The traditional last game of dominoes before I left the DR. Here's El Mambi, Felo, Laura, Chiqui, and Robinson. Laura and I won two out of three!
Monday, April 30, 2007
Veneno
Veneno, the conga player, looks happy to be in the studio - even in this sweltering isolation booth.
Raul & La India
A moment of levity in the midst of a very long day in the recording studio with Raul Roman and La India Canela
Guira on fire!
This photo of Ramoncito Guira in the recording studio didn't come out too well but I like how his guira looks like it's on fire.
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
The Last Week
4/22
There was no time to recover from the road trip, though. On Monday I had to hit the ground running in order to be ready for the week’s activities, which would start that afternoon with the #$&*% press conference. Let’s not talk too much about it. At least it was over fairly quickly, and at the end there was beer. The nice part was I got to see some friends I hadn’t seen in a while: Gaspar Rodriguez, the host of TV show Arriba el Merengue, and El Papillon, a típico radio deejay. Afterwards, La India invited us all out for a typical Dominican dinner at Rancho Chito, one of the only places in town to get Dominican food for dinner (Dominicans don’t usually eat out, or really eat anything much for dinner), where owner Luis had prepared a whole buffet for us. He also shared with us his technique for finding out a woman’s true age: guess an age you’re sure is too old for her, and in indignation she will say, “What do you mean?!” and reveal the real number just to show you. He claims it works like a charm.
That was the last time I’d get to relax and enjoy food for a while, though. We hit the ground running in the studio the next morning at 10:00 and pretty much didn’t quit until 11 PM Thursday. It was a marathon recording session, since the Smithsonian folks could only stay three days and we had 13 tracks to get down. We did it, but only just. It was done by recording all the instruments live, then going back and cleaning up any problem parts instrument by instrument, and finally adding the vocal tracks. As we broke only once a day, for lunch, it was quite tiring for all involved.
Juan, the vocalist, got particularly tired of the whole business when, after recording an entire vocal track, La India came back in and told him he wasn’t supposed to be singing that one at all. He started griping loudly and long about all the “tiempo perdido,” lost time. A little later, as Juan sat with head in hands, Ramoncito, the güira player, came out of the booth and picked up an industrial-strength flashlight that was laying around the studio. He turned it on and started shining its powerful beam all around the studio, paying particular attention to all the corners and hidden nooks and crannies. “What in the world are you doing?” the other musicians asked. “Looking for all the lost time! Where is it? Where has it gone?” This got even Juan laughing. Later he was laughing still harder when Ramoncito started imitating the vocal stylings of Julian, an old-school accordionist who apparently has a particularly bad break in his vocal range. Over and over, Ramoncito tunelessly skipped from high to low, and Juan fell on the floor and was actually holding his sides from laughing so hard.
The other moments of mirth came, unfortunately, at our sound engineer’s expense. Trying to learn a new system on the fly (ProTools was not his accustomed home), he was taking longer than the musicians were used to or had hoped. Bocachula, our wacky tamborero, started calling for “Duran! Duran!” over his mic, confusing me thoroughly, as there had been an engineer called Duran there in the beginning but he had left long ago. As I insisted, “Duran isn’t HERE!!” the musicians were all collapsing in hilarity. As I soon realized, this was Bocachula’s way of saying the guy was taking too long: durando.
One completely non-funny moment was experienced on the first day, however, and one that took the wind out of all of our sails – particularly mine – for some time. After recording four tracks a cuarteto with Bocachula on the first day, we broke for lunch feeling quite satisfied. They sounded great, and the fourth had sounded particularly awesome – we needed only one take and it just clicked into place. Beautiful. Bocachula was anxious to leave so we paid him and he took off, as for the other tracks we’d be using a different tamborero, one better able to play slow and controlled (Bocachula is fantastic, probably my favorite, but is known for always pushing the limits of speed). Shortly thereafter, we discovered that the entire last track had somehow been erased from the computer, leaving no trace. Bocachula had completely disappeared, and we were unable to contact him for the rest of the day, and for the next two days (he appeared to have gone to the beach and left his phone with some unknown woman). We had no choice but to redo the track with different personnel at the last minute on the last day. Bummer.
In the end, though, we did get it done. All tracks recorded, all contracts signed (even by those who were illiterate), all people filmed (they were making a documentary at the same time), all our names included in some song or another (in accordance with típico homenaje tradition), all lost time found – but not all lost sleep. And again, there was no time for me to recover from this tiring time, as the very next day the big, three-day, biannual conference (Musica, Identidad, y Cultura en el Caribe) would begin at the Centro Leon.
It was good to see friends, many of whom I hadn’t seen since the last installment of the Congreso, but my enthusiasm was somewhat tempered by sleep deprivation. That and the embarrassment of seeing and listening myself on the big screen right at the start of the event. I’ve never particularly liked to be in front of the camera, but I’d agreed to appear as the Voice of Academia in a documentary on son in Santiago as a favor to the friends who were making it. As thanks, I had to see my giant face sans makeup plastered up there when they showed the film at the opening ceremony, and again at a huge concert a few days later which was televised all over the country. Zoiks!
