You'll find when you're not searching

Sooi's last evening in The Republic, we wanted to make a little bit special by cooking for ourselves and make it a little quiet evening. As we didn't know any place besides Fata Morgana were there was a community kitchen (besides the fact that we really liked the place and it was cheap) we decided to spend out last night together there. We left our hotel at 11:30 and arrived at Las Terrenas at 20:30 ! So most of that last day we spent on travelling and we were fed up by guagua trying to rip us off (or at least that's how we felt about it).
When we finished dinner, Edit, the owner of Fata Morgana tried to convince Sooi to take a bus in the morning the day his plane would leave instead of the next day. Since Sooi managed to get a Cacao Nut freshly picked by a Haitian guym he decided to follow our advice and we ended up having a second night together. We decided to spend it at the beach at Playa Cozon and simply have some beers and go for a swim...
After we sat down and finished the first one and went for a swim we came back at the bar and a couple of Dominicans were playing guitar, playing the bongos or congas or whatever it is called (I know for sure it wasn't a church organ) and singing too. After a while we put ourselves in front of the band at a table and when the band noticed our interest, they asked what we wanted to hear next. So we asked them to play merengue and bachata, what the difference was and one of the members of the band and a spectating lady even showed us the secrets of merengue dancing...
Sooi and I agreed this certainly was the most idyllic day of the trip.

After the band left, we shot the last pictures with Sooi's underwater camera (we also took these pictures under water) and we were blessed with some beautiful sunsets in the nicest beach in the country. Sooi thanked all gods of all religions (except that one religion were you need to cut of your hand, paint it blue and then sing a song in a language that doesn't exist, because that's a silly religion anyway) for staying one more night and receiving a gift like this one, without even asking for anything...

Dominican Coins

Did I mention already that the coins here in the Republic are made of
rubber ?

KeruBanda

The whole day long we were anxiously looking forward to the concert of KeruBanda. When we eventually decided to take a shower in the less than appealing bathroom (I even doubted that I would get cleaner out of it then when I got in it) we heard some music playing and figured that they had started already at 8 o'clock as displayed on the banners all over the town. As we were preparing ourselves as quickly as we could, a Dominican guy with an American Nationality told us there wasn't anyone there yet and that the music we heard was just a DJ playing. With a sigh
of relief we figured we could relax a little more. When we eventually showed up in the center of the village around nine-ish, we discovered that the gig was actually taking place inside a new club in Mimey, that had booked KeruBanda as their opening spectacle.
The guards at the door told us that the concert was about to start around 10, so around 20 past
ten we entered the club. It was a very fancy club according to Dominican standards, which we noticed because a lot of expensive cars with people in expensive suits showed up. Most of the tables in the club were reserved and some of them had a box with a bottle of Jack Daniels waiting to be consumed. We were directed to a tiny little plastic table with tiny little chairs at the side of the club. They played all kinds of loud music (Dominicans don't seem to make the connection of their country-wide hearing problems and the loud music they play all the time during all moments of the day), mostly Reggea-Ton, Merengue, Batta-something and sometimes a kind of techno that reminded me of the times shortly after "Bonzai".

Sooi was feeling the vibes and looked like a drifted-loose Kurt Cobain between all these High Class Society Dominicans who looked at him like they never seen anything like it.

Every now and then we went outside for a smoke, because you're not aloud to smoke in airconditioned places.
Dominicans don't smoke a lot and some people even acted annoyed when someone lighted one outside in their vicinity. Lots of people also warned us about the dangers of smoking. (well I'm trying to quit and smoke only three when I'm drinking and Sooi only smokes when on
holidays :-), so we take their advice for real).
Anyway, it's only because of our bad habit that we had the luck to meet one of the singers of the band in person. We were looking from a close distance at a neat van parked right outside the club. It looked like a guagua but then without the broken windows, dents and scratches as usual
and it was also brand new.
As we were admiring this vehicle, a guy came out and we asked were this van was going (we succeeded being understood already after 4 attempts !). It turned out to be the artists tour-bus and the singer's name was something that came close to a poorly
pronounced "Richard". We explained the guy that we came all the way over from Santiago to see the band play. This came across as we had came all the way over from Belgium to see them so the guy promised to give us a free cd. Unfortunately we didn't make it to the end of the concert,
because Sooi was just a little bit (!) drunk and we had to go home early.
Fortunately we managed to get Sooi's trophy which he had been dreaming of since the day we arrived at Mimey, a banner with the name of the band, where they played at and when. Ultimately we'd fancy to have it signed by all members of the band, but we had to be happy with only part one of the plan.

