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...