More fun than that were the panels I attended. I particularly enjoyed one on changui, a music from eastern Cuba that has much in common with merengue típico, and two that dealt with Dominican son dancing complete with demonstrations. But even more fun than those was taking friends to my final dinner of 2007 at the continent’s greatest Italian restaurant. And on a similar level of fun was the second night’s concert (minus my documentary appearance there), where Chucho Valdes, one of my favorite pianists, did an amazingly salsariffic solo.
There was no time to catch up on sleep, what with all that fun, which put me in a bit of a state on the day I was to give my paper. It was scheduled for 9:30, not a good time for me, and I had to get up even earlier anyway in order to FedEx some contracts to the Smithsonian. I was standing in front of the FedEx office at the exact moment it was to open, 8:30, when I discovered that it was closed on Saturdays. Frantically, I ran down the street to the Mailboxes, Etc, which thankfully was open, sent the package off, and ran away as quick as possible – it was now almost 9 and I hadn’t eaten, had coffee, or been able to set up the technical side of my presentation.
And I wasn’t going to be able to now, either. Turned out I’d locked my keys in my car. Imagine the mirth of the FedEx guy! Imagine the consternation of Sydney! Another guy in Mailboxes offered to call a locksmith, and did so, but the locksmith said he would be there in “twenty minutes” (translate: forty-ish minutes in Dominican), not soon enough. I was so flummoxed that a third guy who was just standing around offered to break into my car using some wire, and I agreed to this plan. While he worked on that, I bought some coffee and a cheese sandwich at the sidewalk stand across the street and ran around a bit as bees chased me and my beverage. By the time that was done, so was he, and I was on my way again. Or almost on my way again – I also realized I’d left my phone at home and had to run back and get it, since I would definitely need it (both for communication and timing purposes) in the long day ahead.
It was not my best morning. My paper was OK though, and after that I was able to relax a bit more. Well, after that and after my tenure as panel moderator afterwards.
The highlight of Sunday was definitely the performers’ panel, where Chucho Valdes, tres player Pancho Amat, and salsero Johnny Pacheco were able to tell their own stories and answer questions. Pacheco was the star of the conference, since he was given some long-deserved recognition by the Centro Leon and the Dominican government for his instrumental role in the creation of salsa music in the 1960s. Though nearing the status of ancient, he was still both hilarious and insightful in his comments. For me, the best part was when he said that he was originally an accordionist, playing merengue típico here in Santiago – a revelation I don’t think he’d ever made before –and that perhaps some of his salsa ideas came from there. The lowlight of Sunday was the announcement of the next conference’s theme – bolero. Blah. Having little to no interest in slow, romantic music, I’m unlikely to give a paper at that event.
The conference finished with a patio performance by Son Santiaguero, and after that, I had a quick errand to do. It was my last opportunity to say goodbye to Tonito of my carnival group, and when I went by I discovered it was his son’s birthday, and they were in the middle of a party. That was cute, but I couldn’t stay as I was booked to take some friends for a less official but more típico conference closing event, by going to see Raul Roman at Andy Ranch and then Francisco Ulloa at Rancho Merengue. In between, we also had a típico style dinner from the cafeteria at Parada La Tinaja. And John Taveras, the owner and originator of RM, told me he is putting the business up for sale so he can go back to Pennsylvania. He asked me to put it on the web, so I’m telling you, loyal blog readers, first. If you have any money you’d like to invest, consider investing it in Santiago’s oldest and most prestigious rancho típico, thereby helping to keep the music alive! Write for further details.
So the recording was over at last, and the conference as well. After that I had only two days left, and my last days in the DR were, as usual, a whirl of activity as I tried to tie up loose ends and get everything arranged for my time away. As usual, whenever someone asks how long it will be until my next trip and I tell them eight months, they exclaim, “Why so long?!” They can’t believe I actually have a life, family, and friends somewhere else, and sometimes it’s hard even for me to believe, so involved am I in life here. In fact, I will be happy to get home to Arizona and see everyone there, but the transitions are always hard.
At any rate, there is little worth writing about in this section - who really wants to hear about picking up things, dropping off things, packing things, and paying for things? One noteworthy occurrence was a major ant invasion discovered when cleaning things out. I waged my usual war on them but victory was incomplete. I found out later they had invaded my purse as well – after they’d bit me about ten times on the arms, causing incredibly itchy, swollen lumps all over that made it hard to sleep. After a sleepless week, it was the last thing I needed, but perhaps all the deprivation would help me be able to sleep on the plane, I reasoned. I also received going-away gifts from three friends: earrings from Claudia, a scarf from Zoraya, and a bottle of Brugal from Tonito.