Pictures Link

I've changed the name of the album to
http://picasaweb.google.com/oneindelijk/RepublicaDominican#
(if anyone's interested in why:
because the name of my blog was the same as that album, and the blog automatically creates a new album in picasa to store the pictures with the same name as the blog, I ended up with two albums with the same name, which was all to confusing...)

City of Difference

The funny thing about Santiago (and then I will shut up about it) and
also the reason why I like it, is that there is such a big difference in
such short distances.
This picture, for example, is taken only two
block away from the hotel I stayed in. It felt like you're suddenly in

Africa or something (not that have ever been there).

The streets are filled with vegetables, clothes, shoes and e ven buckets filled with
toothpaste, medicins, garlic and lemmons (all in one bucket). The odour
isn't really nice there (although the rotting pineapples spread a nice
smell), because the sewers are sometimes flooding parts of the streets
and open sewers in this heat ought to smell like that.
Cars can hardly pass, but they do it anyway. It felt kinda awkward to
take pictures here (so I didn't).
Two blocks away from my hotel in the other direction was the main
street. There you have traffic jams al l the time, but not as bad as
during peak times in cities in Europe. Although they press the horn
practically all the time, they don't seem to be as stressed out in
traffic and the funny thing is, that sometimes it even seems to help.
They use the horn a lot just to provide an audible sign of their
approach towards motorbikes, pedestrian s and other cars (saves them
braking).
On the real busy crossings, a countdown-counter is installed so the
drivers can see how much time they have left before the light changes
(in both cases).

In the hotelroom we got a service that we've never had before. We had a
speaker in our room and a switch to turn it on and off. Dominican music
on demand !!

Live Concert

My traveling companion, Sooi, met me in front of the hotel, because he was searching for some live music (which was the reason I had come to Santiago), but I had to severely disappoint him. Never giving up like the man he was, he found out the next day that there was a gig the night
before. The night we've been in search for at least some dancing and stuff, but all we found was a disco were we had to pay RD200 to get in, which we didn't want to pay as it looked like nobody was even moving inside (the 'D' in DISCO stands for "don't !").
Sooi also found out that the same band also played in a little town called "Mimey", which was on the way to our original destination, "Monte Christi", in the far North-West of the country. We decided to stay there for a couple of nights and then move on to Monte Christi to chill for Sooi's last days in the country.
We had to get off in "Cruce Guayacanes" and take another one for the last stage. I could only reme mber the "Cruce" part and the locals only used the last part to refer to the town. Nevertheless they understood when I asked "¿Es aqui, Cruce ..?".
We booked into the hotel in town (it looked as there was only one) which
we payed RD200 a night per person.

The security for our personal stuff there bared me more then sorrows, certainly when the owner and a friend came by our room and immediately showed an interest in my laptop, asking
how much it costed...
So we locked out room tight, w ith the tiny little locker that we got from the hotel (the doorlocks from all the rooms were all forced open before) and went out in town, because this was the first night of the "fiestas patronales". When we came back, no grizzly-bears had entered our rooms and the toilet paper was still in place (ouf)...

Power Outage #367

I've probably mentioned it before, but power outages are a frequent thing in the Dominican Republic, so metimes because the government cuts the power, but in a

city like Santiago this might be due to the skilled way the powerlines are constructed... In santiago this is neatly done (as in the picture) compared to how it's done in Santo Domingo...
In house electricity also looks like it won several prices for living up to CEBEC-alike standards and the fan in the hotel didn't make any noises for at least 10 minutes after you changed its speed, probably because then it was trying to hard to fell of its hook.

