A Rainforest B&B Blog – Puerto Rico

I knew what Laurie was going to write about for this week’s blog. I was home working. And when I’m home programming or web designing I know I’m also supposed to answer the phone but it does interrupt the whole process. Well Laurie called lots of times that day when she was out getting all the stuff we need for the day-to-day operations of our rainforest bed and breakfast. I look forward to her calls as a welcome break, usually, but when she calls incessantly it quickly becomes something less then a welcome distraction. So I knew what she was going to write. She didn’t know that it would be “Worth every damn bit of sacrifice to get a Cheesecake in Paradise”.

Did you ever want something so bad that you were willing to stop at almost nothing to get it? Well, that was me on Monday the day after Mother’s Day. I had a bunch of errands to do and in the process I got this idea in my head around noontime that I just could not and would not survive without a piece of cheese cake.

My last stop for the day was going to be Costco. They have great cheesecakes in all sorts of flavors ranging from amaretto to guava. The only catch was that I would have to buy the whole damn thing knowing that Bill only eats chocolate, Hu… So you can imagine my dilemma. I thought where else can I get a piece of cheesecake before I go to Costco? I remembered that the other day Bill and I had dinner at Chili’s and I ordered cheesecake and they did not have any.

This craving must have been banging around in my head since then, and no, I am not pregnant. Off to Chili’s I went and had a nice lunch and then I ordered cheesecake. I waited for what seemed an eternity to get that piece of cheesecake and the waitress returned empty handed.

“I am sorry,” she told me “we are out of cheesecake.” She tried to sell me another dessert but I kindly asked for the check and decided I would just have to go without again.

Finally found a slice of cheese cake

My next stop was Plaza Carolina to buy gardening supplies at Sears. Ah-ah they have a Chili’s there I thought. It was pretty far from Sears but I didn’t mind the walk as I kept my mind on my goal of a delectable piece of cheesecake. I ordered a piece as soon as I sat down at the counter and waited again for what seemed an eternity. The waiter in that restaurant also returned to my table empty handed. We are out of cheesecake today he told me. Or any day for that matter I wanted to say to him, I did not want to be polite any more, I just wanted to scream. I kindly declined his offer of another dessert and left. As I was leaving I was thinking to myself, most intelligent people would not return to the same franchise three times just to be disappointed would they? I was beginning to believe the Chili’s has no cheesecake and will never have it again. I thought next time I go there I will ask just to see what happens, but I will tell them I don’t really want it I just want to know if you have it. I figure that way I won’t be disappointed or feel like a fool for a fourth time.

On my way to Sears I remembered Starbucks was just around the corner and they have this lemon tart that I really like. I would get that instead I decided and maybe fool my cheesecake craving. When I get there they did not have the lemon tart but they did have cheesecake. Things were looking up. I was so happy I wanted to reach over the counter and hug the girll waiting on me but decided against it for fear they would have taken me away and locked me up in wherever they put crazed cheesecake cravers.

I savored every bite of that dessert and left Starbucks satisfied.

Later that day while I was in Costco, one of the was giving out samples at the end of an aisle as they often do. IT WAS CHEESE CAKE. Was I in the twilight zone? Do you think they knew I was coming? They couldn’t have. I never go there on Mondays. Anyway I tried a piece of their sample cheese cake and it was really yummy and I thought if I had had a little more patience I could have had my piece of cheesecake in paradise for free!

Technorati Tags: food and drink

My sister Indigo has painted most of the oil paintings which we have hung in the rooms. Some of the watercolors were painted by Laurie. Oil paintings are more durable than watercolors because the constant rainforest humidity doesn’t affect them as much with mold and the colors don’t fade as much. But mosaics are the most durable art form of all. Mosaics in Pompeii were dug up thousands of years later and still just as bright.

We decided to make a mosaic in our kitchen/living room/lounge. It wraps around the central post. We made it on plycem (brand name for a cement board product) so that Indigo could work on each panel, horizontal, on a comfortable table. She designed the panels so that when I installed them around the post it would look like the vines, sunset, waterfall, and other images wrap around the post. We glued the panels onto the concrete post using 3m 5200 and finished the corners with rows of carefully chosen glass mosaic piece.

It’s really a feature now in the room.

Technorati Tags: b&b, rainforest

Check out another green bed and breakfast

During our day to day operations and new construction we have done our best to harm the environment as little as possible. We aren’t the only bed and breakfast to incorporate or try to incorporate green methods. It is very popular now to be green. But sometimes being green is not very practical. I’m going to list some of our efforts and explain why we have chosen them over some of the less practical green construction options there out there.