On Monday, I paid my last visit to Rancho Merengue, going to see Rafaelito play for one last time. My last evening was spent in the best way possible, in what is now becoming the traditional final farewell game of dominoes. As we’d done last year, the Taveras-Peralta clan came over with their dominoes, this time accompanied by saxophonist El Mambi, and we played three rounds over beer. Laura and I won two out of three. Mujeres al poder! Mujeres al poder!
Coming back is always bittersweet. I was looking forward to seeing my family, eating Mexican food, and just generally being at home. I was also ready to be done with running around for a while and get back into the mode of sitting around and writing. But I’ll also miss my friends, as well as the music, in Santiago. Actually, it looks like the missing people is going to be a constant theme – when I’m there I miss the people here, when here, I miss those over there – but hey, having people (and music) worth missing makes life worth living, doesn’t it?
There was no time to recover from the road trip, though. On Monday I had to hit the ground running in order to be ready for the week’s activities, which would start that afternoon with the #$&*% press conference. Let’s not talk too much about it. At least it was over fairly quickly, and at the end there was beer. The nice part was I got to see some friends I hadn’t seen in a while: Gaspar Rodriguez, the host of TV show Arriba el Merengue, and El Papillon, a típico radio deejay. Afterwards, La India invited us all out for a typical Dominican dinner at Rancho Chito, one of the only places in town to get Dominican food for dinner (Dominicans don’t usually eat out, or really eat anything much for dinner), where owner Luis had prepared a whole buffet for us. He also shared with us his technique for finding out a woman’s true age: guess an age you’re sure is too old for her, and in indignation she will say, “What do you mean?!” and reveal the real number just to show you. He claims it works like a charm.
That was the last time I’d get to relax and enjoy food for a while, though. We hit the ground running in the studio the next morning at 10:00 and pretty much didn’t quit until 11 PM Thursday. It was a marathon recording session, since the Smithsonian folks could only stay three days and we had 13 tracks to get down. We did it, but only just. It was done by recording all the instruments live, then going back and cleaning up any problem parts instrument by instrument, and finally adding the vocal tracks. As we broke only once a day, for lunch, it was quite tiring for all involved.
Juan, the vocalist, got particularly tired of the whole business when, after recording an entire vocal track, La India came back in and told him he wasn’t supposed to be singing that one at all. He started griping loudly and long about all the “tiempo perdido,” lost time. A little later, as Juan sat with head in hands, Ramoncito, the güira player, came out of the booth and picked up an industrial-strength flashlight that was laying around the studio. He turned it on and started shining its powerful beam all around the studio, paying particular attention to all the corners and hidden nooks and crannies. “What in the world are you doing?” the other musicians asked. “Looking for all the lost time! Where is it? Where has it gone?” This got even Juan laughing. Later he was laughing still harder when Ramoncito started imitating the vocal stylings of Julian, an old-school accordionist who apparently has a particularly bad break in his vocal range. Over and over, Ramoncito tunelessly skipped from high to low, and Juan fell on the floor and was actually holding his sides from laughing so hard.
The other moments of mirth came, unfortunately, at our sound engineer’s expense. Trying to learn a new system on the fly (ProTools was not his accustomed home), he was taking longer than the musicians were used to or had hoped. Bocachula, our wacky tamborero, started calling for “Duran! Duran!” over his mic, confusing me thoroughly, as there had been an engineer called Duran there in the beginning but he had left long ago. As I insisted, “Duran isn’t HERE!!” the musicians were all collapsing in hilarity. As I soon realized, this was Bocachula’s way of saying the guy was taking too long: durando.
One completely non-funny moment was experienced on the first day, however, and one that took the wind out of all of our sails – particularly mine – for some time. After recording four tracks a cuarteto with Bocachula on the first day, we broke for lunch feeling quite satisfied. They sounded great, and the fourth had sounded particularly awesome – we needed only one take and it just clicked into place. Beautiful. Bocachula was anxious to leave so we paid him and he took off, as for the other tracks we’d be using a different tamborero, one better able to play slow and controlled (Bocachula is fantastic, probably my favorite, but is known for always pushing the limits of speed). Shortly thereafter, we discovered that the entire last track had somehow been erased from the computer, leaving no trace. Bocachula had completely disappeared, and we were unable to contact him for the rest of the day, and for the next two days (he appeared to have gone to the beach and left his phone with some unknown woman). We had no choice but to redo the track with different personnel at the last minute on the last day. Bummer.
In the end, though, we did get it done. All tracks recorded, all contracts signed (even by those who were illiterate), all people filmed (they were making a documentary at the same time), all our names included in some song or another (in accordance with típico homenaje tradition), all lost time found – but not all lost sleep. And again, there was no time for me to recover from this tiring time, as the very next day the big, three-day, biannual conference (Musica, Identidad, y Cultura en el Caribe) would begin at the Centro Leon.