Driveway or Dining room

I couldn't help thinking about something I read about Frank Gehry's house, where he purposely makes the visitor ask himself the question "Am I in the house or am I not ?", with the difference that in the restaurant where I was eating at for my last night in Santiago, it was not done one purpose that the driveway was also the dining room, but out of necessity. The fish was extraordinary, certainly with the added lemon and the fried bananas with ketchup were just like fried bananas with ketchup (rather tasteless), which made it all rather funny when the driveway thing was set extra in the spotlight because a home coming car drove between the tables at my side and the other tables, concealing the view to the other customers for a moment.
For the first time since I was in the Dominican Republic, I ate the lettuce without having diarrhea 30 minutes later, which was either an achievement being resistant or the lettuce was being very well cleansed...

Santiago

For the third time, I end up in Santiago. For some reason I seem to walk into the same places here. The first time we got here, we got off the bus, walked into a big warehouse, walked down that street, were we just stopped for a second to split our giant knife sharpening stone into
smaller pieces (we kept only 1/20th of it, and gave the rest away) and then jumped onto the bus to La Vega. The second time, I came here by myself, choose a rondom street, which looked completely unfamiliar at that time and suddenly walked upon the same corner as where we split our stone. I walked down another street and ended up again at the places where we took the guagua the first time. Now this time I got off the bus (not a guagua, but a full-sized, airconditioned bus with toilet onboard, which by the way only contained 5 people for the trip and was still cheaper than taking two guagua's in the other direction !??) and after a short walk was directed to a hotel on the corner from the guagua place.
It's as if Santiago only has 4 streets, two corners and the rest is just a projection that you can never enter.
I proved this wrong by searching for some food, but due to the late hour, the only thing I could still find was a McDonalds, my favorite restaurant because as a non-meat eater, I could choose between two dishes "a grilled fish sandwich" or "a something else fish sandwich".
I delayed my plan to search for Salsa/Merengue to the next evening since I didn't really trust my hotel, which was cheap (RD$ 250), but had no locks on the door. Due to the late hour I went searching for food, I left my credit card in the hotel in case I had to hand over my possessions to some sujet with a knife in some dark corner (which seemed to be an overly concerned thought, because many sweet young couples still strolled down the roads). But now I was concerned that I would find my hotel door being forced open and I was already making an emergency plan in my head in case I would end up with only 300 pesos in my pocket and not clothes, no phone ...
Of course this thought too, was an overly concerned one.
Back at the hotel, I was caught again by the 15-16 year old girl that showed me my room earlier and again she was making it very clear that she wanted sex for money, so I laughed and pushed her and her girlfriend that she introduced as well out off my room and said "fuerra !!" which I
hope means "get out !" or something similar.

Soshua

I finally left Soshua were I stayed for a week in a hotel named 'Hotel Coco'. Apparently this refers to 'ass' more specificly woman's ass. I thought it referred to coconut, which I thought to be pretty appropriate in this country...
I arrived there in the guagua, my favorite public transportation medium, with a record of 24 people in one little van. With all my bags on my lap, I was barely able to see anything but my sleeping bag. I held my breath for 1,5 hours before I got off the bus in Soshua.

The second day I visited the beach which was loaded with tourists and everything that develops around them. It wasn't very big, so after saying a 100 times "no gracias" to the locals trying to sell me either food, beer, ice-cream or the same paintings as in Las Terrenas (or anywhere else in the country) I reached the other side and I walked back to the hotel. What a great adventure !!

The third day I tried my luck in the other direction. At this beach, which was completely desolate, apart from 4 locals fishing from the rocks, I could enjoy some silence and nature. It was a good thing that I bought slippers just the day before (the asphalt was too hot to walk barefeeted, I discovered when I was in the town) but still the sharp remains of the coral when straight through the bottom of the slippers.
I made along walk along this beautiful piece of nature and eventually found a tiny little beach beneath the rocks where I went for a swim.
On the same spot I found these interesting remains of a colony of some sort...

