February 25, 2009

(Dominican Republic)...I was quite proud that I manage to travel completely around the southeast corner of the Dominican Republic under my own steam, or at least the steam of local, rickety gua-gua buses. I took 20 in total, and it was while taking them that I saw how wonderful Dominicans are. Gua-gua drivers flagged their peers down if they knew I needed a connection, or went out of their way to drop me off at the next bus stop I needed. Right from the pleasant, thatch-roofed Punta Cana International Airport, I took my first such bus. Just walk through the gauntlet of taxi drivers, skirt the car park, and you’ll see a bus stop to your right. I was a little anxious my journey started well, as it was edging towards darkness as I headed 40 kilometres over pleasant arable fields to the country’s religious centre, Higüey.
This ramshackle, dusty spot is best known for its Basilica de Nuestra Señora. Its blue trim, many faceted steeple and relative isolation keep it from being a concrete monstrosity. Inside is the 15th-century painting of the Virgen de la Altagracia, brought over from Spain by soldiers. I visited at 7 a.m. after an evening drinking beer and eating shrimps in a series of open-air restaurants where Higüeyanos come to dance. Surreal was watching a large-screen TV showing a baseball game from Venezuela. It was men versus women. The women wore shorts, the men trousers, and one of the men only had one arm. Excellent, I thought, a game for both sexes and incorporating disability, and then up to bat for the women’s team, dressed in a blue, yellow and red tracksuit and Adidas trainers, came Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, who, on the evidence I saw, was not born to the game.
I took buses—some crammed with 25 where 17 would have done nicely—to El Seibo, Hato Mayor and finally Sabana de la Mar, where I jumped on the first of my five motoconcho scooters for the eight-kilometre trip to the wonderful Paraíso Caño Hondo (www.paraisocanohondo.com) hotel on the edge of the Parque Nacional de los Haitises.
Perched in a dry subtropical forest, the hotel is the most pleasant lodging I found in that part of the Dominican Republic. I took a walk through the park to see birds, caves, huge spiders and petroglyphs carved by the country’s original inhabitants, the Taíno, including a Christian cross that must have been etched after the arrival of Christopher Columbus. Fat lot of good it did them. The park also is the only remaining site of the very endangered Ridgway’s hawk (www.wptc.org/wildlife/dominican.php). Perhaps 120 remain.
Early the next morning, I hiked through mud and rivers and saw one perched on a branch. As I looked down at my binocular-holding hands, I realised that mosquitoes are not in the same danger of extinction. I only caught one rubbish van, but that was between this hotel and my next stop at the fishing village of Miches, where a deaf-mute showed me the large fish he had caught that moment just off shore. At Playa Limón, which is the wildest, most pristine beach I came across, a young lad was trying to prop up his absolutely intoxicated grandfather back onto his donkey while himself trying to continue to push his scooter that still had its engine on.
From the road—every road in the DR is potholed to an almost Armageddon-like manner—I walked three kilometres down a gorgeous lane looking at Northern parulas and surrounded by 200 or 300 butterflies at a time. I was on the lookout for a lagoon, so I was most happy when I discovered first the Rancho La Cueva (www.rancholacueva.com) hotel. It was run by a jolly Austrian font of information called Walter. Apart from myself, staying there, were a Milwaukee couple and a mother and daughter from Utrecht. It made for very interesting company. Sitting at the edge of the nearby Río Cedro with the hotel’s dog at 7 the next morning was a joy.
Later, Walter dropped the Dutch and I at La Otra Banda, a community of dodgy-looking pieces of meat hanging off shop beams that was founded by Canary Islanders who the dictator Rafael Trujillo invited in the 1930s to whiten the Dominican popular in the hope that it would shore up his regime. Trujillo supposedly spent fortunes on powders and creams in order to blanch his own skin, much in the way that pop singer Michael Jackson is purported to. At the far south of this southeastern corner is the nation’s last remaining fishing village, Boca de Yuma, where the photo above was taken. It has a curious population of ex-pats from Trieste. The hotel I stayed in, La Vieja Pirata, had an owner from this far-flung Italian city, who smiled when I said I had been there three months before.
The weather was patchy, and I saw four rainbows in 24 hours. It is a short walk to the ranger station (no clothing allowance, quite obviously) of the Parque Nacional del Este. An endemic Hispaniolan lizard-cuckoo greeted me at the gate, and I saw a minute, brilliantly shiny, green Broad-billed tody inside. The forest here somehow roots itself into coral, which is hard on one’s boots. A fish lunch here can be expensive, perhaps the only thing to be so in the country. A fish is brought out, but the price is quoted by the pound. Just be careful, is my advice. Back on the north coast, I walked five kilometres from the main road to La Vacama Beach, only to be quoted a hefty price for a room at a hotel that featured an ostrich in a large cage. The price was tall, as I would have been the only person to stay there, so I decided to walk to the little village of La Vacama back at the main road (for what it was).
As I trudged back, a violent downpour ensued. I at first enjoyed the warm rain, but then my boots started swimming. I ran to a cow shed and tried to loosen a rubber handle off a gate. I abandoned that when I saw the reward of my effort would have been to stand in six feet of mud, so I made instead for an abandoned house. This time I did get the fence open, and it fell on the ground like a row of dominoes.
Diving out of the rain, I saw that the house was not abandoned. A little, wizened black Dominican was in one corner—all was bare concrete and live electrical wires—roasting a plantain over a small fire. I apologised, but he insisted on my continuing to shelter there and would not say no to my eating half of his lunch, despite it being small and there being no other food apparent. We chatted about the general lack of money and the crops he was growing in the shadow of the house, which was not his. When the rain stopped, we walked the 20 minutes to the village, where I bought him a beer and the other villages wondered who his new friend was.