It was good to see friends, many of whom I hadn’t seen since the last installment of the Congreso, but my enthusiasm was somewhat tempered by sleep deprivation. That and the embarrassment of seeing and listening myself on the big screen right at the start of the event. I’ve never particularly liked to be in front of the camera, but I’d agreed to appear as the Voice of Academia in a documentary on son in Santiago as a favor to the friends who were making it. As thanks, I had to see my giant face sans makeup plastered up there when they showed the film at the opening ceremony, and again at a huge concert a few days later which was televised all over the country. Zoiks!
More fun than that were the panels I attended. I particularly enjoyed one on changui, a music from eastern Cuba that has much in common with merengue típico, and two that dealt with Dominican son dancing complete with demonstrations. But even more fun than those was taking friends to my final dinner of 2007 at the continent’s greatest Italian restaurant. And on a similar level of fun was the second night’s concert (minus my documentary appearance there), where Chucho Valdes, one of my favorite pianists, did an amazingly salsariffic solo.
There was no time to catch up on sleep, what with all that fun, which put me in a bit of a state on the day I was to give my paper. It was scheduled for 9:30, not a good time for me, and I had to get up even earlier anyway in order to FedEx some contracts to the Smithsonian. I was standing in front of the FedEx office at the exact moment it was to open, 8:30, when I discovered that it was closed on Saturdays. Frantically, I ran down the street to the Mailboxes, Etc, which thankfully was open, sent the package off, and ran away as quick as possible – it was now almost 9 and I hadn’t eaten, had coffee, or been able to set up the technical side of my presentation.
And I wasn’t going to be able to now, either. Turned out I’d locked my keys in my car. Imagine the mirth of the FedEx guy! Imagine the consternation of Sydney! Another guy in Mailboxes offered to call a locksmith, and did so, but the locksmith said he would be there in “twenty minutes” (translate: forty-ish minutes in Dominican), not soon enough. I was so flummoxed that a third guy who was just standing around offered to break into my car using some wire, and I agreed to this plan. While he worked on that, I bought some coffee and a cheese sandwich at the sidewalk stand across the street and ran around a bit as bees chased me and my beverage. By the time that was done, so was he, and I was on my way again. Or almost on my way again – I also realized I’d left my phone at home and had to run back and get it, since I would definitely need it (both for communication and timing purposes) in the long day ahead.
It was not my best morning. My paper was OK though, and after that I was able to relax a bit more. Well, after that and after my tenure as panel moderator afterwards.
The highlight of Sunday was definitely the performers’ panel, where Chucho Valdes, tres player Pancho Amat, and salsero Johnny Pacheco were able to tell their own stories and answer questions. Pacheco was the star of the conference, since he was given some long-deserved recognition by the Centro Leon and the Dominican government for his instrumental role in the creation of salsa music in the 1960s. Though nearing the status of ancient, he was still both hilarious and insightful in his comments. For me, the best part was when he said that he was originally an accordionist, playing merengue típico here in Santiago – a revelation I don’t think he’d ever made before –and that perhaps some of his salsa ideas came from there. The lowlight of Sunday was the announcement of the next conference’s theme – bolero. Blah. Having little to no interest in slow, romantic music, I’m unlikely to give a paper at that event.
The conference finished with a patio performance by Son Santiaguero, and after that, I had a quick errand to do. It was my last opportunity to say goodbye to Tonito of my carnival group, and when I went by I discovered it was his son’s birthday, and they were in the middle of a party. That was cute, but I couldn’t stay as I was booked to take some friends for a less official but more típico conference closing event, by going to see Raul Roman at Andy Ranch and then Francisco Ulloa at Rancho Merengue. In between, we also had a típico style dinner from the cafeteria at Parada La Tinaja. And John Taveras, the owner and originator of RM, told me he is putting the business up for sale so he can go back to Pennsylvania. He asked me to put it on the web, so I’m telling you, loyal blog readers, first. If you have any money you’d like to invest, consider investing it in Santiago’s oldest and most prestigious rancho típico, thereby helping to keep the music alive! Write for further details.
So the recording was over at last, and the conference as well. After that I had only two days left, and my last days in the DR were, as usual, a whirl of activity as I tried to tie up loose ends and get everything arranged for my time away. As usual, whenever someone asks how long it will be until my next trip and I tell them eight months, they exclaim, “Why so long?!” They can’t believe I actually have a life, family, and friends somewhere else, and sometimes it’s hard even for me to believe, so involved am I in life here. In fact, I will be happy to get home to Arizona and see everyone there, but the transitions are always hard.
At any rate, there is little worth writing about in this section - who really wants to hear about picking up things, dropping off things, packing things, and paying for things? One noteworthy occurrence was a major ant invasion discovered when cleaning things out. I waged my usual war on them but victory was incomplete. I found out later they had invaded my purse as well – after they’d bit me about ten times on the arms, causing incredibly itchy, swollen lumps all over that made it hard to sleep. After a sleepless week, it was the last thing I needed, but perhaps all the deprivation would help me be able to sleep on the plane, I reasoned. I also received going-away gifts from three friends: earrings from Claudia, a scarf from Zoraya, and a bottle of Brugal from Tonito.