There is a TV show about an Inn in Africa called “Life is Wild”. The show is about a Brady-Bunch type of family which moved to Africa to get in touch with each other while starting over as inn-keepers. If you watch the first couple of episodes you will see that there is some “bed and breakfast” stuff thrown in that is actually more true to life than often depicted in other television shows. Another example is the Tori Spelling show. It is a reality show about running a bed and breakfast a but it is completely off base because the guests of the Tori Spelling place are only there in the hopes of being on TV and the operations are a dead loss as the profit center of that place is the TV show. Both of these new TV shows throw in lots of references to “green” construction, “green” paint and other environmentally friendly devices sometimes as a source of humor.

Also there are blogs like mine that discus the popular “greening” of bed and breakfasts. Wendy’s Bed and Breakfast Blog is an example. If you want to learn about some of the work that needs to be done to make a house into an Inn you can read about it in her excellent blog. Wendy is also trying to make her new place “green” in an honest effort to try to save the environment as best as one person can do while still surviving. Green Hotels and Inns are trendy.

Five years ago when we started renovating the hurricane ravaged estate that was to be the rainforestinn we weren’t thinking about green construction. We were mainly thinking about how we would ever be able to accomplish such a huge task with the limited resources that we could scramble together (mainly just our wits and a little brawn). We ended up recycling building materials because it was cheaper to use all the piles of lumber, fancy antique bathroom fixtures, twisted used copper pipe and other materials that were left over from the destroyed main house. We learned as we went along what was practical to recycle and what we were better off purchasing new. The old cedar was begging to be re-cycled. The ubiquitous rainforest termites had done us the favor of cleaning the sapwood off which left just the prime quarter-sawn heart wood boards for us to sand to bare wood and varnish again before I used them to make the new high vaulted ceiling-roof for the villa. The antique bathroom fixtures, like the claw foot bath tub, were worth all the effort making weird old fittings fit to modern plumbing. We learned something about toilets though. The bowl of a modern toilet is molded so that the gallon of water (less when trying to be green and water saving) actually flushes all the stuff down in one swoosh. So we used the antique backs (which matched the sinks) and put them on modern toilet bowls. For our newest bathrooms we bought toilets which can be flushed “a little” or “a lot” depending on what you’re flushing down.

The most important thing we learned about being green is that you have to know quit a bit about construction to do it in a practical manner. We collect rainwater for all our water needs. We learned that the best way to pressurize the water is to use a well pump in the cistern and fool it into thinking it’s in a well by using a ten inch diameter PVC pipe to install it in. In any case always use a submersible pump as they are the most efficient (you use less electricity — also being green) and they are quiet. We are even building our pool system with the pump house below the pool level so that we can use a quiet submersible pump. But is it really being green to collect rainwater, store it in cisterns and pump it using electricity for the necessary pressure? Perhaps if we build a windmill for the electricity it will then really be green.

Separating grey water is a good idea too especially if you have some gardens to water with it. It is a very bad idea to mix your gray water into the rainwater collecting cisterns as it is hard enough already to keep those sterile (we use a little chlorine once in a while which even in very small amounts kills the deadliest amoebas instantly). If you use the right detergents in your laundry (lots of phosphates) the gardens will bloom magnificently from the gray water irrigation. Using a detergent with lots of phosphates will also make your bed sheets much cleaner. Stay away from “green” detergents as they are expensive and don’t clean as well. If you aren’t connected to a sewage line where the phosphates would wash into the sea and cause algae bloom then you don’t need to worry about phosphates.

Using solar heat is a very practical green method especially with the new vacuum tube solar heaters. They are very efficient and used in conjunction with a demand heater (for the times when every guest is showering at once) they will actually pay for themselves too.

Outdoor lighting is best done with LED lamps powered with small batteries charged by solar cells. They are cheap. They work well and you don’t have to run wires all over the place. Also replace all your incandescent bulbs with the new energy saving ones even if they are expensive and sometimes buzz loudly.

By all means put compost buckets in all the guest’s rooms. It will cut your garbage generation in half as well as help you build lots of new rich soil for your garden. They also make it easier to keep animals out of your garbage as there won’t be anything interesting for them to root out. Separate cans for paper, plastics, and aluminum are also a good idea.

Those are pretty much all the practical green methods that we have proven out here. I have heard of some other things to try but most of them are very “gimmicky”. Don’t waste any money on “green” paints as they are just latex based paint that can be purchased at better quality and lower price without the “green” label. It is also very difficult to make a light colored paint without using titanium dioxide and it is impossible to make a long-lasting paint without adding a little fungicide. Of course the low-cost recycled paints are fine.