The last interesting thing I experienced there was the nightlife. David, a 50 year old, big black American guy, who speaks Spanish fairly well and who seemed to know everyone in town that appeared often in the clubs took me out and showed me all the places. Although my plans were different, his mind was set on finding a girl for me, so his first question when we paid off our motoconcho's was "black our white girls". I said "white" and we buggered off. It wasn't clear to me (still isn't) what black or white in this country means. Some rather Hispanic guys call themselves black, while there as tanned as we could be after 2 months in a really sunny place, and some call themselves white, while there as black as the night. It's your origins that define your color, not your actual color...
Anyway, we kind of quickly scanned all the bars, had a beer in some of them (met a Walloon that lived since 8 years in the place) and David said it was a quite night. There weren't a lot of people going out (the economic recession has its effects everywhere). We ended up in a 'hooker' bar, as David stated, which I noticed as soon as I stopped walking. Girls started touching me and throwing these typical looks at me. Finally David decided to leave and I had a drink at the bar with some guy that always tries to make friends among tourists, which is often a cheap way to get through the night. Looking around I noticed other tourists enjoying all the attention they got just from the fact that their skincolor shouted 'Dineros !!' at the dominicans. I also had the feeling I could better avoid the eyes of one of the bartender girls, who kept on dancing in front of me, as not to raise expectations which I wasn't going to fill in anyway. Eventually I went back to the hotel, knowing that this wasn't the place to learn some merengue or salsa dancing...

Waterfall Adventures

When we arrived at Jarabacoa, which is pretty much the main place where tourist take off to climb the mountain Pico Duarte, as usual a guide immediately jumped upon us asking what our plans were and if we intended to go up as well. For US$ 200 he would take us, no problem, he said.
Our previous encounters made us hold him off for a while so we told him we were getting on the internet first. After writing an email to the whole world we decided that we were going to pay a visit to one of the waterfalls close by and if possible, camp there too.
The same guide took us there and try to rip us off again by claiming that the price he stated (500 pesos) to take us there was per person (which seemed to be the standard procedure to trick tourists who tried to negotiate a price on beforehand).
We told him we knew the prices for gas and we thought he'd been paid enough. Of course he made a face like a hit dog, but eventually shook our hands and buggered off.

We went up higher on the river a bit till we found a tiny little beach were we threw off our bags and clothes and started wading through the river to look if there was even a better spot. at first we crossed another much waterfall and the river curved so we couldn't see around it, so we decided to check a little further, but there we met the same scenario for a couple of times more, so we went back, happy with the spot we'd found at first.
There we made a fire and set up a improvisionairy shelter (which we took down later to lay upon instead of underneath).
Later that night it started raining, so we quickly put the shelter up again (luckily we hadn't detached the lines yet, so all we had to do was put the poles back up).
It didn't rain hard so we weren't disturbed any further that night.
Although when we cleaned up next morning, we noticed that some animal had been gnawing at our bag of bread (possibly a rat or some kind), so I was kinda glad I was sound asleep.

Playa Cozon

After visiting Playa Bonita, "beautiful beach", I was somewhat dissapointed with all the hotels and fancy house right build on the beach. It appeared to me that "The West" even takes those things away from the natives (not that they're are any, I believe they're all killed by Cortez or similar Historical "heroes"").
Edit, our host from Fata Morgana, explained me how to get to Playa Cozon, a rather untouched beach, where to rivers merge just before they strand in the Ocean.
I sat down in the beach bar, where some locals were having a beer as well, but found out that I only had 95 pesos, while a beer was a 100...
The bartender was a little dismal about that, so I promised to myself to come back later to have another one and fix the remainder of the first. Unfortunately the bartender closed up when I left, because there were no more customers...

Fishing

Sooi has been busy for about 4 days to catch a fish now. He started his obsession in Samana, which seemed very difficult to explain to the locals what he needed (possibly because they never met a tourist who wanted to go fishing and needed to collect and construct his own gear; it just didn't fit their paradigm).
Even to explain he needed spices to prepare the fish afterwards, he had to role-play the whole process of fishing, killing, cooking and spicing the fish before they grasped what he meant...