On Monday, I paid my last visit to Rancho Merengue, going to see Rafaelito play for one last time. My last evening was spent in the best way possible, in what is now becoming the traditional final farewell game of dominoes. As we’d done last year, the Taveras-Peralta clan came over with their dominoes, this time accompanied by saxophonist El Mambi, and we played three rounds over beer. Laura and I won two out of three. Mujeres al poder! Mujeres al poder!
Coming back is always bittersweet. I was looking forward to seeing my family, eating Mexican food, and just generally being at home. I was also ready to be done with running around for a while and get back into the mode of sitting around and writing. But I’ll also miss my friends, as well as the music, in Santiago. Actually, it looks like the missing people is going to be a constant theme – when I’m there I miss the people here, when here, I miss those over there – but hey, having people (and music) worth missing makes life worth living, doesn’t it?
FYI: My book is out!
OK, it's not about tipico (that one is still in progress), but still, I wrote it, it's out, and maybe you should buy it! The official release date is May 17 but it's in the warehouse already. Here is its page. Of course, you can also buy it on Amazon, etc...
Judas
This giant Judas figure gets paraded through the town of Navarrete on Easter Sunday, then burned.
gagá
I caught this small gagá group and dancer on the highway as they went from Batey Libertad to Maizal.
Baron's house?
This interesting construction was in the middle of the Ouanaminthe cemetery. One of my friends said it must be where the Baron del Cementerio dwells.
Sunday, April 22, 2007
Travels with beans, part 2
4-21
My first task of this Easter Sunday was to head over to the Centro de la Cultura, an unmarked yellow house, for a demonstration of the newly formed children’s típico class. Laura came with me, and we found the children anxiously awaiting our arrival in the backyard. It was a complete group of accordion, tambora, güira, and marimba, all played by children under 12 (the marimbero appeared to be more in the neighborhood of 7). They did quite a respectable job on three merengues, considering the accordionist had been playing for all of four months. This was one of the results of Dajabon’s win in the city pavilion competition at last year’s Feria Regional del Libro, which I had attended on my last trip. With the prize money Chio purchased instruments and got this new program going – the first such class I’ve ever seen or heard of.
Chio also showed us quickly around the other new developments, which included a large room used for sleepovers and movie showings, the recently purchased other side of this duplex house. We couldn’t stay much longer, though, if we wanted to carry out our plan to get to Haiti. Laura’s brother, a military man, thought he could get us across with no problems, but the border crossing would close for lunch at 12:00 sharp and then there’d be no crossing back. When we met him at Laura’s mom’s house it was already nearing 10:00 so we had to get a move on.
Approaching the border by Falcon, we parked it at the customs house and passed through its arched gateway, pausing to greet several soldiers on the way, all of whom assured us we could go on through the big metal gate in the center of the bridge over the Rio Masacre that here marked the border. Well sure, the Dominicans let us through, along with all the Haitian vendors carrying heaps of clothing and carts full of other mysteries to sell. But the Haitian border officer wasn’t such a pushover. He didn’t mind the Dominican members of our party going through, namely Felo, Yary, Robinson, and our military escort, but I was another matter. First our guide tried evasionary tactics: he insisted that I was, in fact, Dominican. The guy didn’t buy it and wanted to see ID. Unable to produce this, he then said that I could go through if I showed a passport and paid 600 pesos. Luckily, I did (unusually) happen to have my passport with me, but the price seemed a little steep. Arguing that we would only be there for a short time anyway, the price was negotiated down to 200 upon our return, and we set off.
It was a weird no-man’s land we had entered. After the customs house, it was a rather muddy dirt road lined with masses of trash, first passing by a line of men selling things like phone cards from TV-tray-sized tables, then a larger table with food and drink, then a tiny city of booths selling lottery tickets. All this was in the middle of a sizable empty space sparsely populated by trees and one lonely white truck marked “UN.” In the heat it was like entering a weird purgatory where no one spoke our language and could only stare quietly at us as we passed by. It was a relief to finally cross a small bridge and enter the town of Ouanaminthe, known to Dominicans as Juana Mendez.
The road conditions did not improve. In fact, I saw not a single paved road in the whole town. I did see a surprising number of fancy mansions in various stages of being built. Then there were the places that held only a nice-looking wall surrounding a plot of land filled with nothing but weeds. I was told the method here was to build the wall first, then the house as money becomes available. Where does the money come from? Probably best not to ask. Borders are borders anywhere.
We walked on through the hot and dusty streets, passing little girls dressed in Sunday best on the way to church and small businesses painted with slogans in Kreyol. A brand new white SUV passed and Laura’s brother hailed the driver. Apparently this guy was a friend of his, with two others in the car, all Dominicans claiming they were there to visit friends. They invited us to pile in alongside and they would take us as far as we wished. We didn’t go far but it was still a relief to have those few minutes of air conditioning.
