Advice we should have listened to before renting a car in Puerto Rico

If you want to explore outside of San Juan, nearly everyone will tell you to rent a car. Oh! But before you came everyone warned you about the perils of driving in Puerto Rico: the traffic is terrible, the roads haven’t been paved in years, the entire culture of driving is different!

Despite what you may have heard, there’s no more reason to worry about driving in Puerto Rico than any other place. I am a known nervous Nelly who can’t survive driving in Chicago for over 15 minutes and even I found the highways outside of San Juan easy to navigate. Here’s some sage words of wisdom we picked up along the way and road tested just for you.

Photo by Maxwell Ridgeway on Unsplash

1. Screenshot Directions in Advance

Know exactly where you’re going and how to get there before you even start the car. Phone service is spotty in some areas so you don’t want to rely on data to tell you where to go. Screenshot directions in advance and have an attentive co-pilot guide you.

2. Split When You Can

The cost to rent a car alone is reason enough to send experienced backpackers running, but finding fellow travelers who have similar plans in mind can help cut down the total. Between the four of us, we each paid around $25 to rent an SUV for one day, and that’s WITH the extra insurance for drivers under the age of 25.

3. Add an Hour

Give yourself a healthy hour of extra time if you plan on driving in the morning or afternoon. The traffic isn’t worse than in any major city, but that’s easy to forget when deciding what to do on the island of enchantment.

4. Follow Any and All Directions

Now is not the time to get cocky. If a local tells you not to park your car in the ally, chances are they’re not trying to steal that sweet spot for themselves. The same goes for advice from blog posts- if you’re going off the beaten path, there’s no need to make mistakes you were well aware of to begin with. Learn from our mistake(link to narrative piece) , take every piece of knowledge you can and follow it!

5. Double Check Destinations

Who knew different places can have the same name, especially generic-sounding locations like “Blue Caves?” Not us, at least on the first try. Don’t just enter a destination by its name into Google Maps, find the actual street address or GPS coordinates just to be certain you’ll get exactly where you need to go.