As weight (don't know the official name for it, but it makes the bate sink) they sold him little car-parts (which seems to be common practice to fish) and as bate someone took him to the fridge and told him to take frozen scampis...

Transportation

Transportation keeps on surprising us. We found out you have several types here.
First there is my personal favorite, the Guagua, which is the public transportation with vans in varying sizes.
Sometimes you end up in a larger 16 people van (on which the Domenicans easily fit 3 times as much) and sometimes in a Nissan-like van (those who are smaller than a normal car) where they fit in at least 14 people and the driver.
Besides the guagua, you also have the Motoconcho's, which are numerous motorbikes that transport up to three people at a time. And then, of course, you have taxis, which are, just like in many countries ranging from hardly a car till rather fancy and expensive cars (but rarely Mercedes or other European Middel/High Class cars, since overseas import is expensive and used only by the richer class here).

Still they trick us in paying too much for transportation, except for the Guagua. (In the guagua you just give your money to the passengers in front of you, who then in turn pass it on to the driver's helper and the change is being passed on back to you. This way we payed 200 pesos from Santo Domingo to Samana (ca 300 km) and in Las Terrenas we payed 50 pesos for not even 500 m with a Motoconcho.
(our mistake in this case was to give the man a 100 pesos biljet before accepting the change, so he quickly changed his price in 50 a person, pretending that was what we agreed...

The trip from Las Terrenas to Santiago in a guagua was another experience as well, since the road we took seemed to go criss-cross through all the little villages, we did have aircon and the driver played some music from his phone, amplified through a huge system behind his seat, making the bass as heavy as on a techno party and the treble high pitched that it hurted my ears. Nevertheless I slept most part of the trip...

Landscape

After messing around a little with my phone, I discovered a "panorama" function. I didn´t expect much of that, as I´ve seen other cameras that just cut off a part of the picture to create a smaller picture with different dimensions, but the phone takes 3 pictures and joins them in one panoramic one.
Despite my scratched lens they´re not too bad (from a pure technical point of view)...

These ones are taken this morning on Playa Bonita. Because I didn´t realise I had woken up so early that the shops weren´t even open yet, I decided to go for a swim (which I didn´t because it started raining).









Another one from this morning (here you can see the difference well between the first and the other pictures...









You can see more pictures on http://picasaweb.google.com/oneindelijk/ScAMpERICA#

The last picture I want to post here, is one from Paco, the lawn mower I mentioned in a previous post...
I don´t know if donkeys are a native species here. I did ask some locals about what dangerous species live natively in the Domenican Republic and although they don´t really know they´ll give you an answer anyway. So there´s a chance it might be some Cobra-alike snake and Scorpions (a French teacher already denied that) and Malaria-carrying mosquito´s (another French guide claimed there´s no danger whatsoever for Malaria in the Domenican...).
So basically, it´s just like Belgium where politicians are the biggest threat...

Las Terrenas & a real Fata Morgana

As we arrived in Las Terrenas, the first thing we noticed was beautiful beaches and the kind of tropical color the sea always has in postcards and travel-posters.
The second thing I noticed (of which I purposely didn´t notice Sooi, my travel companion), were fairly new or still being constructed tourist complexes, typical tourist-beach-bars and all the stuff that you´d expect in Barcelona beaches. Immediately we had the impression of a very expensive neighbourhood.
Luckily our impression quickly changed as we entered the town, which apart from being rather clean, still felt like a Domenican Town. Still we feared that the prices for accomodation was going to be 4 - 5 times the price we were used to.
Although after a quick search for youth hostels we found this place called ´Fata Morgana´, which was only 590 something a night for a double room, cheaper than anything we´d stayed before !!


Ver Las Terrenas en un mapa más grande

The hostel, which existed out of 6 rooms in 3 separate buildings spread around a beautiful garden with Paco, the lawn mower / donkey, 4 dogs, a chicken, a vulture that flies over pretty often and many Gecko´s (who come visit us in the room as well).
I was so happy there was a communal kitchen so I could prepare my own food, because the 2 times I ate vegetables here, I ended up with some diarrhea. (I´ll post some pictures soon, I only now remembered I can take pictures with my phone, which is at least something...)