Please if anybody has any other suggestions for cost-effective green strategies please let me know.

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Since I posted this we found out about http://www.chezsven.blogspot.com/ . This is Chezsven Bed & Breakfast in Wellfleet, Massachusetts and they are even more green than we are! Their also much better about updating their blog. Very interesting reading.

We were spoiled by our old German Shephard “Addie”. The guests all loved her. She was friendly to everyone but still knew how to be a guard dog and would protect Laurie when she went on her long walks on deserted beaches. It’s difficult for a naturally protective shepherd to learn that the strangers who come into our home so quickly and for such short times are honored guests that she should welcome into her “pack” but she made the distinction and would still bark when someone was at the gate who wasn’t supposed to be there. She was very “in tune” to our feelings.

She was highly trained (having won obedience trials) and the dog that I had taken everywhere with me including on board the trading vessels I worked with before we opened our bed and breakfast. So she knew what work was all about and how to greet people respectfully and when a guest was a dog lover and she could bask in their attention happily; or when a guest that wasn’t so much a dog person she knew how to be admired from a distance. Being a good bed and breakfast dog is a fairly hard job for a naturally protective pack animal.

Our new dog is also a shephard but this time we decided on a Belgian Malinois because they are just as smart and trainable as German Shepards but the breed is also known to have fewer hip problems and be longer lived. I had decided on a Malanois a couple of years ago but the recommended breeders that I could find were charging over a $1000 for the dogs and with shipping that would have been quit an investment so I was waiting for exactly the right puppy.

Laurie (my wife and the boss lady of our bed and breakfast) also knew how much I wanted a Belgian and she was looking around too and luckily found the perfect dog. The big Navy base here in Puerto Rico (the one that had the practice range on the island of Vieques) closed about four years ago under pressure from local activists and the K9 outfit on the base was breeding some Belgian Malinois for war dog training. These dogs had no AKC registration and were not part of an “official” military program so the relocating base personal had to find new homes for them. The bitch, which was the mother of our new puppy, ended up being given to a local base contractor and he raised her welp of puppies for sale. My wife found out about the puppies being for sale and suggested I go check them out. I was amazed to find out what incredible dogs they were. The bitch was a tremendous alpha dog that wouldn’t let a stranger within ten feet of her. She, and the puppies, had perfect confirmation and I picked out the best female puppy in the litter feeling very lucky to get such an incredible dog on the island. Local breeders tend to specialize in smaller dogs.

We raised our puppy using the methods outlined by the Monks of New Skete. She stayed in a crate right by my bed and I took her everywhere I went on a leash (including to the docks of San Juan where I work as a ship’s agent). She was always a big hit with the ship Captains and the stevedores. Gradually we taught Maya basic obedience training. Laurie went on long walks down our driveway (about a mile each way) and taught her to heel. Maya proved to be easy to train and had very good behavior. Even in her puppy phase she didn’t wreck too many things and picked-up right away what was “her toys” and never to chew on U.S. Customs papers (except once). But Maya is an “alpha” dog so we have to keep after her behavior.

When new guests arrive, after check-in and complementary pina colada, I usually lead Maya out to great the guests. I tell Maya to sit while she is being petted and discipline her if she paws them or jumps up. Occasionally we get guests who don’t like animals (or dogs anyway) and then it is harder. I have to train Maya to lie down and not molest those guests. Maya hasn’t figured that out yet and keeps a very wary eye on the guests that don’t want anything to do with her. My biggest worry is that she will growl or act menacing towards a guest that surprises her walking down a driveway or by coming in the property from our jungle paths. The training is coming along though and as she gets older she is learning to keep her territorial instincts in check.

I wanted to include a you tube video of what Maya does when someone gets near her food bowl but I decided that it was a little too scary. We are also working with her on that. I put a food bowl down and then tell her to sit and not touch it while I pick it up again. If she growls then she is told “no” and not given her food back until she sits quietly. This is fairly advanced training as most people know better than to touch a dog that is eating but just in case we want her to have perfect “nice” behavior in all situations. A good bed and breakfast dog is a special animal.

I was just looking through the guest registry for the villa. Our guests write wonderful comments about their stay. Some even put drawings in the guest book. One drawing I’m including in this blog is of one of Laurie’s flower arrangements. This flower arrangement was on the breakfast table on the villa porch and one of our guests presented us with a watercolor of it.

