Easygoing Puerto Rico.

This article focuses on Puerto Rico as a tourist destination. It says that if one wants to get away from it all, one will find life full of fun and far less taxing on this neighborly Caribbean island. Divided down the middle by a chain of high mountains, this 35-by-100-mile-long island offers broad coastal plains of rich farmland, terraced hillsides and forests of mahogany, pine and teak. Good roads, many of them freeways, lead to breathtaking mountain vistas, through thick tropical jungles, by lagoons and mangrove swamps and into scrub, cactus desert and, of course, beautiful beaches. The hub of Puerto Rico is San Juan, where approximately one-third of the island's 3 million inhabitants reside. The beaches are all open to the public, so one doesn't need to stay at an expensive oceanfront hotel. Puerto Rico imports almost all industrial products, and the excise tax is high, a feature especially true of luxury items and automobiles. Cigarettes have a 61-cent tax per pack, perhaps the highest tax on cigarettes in the world. The largest export is rum, Puerto Rico's main moneymaker. Bacardi rum usually tops the list of brand-name spirits sold in the U.S., and all sales taxes levied on Puerto Rican rum are returned by the federal government to Puerto Rico.