July 12, 2005

Well, I just returned from quite an adventure.  I can’t say I ever really thought I would visit the Dominican Republic, but, I did and it was great and I had some excellent people to travel with.  We flew into Santiago and had a bit of a rough beginning in the country.  Santiago is about as far as you can get from a vacation… I don’t want to speak badly about it but let me just say… it was dark and somewhat scary and our hotel room had the toilet, sitting on a small platform, in the middle of the room.  Nice.  We did find a nice, fresh bread place and proceeded to eat a lot of bread until we left the city.

As sun set, our fortunes changed for the better and we discovered a lovely little bar that served excellent frozen drinks.  We slept well and then caught a bus to Jarabacoa- a nice mountain town surrounded by lush rainforest and cloud-shrouded peaks and waterfalls.  When we visited, due to the more or less constant rain, mud was also a major component of the city.  By visiting in the off season, we managed to avoid the normal tourist crowd and we had our lovely hotel mostly to ourselves.  We walked to a stunning waterfall and observed the countryside and its residents (people, dogs, chickens and cows).  It was nice to see the landscape and we weren’t rained on.

Next stop on our list:  the capital city, Santo Domingo.  Santo Domingo is reportedly the first city where Columbus developed a colony.  There were many old and impressive ruins and plenty of pigeons and small, winding streets and beautiful architecture.  We spent a day walking about watching folks roll cigars, play guitar and try to hound tourists.  We also visited the Aquario Nacional- which had some impressive fish but murky water that obscured the impressive fish..

I didn’t sleep much in Santo Domingo.  The night life accompanied by car alarms and dogs serenaded me from dusk until dawn and I was grateful to sleep on the bus the next day on our way back north to Cabarete.

Cabarete is on the north coast of the DR- close to the extremely touristic Puerto Plata (which we avoided completely).  Cabarete has soft sand beaches, big palm trees (of which we have NONE in south Caicos), and some very pleasant and unique bars and eateries along the beach.  This was an excellent place to finish up our adventures.  It was relaxing and really actually felt like a vacation finally.

It’s amazing what you can stuff into five days when you put your mind to it.  Today we flew home and I can’t believe that a week ago we still had students here and were getting ready to have a fourth of July.

In one week, I learned how to deal with a whole host of new challenges including speaking Spanish, avoiding nice diseases like Malaria, and confronting aggressive “tourist leaches” who incessantly hound you to buy this, go in their store, get in their taxi, go to the “disco” with you, marry them, etc. What a week!  I am putting some pictures online for you to view.  Check them out.