RD$ 500 / hour

On the road to Las Terrenas, we found beautiful waterfalls in Limon (or smth like that, it´s not on google maps) in our Tourist guide. So we found a motorbike that wanted to bring us for 20 pesos, but entirely in the DR style, they dropped us off on a ranch, put us on a horse, pretended to be very busy and off we were. Only later we found out it was going to cost us 500 pesos an hour per person. We already had seen the waterfall from the top and we were descending to go for a swim, but when we heard this, we decided to turn around and bring back the horses as quickly as possible.
When we returned we had to pay 2500 pesos, but we only had 1800 and some eurocoins left (about 1,10 EUR). Of course they started making amok about it, but eventually they angrily dropped us off at the busstop for Las Terrenas and payed it for us.
Some 5 minutes later the owner of the ranch came back on his motorbike to return the euro coins.  Suddenly he was very friendly again and with a broad smile waved us goodbye as he left us behind...

Samana

Samana is a little city (ca 91 000 inhabitants) on the coastline of a large bay in the north. The city itself is typically Domenican (for my eyes). We found a cheap, but very nice hotel for 600 RD$ (= BF 500) a room. They even served us coffee in the ñorning !
My travel companion has a habit of eating only lunch, so for a few days now, we´ve been eating our first meal long after dark...

In Samana, the governement often cuts down the electricity to punish te locals for not paying. So all the Europeans and the richer locals have aggregates. When we woke up monday morning, the first thing I noticed was that it was very quiet because the power was back on and no noisy engines had to provide electricity.

Inland Travel

As our plan to buy a car or even a bike seemed to be a little out of scope, we continue to travel with the mini-busses that are present all over the countrie. They´re not air-cooled and sometimes they put as many people on it as on a normal-sized bus. The pathway in the middle also contains a foldable chair so each row can contain 6 people on 4 seats. For a trip from about an hour we pay 100 pesos ( EUR 2) for the both of us.
At first we didn´t know you always pay for the whole trip, but after getting on and off the bus for about 4 times, we started realising we were paying 4 times as much for the same distance.

Arrival @ Santo Domingo

Just before we had to go through customs, we had to buy a Tourist Visa. The price for this was US$ 20. After declaring I wasn´t American and had no dollars, the servant simply said: "Okay, then it´s 20 EUR"...

Shortly thereafter we went to San Christobal, which appeared to be a city where not a lot of tourists come. Nevertheless, no 5 mins passed by or someone tried to make a bargain for a ride by bike or taxi for outrageous prices.

To save some money we figured we could buy a car and sleep in it, while giving us a whole lot of freedom at the same time. Thinking about how my dad sold his car for EUR 100 and I bought mine for 250, I thought we should be able to buy a car for EUR 100 or even less.
I don´t know about locals, but for tourists the price was not far from the price you´d pay for a new one, unless it practically fell apart and even then we had to pay outrageous prices.
So we abandonned this project.

San Christobal is quite shocking as to where and how people live. (probably not as bad as Mexico City´s banlieu, but still far worse than I had expected). Many people live in half-collapsed houses and there´s so much trash you can fill a supermarket with what you can observe standing in one place.

Santo Domingo seems a little cleaner, apart from the ocean, where it´s waves of litter rolling onto the beach. The electricity network is a miracle it still functions. The wires are dangling criss-cross over the road, at crossings in maybe 20 directions and some of the poles can´t support the tension so they start leaning over until they lean against a wall and the situation stabilizes a bit. Electrabel would get sued a million times over.

The Plane & The Airport

That was cool (litterally, I woke up several times from the aircon). We managed to get a seat for three for ourselves, so I could stretch out my legs and curl up like a baby.
Sooi, however, left his seat to look out of the window and as soon as the "fasten your seatbelt" sign went off, his place was taken by another horizontally travelling customer".