After dropping us off at the town’s main square, our ride took off. We were left to stroll through the park, such as it was: a ramshackle building in the middle in the middle of a somewhat depressing slice of patchy grass with few other plants to speak of, all surrounded by a low stone wall. A few sheep relaxed in the shade on the side nearest the church from which a crowd of people were emerging. Next door to the church, a few men watched soccer on some benches under a roof, a place where you could pay to enter and watch TV. A poster advertised some upcoming games and movies that would be shown.
There wasn’t much to do here unless we wanted to sit and watch the game, so we continued down a side street toward the fortress. This too was a bit depressing – a large cinder block structure that was only partially standing, as apparently some kids had blown it up or set it on fire about ten years back for no very good reason. A mule tied up under a tree swatted at flies in front of the place, and that was pretty much the only activity on the street until a street vendor came by with her wares in a wheelbarrow. Among the various bottles and cans were several pints of clerén, a bootleg Haitian rum. I’d had it before in its clear form, but this one was flavored with something that made it an almost fluorescent orange color. My companions bought a couple and we pushed on.
Coming to a graveyard surrounded by a high wall, I insisted we go in if at all possible, and finding the gate open, we did so. It was not very different from Dominican cemeteries I’d visited, with its large above-ground tombs plastered in various pastel colors. An unusual structure, like a mini castle complete with turret, stood in the center. It didn’t appear to hold any bodies, at least it wasn’t marked with a name, but it was hard to be sure. One of the group suggested it belonged to “El Baron del Cementario.” This vodou spirit in charge of the dead still survives in Dominican folklore, although in a somewhat different form. My friend told me the Baron del Cementerio was a sort of honorary position occupied by the first person to be buried in the cemetery, and I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not.
Emerging from the graveyard we checked our watches and saw it was getting perilously close to 12:00. We had better make for the border tout de suite to avoid being turned into pumpkins or something. Indeed, when we crossed the no-man’s land and walked up to the customs house they were nearly ready to close the doors, and Laura’s brother’s cell phone was ringing with a soldier friend calling to notify us. They were all worried we’d get stuck in Haiti and never make it back, I guess, but we paid our fee and passed through to the other side safely.
Our little international sojourn over, it was time to pack up the car and hit the road. It would be a heavy load coming back: not only would we total five people in the car, each with a bag, but Laura wanted to bring back a giant sack of rice and another of dried beans. The Falcon would be riding low, which made me a little more nervous than usual about the potholes. I’d have to go slow, but I was in a bit of a hurry to get back, as my friends from the batey had called to inform me that a gagá group would indeed be going out that day and I should stop by to see it.
As we got on the road, Laura informed me that rice and beans were considered contraband in these parts and that if we were stopped by the military, they would confiscate it. What was that about? Haitian rice smugglers? I thought it was more likely the guards wanted to eat the stuff themselves. Our illicit agricultural products were well hidden under clothes and bags, but Laura was still nervous. Not I. I cackled maniacally every time we passed a checkpoint. They waved us through every time. “Ha! I’d be the last person they’d suspect of rice smuggling!” I bragged. “I could smuggle a ton through and they’d never notice!” Laura wished she’d brought more.
We actually made pretty good time on the way back, even considering our heavy load. As we approached the batey, we encountered the gaga on the highway – they had already set out for Maizal, hoping to collect some tips. I pulled over and jumped out with my recording equipment, as well as an umbrella for the blazing sun, and paid them to play a couple of tunes for me before moving on to Santiago. This accomplished, I finally felt that my Easter was complete.
We weren’t home yet though: just as we were about to come into Navarrete, we hit a major traffic jam. Turned out that in Navarrete this is the last day of carnival, and perhaps the most important one. From a distance, we could see a giant doll of some sort propped in a pickup truck somewhere in the mass of cars ahead of us. Then I remembered how I’d heard that the Navarreteneses make a big Judas doll, kind of like in Cabral, parade it through the town on Easter Sunday, and then burn it in a kind of cleansing ceremony. Following the Judas were more pickups, these filled with various carnival groups in their matching t-shirts, carrying their masks more for show than anything else (they weren’t going to actually dress up today, it appeared) and blasting music. I would have liked to get a picture of Judas and maybe see the burning, but I couldn’t deal with getting through all the traffic again in order to follow it.
Outisde of Navarrete, things didn’t get any better. We wondered if there had been an accident, since traffic was backed up on that side too and we could see a couple of police cars a ways down the line. As it turned out, though, this was simply a part of the plan to reduce traffic fatalities this year, since these are always high during Holy Week here. The police cars were there to escort us at a safe speed down to Santiago. It was a fine idea, but too slow for my tastes. And it got even slower a minute later, as it started pouring rain. Luckily, the cloudburst ended before Santiago and I was able to drop everyone off and get home with no further incident – other than for complete and total exhaustion.