We have many guests who come here for the bird watching. A recent guest made the following list of birds she confirmed siting while staying in our El Yunque hideaway. If you go out on the island, of course, you may see many more but these were birds that visited our bed and breakfast:

Red Tailed Hawk (Guaraguao)
Mangrove Cuckoo
Puerto Rican Lizard-Cuckoo (Coccyzus vieilloti)
Puerto Rican Woodpecker
Scaly-naped Pigeon (Patagioenas squamosa)
White-winged Dove (Zenaida asiatica)
Green Mango: [Anthracothorax viridis] hummingbird
Puerto Rican Emerald
Puerto Rican Tody (San Pedrito)
Gray Kingbird
Pearly-Eyed Thrasher
Red legged Thrush
Bananaquit (Coereba flaveola)
Cape May Warbler
Black Throated blue warbler
Black-Cowled Oriole
Shiny Cowbird
Striped Headed Tanager
Antillean Euphonea
Indigo Bunting
Black-faced Grassquit (Tiaris bicolor)
Black Whiskered Vireo

My favorite is the Lizard Cuckoo both for it’s long elegant striped tail and for the cool sound it makes. I also love listening to the Puerto Rican screech owls at night as their call added to the night sounds makes it seem like a Tarzan movie sound track.

This photo is of a green heron that one of guests saw hiking off of our property. We have a path that leads to an isolated pool at the top (right at the top with an incredible view) of the Espiritu Santo waterfall. We have this photo because none of us could identify it at the time so our guests emailed it to us for identification. I always thought of herons as sea coast birds.

I think google maps is a great idea so I submitted my bed and breakfast to their directory. In order to prove to Google that our business is legitimate you put your mailing address in the application and google mails out a confirmation post card. This is where the reality of Puerto Rico comes in. Nearly everyone who lives out in the country in Puerto Rico has a mailing address that is no where near their physical address, either because they have a post office box in town like us or because they use rural route directions which were invented by someone who was confused by maps and maybe dyslexic too. If google could offer the option of sending out the confirmation cards by UPS or FedEx that would have worked or Google could allow the incorrect address to be edited (which they don’t even when you put in your confirmation number from the mailed-out card).
To make this even more interesting we had some of the google map employees themselves stay with us as guests a couple of months ago (the rainforestinn tends to attract guests that are scientists and professionals and even Google geniuses). I explained the problem to them but so far they haven’t implemented a solution. This means that the correct location for the rainforest inn — see this URL

does not match the directions that come up when you search businesses for lodging in the rainforest. I’m not even going to go into all the large hotels which come up in that search and the fact that none of them are in the rainforest. The El Yunque rainforest is a popular tourist attraction now and everyone is claiming to be there.
But I wouldn’t be writing this blog if I hadn’t found a solution to share with you. First off if you look at your google maps business listing (or someone else’s) you will notice that there is an option to write a review about the place but no one seems to have any reviews written about their place. This is an indication that maybe google maps business directory has a way to go yet before it is that important for your business.
Maybe more people are using google earth. The nice thing about google earth is that it works with http://www.panoramio.com/ to let you place a photograph of a location. Go there and sign-up for an account. After you add the photo you are then given the option to place it on the map. Be sure you find the exact location (easiest done by typing in the name of a nearby city and zooming in to move the marker).
I ended up with: http://www.panoramio.com/map/?user=898653#lt=18.336103&ln=-65.813384&z=0
Now the next step is to just wait until google earth is updated and your photo is placed. Too bad google business isn’t that easy.

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Since I wrote the above blog Google maps improved their business listings. Now you can edit posts and show the real location of your business when it is placed according to your mailing address instead of your physical address.

Lots of other bed and breakfast operators have been reading my blog. Some have asked me how we manage to complete all the construction work we’ve done here so I thought I’d let everyone in on our secret. When Laurie and I first bought the property we were looking at an estate home that had been ravaged by two hurricanes and left abandoned for six years. Just so we could walk around the property safely we filled six thirty-yard garbage dumpsters of unusable material. The beautiful cedar from the main house we recycled to build the vaulted ceiling on the new villa. Some of the antique furniture we repaired and re-finished.

But how did two people, one who is still running his Caribbean shipping agency (probably the smallest in the world but still the down island trading ships arrive at 3 am or Sunday or whenever their schedule demands and they are demanding) cope? The scope of the tasks we have accomplished and some of the pending projects would be considered insurmountable by many. We certainly couldn’t have accomplished so much in the usual manner. And we know about the usual manner because many of our guests ask how come we have been working on this place for nearly five years now and it isn’t finished.

