May 2015

I’ve come here ill prepared. I realise this very quickly after having sat down behind the steering wheel of my rental car.

There’s just one road leading across the island from the south coast to Las Terrenas in the north, a fine toll road that will take me straight where I need to go. Should be easy, right? Only the motorway from the airport to Santo Domingo doesn’t connect with the toll road. Between the two lies the old road, and between that and the motorway are concrete walls, preventing me from getting where I want to go.

After an exasperating hour of trying in vain to reach it via back roads I return to where I started (guided by a car full of giggly, drunken, grotesquely overweight young women), and resort to reversing off the motorway via an entrance ramp to get onto the old road. I only execute this desperate manoeuvre because I’m now safe in the knowledge that my fellow road users would approve, as they all seem to be treating basic driving rules as laughably restrictive.

The ride across the island is beautiful, over lush green hills and through verdant fields, but the Department of Transport has another surprise for me; there are no less than four tolls to be paid along the way. Now, just as there seemingly was no way to get on it, there is really no way to get off the road either, so why they feel they have to get you to pay in incremental steps I don’t know, but pay I do, thanking the stars that I got enough pesos to get me all the way.

Once off the toll road I again get immediately, frustratingly lost as tropical darkness descends upon me (and what precious few signposts there may have been), and it’s only with the help of a local woman – who actually gets in the car and guides me the last seven kilometres through labyrinthine village roads – that I finally arrive at my destination.

Buenas noches.
Day 1

The first thing that strikes you here is how familiar the scenery is. I’ve seen this beach in a hundred movies and a thousand pictures, the palm trees hanging out over white sand in the water’s edge, the waves rolling in to lap at your feet. I half expect Captain Sparrow to careen around the corner at any moment, cannibals in hot pursuit.

The second thing that hits you is the technicolor quality of the landscape; the turquoise sea and azure sky, the crystalline salty white beaches, the cascades of colour exploding from the rampant vegetation – fleshly purple hibiscuses, translucently pink grasses, ripe red mangoes.

Not to be outdone, the Dominicans adorn their houses with colours seldom found outside of Italian ice cream vendors’ counters: electric blue, acid yellow, poison green and countless other outlandish nuances jostle for position, making me feel as if I’m the last spot of white on a child’s painting, waiting to be coloured in.

It’s an odd sensation, expectant and abandoned in equal measure, and yet it sums up my first day here perfectly.

Day 2

Remember how I said I didn’t feel well prepared coming here? Well, I’ve been swatting – as well as sweating – and now I know that I’ve landed on the great island of Hispaniola, so named by my namesake C Columbus, who did likewise in 1492, bringing the local Tainó people the traditional gifts of trinkets, baubles and measles, and changed the world forever.

Christopher’s brother Bartholemew went on to found Santo Domingo, the oldest colonial settlement still in existence, but after that the Spanish pretty much forgot about Hispaniola as they went on to conquer the Incas and the Aztecs. The French were thus able to promptly snatch it up and turned it into Haiti (after a Tainò word meaning “land of many hills”). Some time later people in the east of the island rebelled against their French masters’ rule and formed the Dominican Republic.

The name means something like the Sunday Republic, and if it conjures up images of amateurism (e.g. Sunday drivers) you aren’t far wrong, since the fledgling republic has had a long and onerous journey to democracy. It holds the distinction of being the only country in the Caribbean that voluntarily returned to its colonial masters once the yoke had been cast off, it was occupied by the US in the 1920’s, then run as a dictatorship for thirty years (the original banana republic) and was torn by civil war as late as in the 60’s(!).

On top of that, the relationship with their co-habitants the Haitians has always been fraught – in the 30’s they even engaged in a spot of genocide of ethnic Haitians, which I feel is a bit short-sighted when you consider that more than half the island’s population is made up of the brethren of their victims. Suffice to say that even today locally produced maps of the DR depict it as being an island unto itself, completely ignoring the existence of their neighbours.

Trouble in Paradise? You betcha.

Day 3 and 4

I’m finally getting acclimatised. The jet lag has eased, the heat is becoming bearable (though still oppressive) and I’m beginning to come to grips with this alien society.

Houses here are small, mostly one or two rooms, rickety things constructed of wood or concrete, shockingly colourful, with a covered veranda in front if the owners can afford it – always protected with wrought iron bars, because shade is a valuable commodity here.

