My rental car’s brakes failed, stray dogs chased me up a hill, and dozens of mosquitoes greeted me in my hostel shower–all in one day. The other 48 days of my Puerto Rican adventures were a breeze in comparison.

I sat through flash rainstorms in Puerto Rico’s Cordillera Central and swam with bioluminescent microbes and radio astronomers–but only the microbes lit up. I visited lost Spanish colonial towns and the remnants of a Cold War American Air Force base.

The results are in the second  edition of Let’s Go: Puerto Rico, researched in the summer of 2005 and published in 2006.