But, the usual manner would have required truck loads of money to pay the teams of contractors that come in and get it all done in a professional and seemingly effortless stream of busy workers and material deliveries. If we had the cash flow to do it like that we would probably elect to stay in someone else’s beautiful romantic hideaway. But we are doing it on the cheap so we can live in our own paradise hide-away. Still, there is (and was) far too much work here for one busy couple to do even without sleeping and certainly cutting into the average American’s six hours of television viewing time (luckily we don’t have TV).

I think it was Laurie who came up with the solution to our problem. It was certainly her that had to do most of the extra work involved so she was motivated. Our solution was to advertise for volunteers to come and stay with us for two or three months. We would feed them and house them and even teach them a trade in return for the work they perform on one of our projects.

For the past two months we have been closed and lots of working is getting done with the volunteer’s help. Pictures tell a thousand words so the following are some pictures of our volunteers working (and resting with our dogs after working). We have also added some new short videos to our youtube site. Go to rainforestinn’s youtube videos — we will keep adding new ones, mainly showing our volunteers in action.

Thanks everybody for thinking of us and sending emails about how we were doing. Hurricane Dean passed well south of us. We got some rain and a little gusty wind but that was it. One of our neighbors lost a roof but that couldn’t have been a very strong roof.
We spent about a week doing preparations so now we have our generator installed (great thing that is as many of our guests haven’t lived in Puerto Rico for thirty years like us and don’t ignore as easily little inconveniences like no water and no electricity that happens so often here). Having the new genset installed is one more step towards making our small bed & breakfast more serving of our customer’s needs (don’t worry we aren’t going to ever become a big resort). We are also taking advantage of the slow season to build a pool and jacuzzi as well as completely re-build the bathroom in the chalet.
When we moved the lumber pile down below the new pool deck we found a cute little pair of boas living there.

I think the may have eggs somewhere but so far we haven’t seen any. The new pool deck is truly giant. I used twenty yards of concrete (two big, very noisy, cement trucks) to pour the new deck. I’m glad we were closed as I had no idea how noisy a cement truck is. We are looking forward to season when we can stop doing all this construction and enjoy the rainforest sounds and having guests again.

Lately Tripadvisor can be the single most important internet presence for getting new customers to your guest house. As I reported in my first post about Tripadvisor, many hotel owners are promoting their bed and breakfasts by making up their own wildly positive posts or having friends do it. The only way that the Tripadvisor mavens can tell that this is happening (if you use different email addresses) would be by the IP address always being the same.  Sometimes guests log-on while staying at your place and post from your IP address (we have WIFI access everywhere using our microwave connection directly from the El Yunque peak towers). If we know, we usually ask them to wait until they get home before posting a review and most times this takes away the spontaneity and a review never gets written.
Our guests at the rainforestinn here in Rio Grande tend to be internet savvy people who are familiar with web 2.0 and some of the drawbacks of the new social networking. So when they see a bed and breakfast listing that has a hundred or so perfect glowing reviews they suspect something is awry and check further. One way that Tripadvisor offers is a simple click on who is posting the review and then look at their other postings. From this you can see right away that it is a real vacationer and you also might learn about other cool places to stay (or places to stay away from) when you’re visiting Puerto Rico.
Another of the drawbacks with web 2.0 is the omni-present spam bots. It is the reason why I’m blogging to you on Typepad right now (my Wordpress blog died under a bot inundation). To run a successful social web ap you have to put traps in place to stop the bots. This means blocking certain IP address and having mult-step login processes with a “captcha” picture that can’t be read by the spam bots. The drawback to complex login processes are that sometimes it becomes just too hard for someone to post a comment or a review and they give up. For example the following review was sent to me by one of our guests that had given up but emailed it to us because they still wanted their review seen.  Here is what our last guests at the rain forest inn had to say:

“We visited the Rain Forest Inn for our spring break in March 2007.  We arrived very late at nightâ??our plane being delayedâ??and to our surprise we were graciously met by Bill.  He showed us to our roomâ??really the chalet. As you can imagine we were quite tired and ready to hit the bed.  The chalet is charmingâ??nice large living room/kitchen, our bedroom overlooked the rainforest with windows on 2 sides which made for great breezes and great sounds of tree frogs ( coquis ).  We had a lovely porch overlooking the premises on the front of the chalet.

The next morning we had a super breakfast prepared by Laurie.

  She told us about all the various things we could do and if we wanted to simply relax that was just fine, too.

What we liked about the Rain Forest Inn–wonderful, quiet location, great breakfast, very nice folks to spend a week with and get to know.  I would recommend it to anyone.”

– Marcia, Winnetka, IL

Laurie and I always love to read the comments are guests make after staying with us. It makes every effort we put in to make their vacations special worth it.