My first task of this Easter Sunday was to head over to the Centro de la Cultura, an unmarked yellow house, for a demonstration of the newly formed children’s típico class. Laura came with me, and we found the children anxiously awaiting our arrival in the backyard. It was a complete group of accordion, tambora, güira, and marimba, all played by children under 12 (the marimbero appeared to be more in the neighborhood of 7). They did quite a respectable job on three merengues, considering the accordionist had been playing for all of four months. This was one of the results of Dajabon’s win in the city pavilion competition at last year’s Feria Regional del Libro, which I had attended on my last trip. With the prize money Chio purchased instruments and got this new program going – the first such class I’ve ever seen or heard of.
Chio also showed us quickly around the other new developments, which included a large room used for sleepovers and movie showings, the recently purchased other side of this duplex house. We couldn’t stay much longer, though, if we wanted to carry out our plan to get to Haiti. Laura’s brother, a military man, thought he could get us across with no problems, but the border crossing would close for lunch at 12:00 sharp and then there’d be no crossing back. When we met him at Laura’s mom’s house it was already nearing 10:00 so we had to get a move on.
Approaching the border by Falcon, we parked it at the customs house and passed through its arched gateway, pausing to greet several soldiers on the way, all of whom assured us we could go on through the big metal gate in the center of the bridge over the Rio Masacre that here marked the border. Well sure, the Dominicans let us through, along with all the Haitian vendors carrying heaps of clothing and carts full of other mysteries to sell. But the Haitian border officer wasn’t such a pushover. He didn’t mind the Dominican members of our party going through, namely Felo, Yary, Robinson, and our military escort, but I was another matter. First our guide tried evasionary tactics: he insisted that I was, in fact, Dominican. The guy didn’t buy it and wanted to see ID. Unable to produce this, he then said that I could go through if I showed a passport and paid 600 pesos. Luckily, I did (unusually) happen to have my passport with me, but the price seemed a little steep. Arguing that we would only be there for a short time anyway, the price was negotiated down to 200 upon our return, and we set off.
It was a weird no-man’s land we had entered. After the customs house, it was a rather muddy dirt road lined with masses of trash, first passing by a line of men selling things like phone cards from TV-tray-sized tables, then a larger table with food and drink, then a tiny city of booths selling lottery tickets. All this was in the middle of a sizable empty space sparsely populated by trees and one lonely white truck marked “UN.” In the heat it was like entering a weird purgatory where no one spoke our language and could only stare quietly at us as we passed by. It was a relief to finally cross a small bridge and enter the town of Ouanaminthe, known to Dominicans as Juana Mendez.
The road conditions did not improve. In fact, I saw not a single paved road in the whole town. I did see a surprising number of fancy mansions in various stages of being built. Then there were the places that held only a nice-looking wall surrounding a plot of land filled with nothing but weeds. I was told the method here was to build the wall first, then the house as money becomes available. Where does the money come from? Probably best not to ask. Borders are borders anywhere.
We walked on through the hot and dusty streets, passing little girls dressed in Sunday best on the way to church and small businesses painted with slogans in Kreyol. A brand new white SUV passed and Laura’s brother hailed the driver. Apparently this guy was a friend of his, with two others in the car, all Dominicans claiming they were there to visit friends. They invited us to pile in alongside and they would take us as far as we wished. We didn’t go far but it was still a relief to have those few minutes of air conditioning.
After dropping us off at the town’s main square, our ride took off. We were left to stroll through the park, such as it was: a ramshackle building in the middle in the middle of a somewhat depressing slice of patchy grass with few other plants to speak of, all surrounded by a low stone wall. A few sheep relaxed in the shade on the side nearest the church from which a crowd of people were emerging. Next door to the church, a few men watched soccer on some benches under a roof, a place where you could pay to enter and watch TV. A poster advertised some upcoming games and movies that would be shown.
There wasn’t much to do here unless we wanted to sit and watch the game, so we continued down a side street toward the fortress. This too was a bit depressing – a large cinder block structure that was only partially standing, as apparently some kids had blown it up or set it on fire about ten years back for no very good reason. A mule tied up under a tree swatted at flies in front of the place, and that was pretty much the only activity on the street until a street vendor came by with her wares in a wheelbarrow. Among the various bottles and cans were several pints of clerén, a bootleg Haitian rum. I’d had it before in its clear form, but this one was flavored with something that made it an almost fluorescent orange color. My companions bought a couple and we pushed on.
Coming to a graveyard surrounded by a high wall, I insisted we go in if at all possible, and finding the gate open, we did so. It was not very different from Dominican cemeteries I’d visited, with its large above-ground tombs plastered in various pastel colors. An unusual structure, like a mini castle complete with turret, stood in the center. It didn’t appear to hold any bodies, at least it wasn’t marked with a name, but it was hard to be sure. One of the group suggested it belonged to “El Baron del Cementario.” This vodou spirit in charge of the dead still survives in Dominican folklore, although in a somewhat different form. My friend told me the Baron del Cementerio was a sort of honorary position occupied by the first person to be buried in the cemetery, and I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not.
