinction would have been considerably more comforting had they not looked bigger than our hands.
There I was, surrounded by an extraordinary geological landscape millions of years in the making, and part of my brain was occupied with:
That thing has entirely too many legs to be standing that close to me.
Nature is magnificent.
Nature is awe-inspiring.
Nature occasionally needs to back up about six feet.
Listening to a River Beneath the Earth
The creatures weren’t what stayed with me most, though.
It was the water.
We entered an area around an enormous sinkhole, where the underground landscape suddenly opened toward daylight and vegetation again.
There were other cave openings within the immense space.
Rock formations surrounded us.
And somewhere beneath everything, we could hear the Río Camuy.
I couldn’t always see the river.
But I could hear it flowing beneath us.
Ten years later, that detail still fascinates me.
Because that water wasn’t simply passing through the cave.
Water is part of the reason this underground landscape exists at all.
The cave we were walking through wasn’t something created and then abandoned by geology. Karst landscapes continue to respond to water, erosion, collapse, and change.
We were witnessing one tiny moment in a geological story far older than any of us.
But the caves of Puerto Rico also hold another kind of history.
A human one.
Puerto Rico’s Caves Before Modern Tourism
When I walked through Río Camuy in 2016, I was fascinated by the size of the cave, the sinkhole, the underground river, and—apparently quite emphatically—the size of the wildlife.
What I didn’t understand was the much older relationship between people and Puerto Rico’s caves.
Indigenous peoples entered caves across Puerto Rico centuries before modern cave tours existed.
Archaeological sites throughout the island preserve evidence of those relationships, including petroglyphs, pictographs, artifacts, and other traces of human activity.
Caves also held significance within Taíno traditions and cosmology. They could be more than shelter or unusual features in the landscape; some were places connected with spiritual beliefs, ancestors, and origin traditions.
That’s an important distinction when talking about places like Camuy.
Modern exploration didn’t make Puerto Rico’s caves known.
People already knew these landscapes.
They entered them.
They experienced them.
They gave them meaning.
Modern researchers and explorers greatly expanded documentation and mapping of cave systems such as Río Camuy, helping reveal their extraordinary geological scale.
But words like “discovered” become complicated when a landscape already has a human history stretching back centuries.
That’s something I certainly wasn’t thinking about while walking through the cave in 2016.
Back then, my journal offered this profound assessment:
“The cave was pretty cool.”
Pulitzer committee, please form an orderly line.
The Camera Battery Incident
Somewhere during our cave tour, my camera battery died.
This normally would have been precisely the kind of minor travel disaster Murphy’s Law enjoys tossing into my adventures.
But not this time.
Oh no.
I had come prepared.
I had extra camera batteries.
We finished the tour, climbed back out of Puerto Rico’s underground world, reunited with Grandma and Grandpa, and eventually got back into the car.
And I was apparently feeling far too confident about my victory.
Because I actually said:
“Haha, Murph! Not today! I brought extra batteries!”
I would like the record to reflect that this was an error in judgment.
There are moments in life when you should recognize your good fortune, quietly appreciate it, and move along.
You should not challenge the universe to escalate.
Approximately thirty minutes later, I was sitting beside a river…
with a broken ankle.
Murph had, in fact, simply been pacing himself.
That particular adventure deserves its own story.
And it gets one.
What Happened to Río Camuy After Our Visit?
Our visit happened in May 2016.
A little over a year later, Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico.
The cave park was among the many places affected, with damage to infrastructure eventually contributing to a lengthy closure. Portions of the attraction later reopened, but access to Río Camuy has changed over the years as recovery, maintenance, weather events, and rehabilitation have continued.
That means this is one destination where you should check the current official operating status before building a trip around it.
The experience available today may not look exactly like the one my son and I had in 2016.
And ours already exists in a very particular moment in time.
Just like Arecibo.
What Stayed With Me
When I started Travel Made Personal, I knew I wanted to tell the history of the places I visited.
I don’t think I realized how often that would mean returning to my own memories and discovering that I hadn’t understood the place at all when I was standing there.
In 2016, Río Camuy was a cool cave.
It was giant crickets.
Ridiculously large arachnids.
A sinkhole.
An underground river.
A dead camera battery.
And a fun afternoon with my son after our original plans fell apart.
Now I see more layers.
I see the water slowly reshaping limestone over spans of time my brain can barely comprehend.
I see a landscape that people knew long before modern explorers began mapping its passages.
I see a place connected to the deeper human history of Puerto Rico.
And I see one more reminder that sometimes the destination you planned isn’t the story you bring home.
We were supposed to visit Arecibo that morning.
Instead, my son and I descended beneath Puerto Rico and listened to a river moving through the darkness.
Plan B became the memory.
And somewhere in the car afterward, I foolishly believed I had defeated Murphy’s Law.
I had not.
But that’s the next story.
Río Camuy was only one chapter in the nine days my son and I spent exploring Puerto Rico—an adventure that went almost nothing like the trip we’d originally planned
Planning a Visit to the Río Camuy Caves
If the Río Camuy caves are part of your Puerto Rico plans, verify current access, tour availability, hours, and reservation requirements with official Puerto Rican park or tourism sources before you go. Conditions and available visitor experiences have changed since our 2016 visit.
If you do get the opportunity to descend into this landscape, don’t just look at the size of the chambers.
Listen.
Listen for the water.
Look toward the openings where the tropical forest spills back into the underground world.
Think about the immense amount of time required to shape the limestone around you.
And remember that you aren’t walking into an empty landscape.
You’re entering a place with geological and human stories that began long before you arrived.
And one final piece of travel advice, offered entirely from personal experience:
Bring extra camera batteries.
Just don’t brag about them.
Murph has excellent hearing.
Join the Journey
Sometimes Plan B takes you somewhere better than you ever planned.
When the Arecibo Observatory was unexpectedly closed, my son and I ended up beneath Puerto Rico instead—exploring the Río Camuy caves, listening to an underground river, and discovering creatures that had absolutely no business being that large.
And then I made the terrible mistake of declaring victory over Murphy’s Law.
You can probably guess how that went. 😂
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