Ultimate road trip for students

After raising funds all year, 16 students from Fronteras Spanish Immersion School took a trip to Puerto Rico recently for adventure and learning.

The seventh- and eighth-grade classes of Sra. Brittany Pierce and Sr. Joe Dinwiddie not only immersed themselves in Español for a week, the Alaskans also took in the richness of an island south of Cuba.

The first day, the group watched their step as they descended to a giant waterfall through, El Yunque, the only tropical rainforest in the United States, one that whistles with the song of tiny tree frogs. The coqui (co-kee) are native to Puerto Rico. One of the hard-to-catch frogs was scooped up and perched on a shoulder by the ever-resourceful naturalist on the trip, Tito, a Puerto Rican fisherman. On every outing, Tito increased the level of wonder with the creatures he plucked from the wild.

On Coffin Island, lizards were clipped onto kids’ earlobes, garter snakes were wrapped around necks and giant-shelled crabs waved their purple claws in regret at capture. Underwater, on the snorkeling trip with Aqua Adventure, Tito reached into a crack in fire coral and pulled out a lobster.

Alongside a dock with pelicans hovering overhead, Tito displayed a procession of creatures to a shrieking, laughing bunch up to their waists in seawater. Starfish were one-upped by a blowfish, an eel, a lionfish. Students tasted the buttery meat of a freshly departed muscle from a conch shell.

Some felt the wrap of tentacles and the pucker of suction cups as Tito propped a wee, sometimes inking, octopus on heads. That night the students found themselves in moonless water, bobbing in lifejackets in the warm Caribbean, their every move lit by microscopic creatures called dinoflagellates.

A wave of a hand underwater or a kick of a foot led to bursts of light, glowing in the black salty water — reverberating laughter in the sheltered bay outside the fishing village of Parguera, one of the few places in the world to experience Bioluminescence.

With the patient, good-natured guide Bernardo, kids took in los faros or lighthouses built by the Spanish in the 1800s, and stood in the dungeon of the 400-year-old fort at San Juan looking at a drawing of a ship on rock by a man held prisoner there for 30 years. They shopped in el mercado for things like the tropical prickly fruit guanabana or soursop, which rounds up the flavors of strawberry, pineapple, sour citrus and a hint of coconut or banana.

They shared a day with school children just like themselves, playing basketball, jumping rope, conversing in class, lining up in the lunchroom and hugging upon departure.

Parent chaperones Veronica Wolf and Patty Sullivan were enchanted by the trip, and said they believe the students will never forget the experience.