Mostly though, life is lived outdoors, in the cornucopia the jungle provides; mango, avocado, guava, papaya, cocoa, coconuts all grow in abundance. The climate is such that if a Dominican wants to make a fence she simply sticks branches in the ground, which take root, turning it from fence into hedge in a season. It works both ways though: the jungle will reclaim anything, and fast.

The car isn’t the mode of transport of choice – the moped is, and it will have 2,5 people on it on average (sometimes literally, as the aforementioned cavalier approach to road safety takes its toll). In the mountains mopeds face stiff competition from horses – all of them steeped in the same mould as Rosinante (of Quixotic fame) and ridden in vaquero style – and for longer journeys there are hua huas, the 50’s Jetsons buses that my friend Laura claims you can “flag down and ride for a peso, often seated next to a rooster”.

The police aren’t much trusted – a memory of the bad old days – so instead there are people who provide private security for homeowners, banks, gas stations et cetera by means of a sawed off pump-action shotgun. That, combined with the odd guy sauntering through the streets with a machete in his hand, makes it a bit unnerving to move
about, but at the same time I have never encountered a more laid-back society. They even measure time in Dominican minutes, which of course are slightly longer than ours.

It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it.

Days 5 to 7

Tourism is by far the largest sector of the local economy here, and it’s easy to see why: the Dominicans are blessed with a climate that rivals just about anything I’ve experienced, and tourists are coming here in great herds, like wildebeest crossing the savannah (and often with the same delicate approach). How tempting it must be for the locals then to make a quick buck – especially when domestic monthly salaries are a fraction of what an average tourist is happy to dispense with over a week.

Unfortunately, this means that you’re constantly running the risk of getting ripped off, if not worse. 3,000 police and military personnel were recently dismissed as they had all been involved in armed robberies. That’s coppers and grunts threatening to kill you if you don’t hand over your money! To continue the metaphor, it’s as if zebras and giraffes suddenly turned out to be lions and crocodiles in disguise. Not a happy thought, that.

Even legit operations seem to be geared towards extracting the maximum amount of dollars with a minimum of effort, so every excursion I’ve made has turned into a gauntlet, negotiating with or just plain dodging locals who are hawking their trinkets and services, often making completely bogus claims in the process. “Wanna see famous waterfall, señor? You need horse and guide, esta impossibile otherwise. Forty dollars US.” No horse required, nor guide. Entrance fee? One hundred pesos, or about two dollars. And on it goes.

On a larger scale, money speaks even louder. Anything is for sale, without regard for the public good. So for instance the village I’m staying in is effectively divided into two valleys because a local politico owns the land in between and won’t allow a road to cross his dominion. Foreigners are buying more and more properties along the coast, making it impossible to access the sea for locals and tourists alike. And with the new toll road, the time it takes to get here from the capital has been reduced by two thirds, which I fear will only exacerbate the situation.

For now, woodpeckers are the only ones enjoying high rise condos, as they make their nests in the coconut palms, but give it another five years and I am convinced that las Terrenas will be another Punta Cana or Costa del Sol – a concrete tourist ghetto with not a hint of authenticity.

Paradise Found equals Paradise Lost, seems to be the inevitable conclusion.

Outro

They say travel writing is the most self-indulgent form of writing bar autobiography, and so in self-defence I stay away from what I think of as “and then I did this”-writing if I don’t feel it has some general interest.

However, someone pointed out that this has the effect of making it sound as if I don’t do anything much at all on my holidays sometimes, and so to debunk that, here are some of my top experiences in the Dominican Republic, big and small:

– Hiking through the jungle to a 50 metre high waterfall and swimming in the water right underneath it,

– Watching a gazillion stars at night uninhibited by electric lights during one of several black-outs,

– Having a humpback cow and calf surface right next to our speedboat and watching them splash about for half an hour,

– Having another whale appear just as I was about to go scuba diving for the first time in well over a decade (even though it made me hyperventilate),

– Learning how to surf, and feeling on top of the world when I rode my first wave (and my second, and my third…),

– Exploring Tainò cave paintings deep in the mangrove labyrinth of Los Haitises,

– Watching the setting sun set the ocean on fire, calming the waves and turning them into something akin to molten mercury every evening.

Not too shoddy. But now the trip is at an end, and as the flight takes me across the Caribbean (named after an extinguished tribe) and the Atlantic (home of the fabled lost continent) I can’t help but ponder the inevitable demise of everything. In the end all you can do is keep on travelling, keep on moving forward.

After all, what’s past is prologue.