Emerging from the graveyard we checked our watches and saw it was getting perilously close to 12:00. We had better make for the border tout de suite to avoid being turned into pumpkins or something. Indeed, when we crossed the no-man’s land and walked up to the customs house they were nearly ready to close the doors, and Laura’s brother’s cell phone was ringing with a soldier friend calling to notify us. They were all worried we’d get stuck in Haiti and never make it back, I guess, but we paid our fee and passed through to the other side safely.
Our little international sojourn over, it was time to pack up the car and hit the road. It would be a heavy load coming back: not only would we total five people in the car, each with a bag, but Laura wanted to bring back a giant sack of rice and another of dried beans. The Falcon would be riding low, which made me a little more nervous than usual about the potholes. I’d have to go slow, but I was in a bit of a hurry to get back, as my friends from the batey had called to inform me that a gagá group would indeed be going out that day and I should stop by to see it.
As we got on the road, Laura informed me that rice and beans were considered contraband in these parts and that if we were stopped by the military, they would confiscate it. What was that about? Haitian rice smugglers? I thought it was more likely the guards wanted to eat the stuff themselves. Our illicit agricultural products were well hidden under clothes and bags, but Laura was still nervous. Not I. I cackled maniacally every time we passed a checkpoint. They waved us through every time. “Ha! I’d be the last person they’d suspect of rice smuggling!” I bragged. “I could smuggle a ton through and they’d never notice!” Laura wished she’d brought more.
We actually made pretty good time on the way back, even considering our heavy load. As we approached the batey, we encountered the gaga on the highway – they had already set out for Maizal, hoping to collect some tips. I pulled over and jumped out with my recording equipment, as well as an umbrella for the blazing sun, and paid them to play a couple of tunes for me before moving on to Santiago. This accomplished, I finally felt that my Easter was complete.
We weren’t home yet though: just as we were about to come into Navarrete, we hit a major traffic jam. Turned out that in Navarrete this is the last day of carnival, and perhaps the most important one. From a distance, we could see a giant doll of some sort propped in a pickup truck somewhere in the mass of cars ahead of us. Then I remembered how I’d heard that the Navarreteneses make a big Judas doll, kind of like in Cabral, parade it through the town on Easter Sunday, and then burn it in a kind of cleansing ceremony. Following the Judas were more pickups, these filled with various carnival groups in their matching t-shirts, carrying their masks more for show than anything else (they weren’t going to actually dress up today, it appeared) and blasting music. I would have liked to get a picture of Judas and maybe see the burning, but I couldn’t deal with getting through all the traffic again in order to follow it.
Outisde of Navarrete, things didn’t get any better. We wondered if there had been an accident, since traffic was backed up on that side too and we could see a couple of police cars a ways down the line. As it turned out, though, this was simply a part of the plan to reduce traffic fatalities this year, since these are always high during Holy Week here. The police cars were there to escort us at a safe speed down to Santiago. It was a fine idea, but too slow for my tastes. And it got even slower a minute later, as it started pouring rain. Luckily, the cloudburst ended before Santiago and I was able to drop everyone off and get home with no further incident – other than for complete and total exhaustion.
Friday, April 13, 2007
Everyone
The family and the cherries they just picked: Yary, Felo, Laura, Robinson, Yahaira, her grandma, and Laura's mom
Travels with beans, part 1
4/7/07
After Mom left, it was back to work for me, making the final arrangements for the Folkways recording and press conference. I also had to finish my conference paper and a couple of applications. Nothing too exciting for the blog, expect perhaps for a rehearsal in preparation for the recording. Since one of La India’s tunes combines palos rhythms with merengue, we figured this should be worked out beforehand in order not to waste a lot of studio time. We considered it successful, although we never did manage to coordinate the palos drummers into the percussion breaks, instead opting to let them keep doing their thing. Also, I convinced them to try my favorite arrangement technique- dropping out all the melody instruments for one chorus, letting just the drums accompany the voices. Cubans do this a lot in timba, and it always gets the dancers (i.e. me) all pumped up. Strangely, Dominicans don’t ever use this technique, but I’m advocating for that to change.
Then it was holy week already, and so it seemed like I should leave town once again. Everyone else does, and if I stayed behind, I’d probably just feel lonely. I accepted a long-standing invitation from friend Laura (accordionist Chiqui’s wife) to accompany her and her kids to the family home in Dajabon. Unfortunately, Chiqui couldn’t join us: all their neighbors would be out of town, and someone had to stick around to keep their eye on things in the neighborhood. Also, I couldn’t get away until Thursday, when everyone else had already left, but Chiqui’s sister Yahaira waited around in order to accompany me on the drive. This turned out to be long but uneventful.
The main sights to see along the way were the numerous paradores that start soon after Esperanza selling spicy goat, also known as chivo liniero (goat from the northwest border region), as well as herds of the living versions that every so often attempted to cut off our progress. In the same area, the landscape became more arid and eerily Arizona-like: full of cactus and trees with tiny leaves that looked much like mesquite. The soil too was different. Instead of the bright red-orange of the fertile lands around Cotui or the slightly mellower red-brown near Santiago, it was now the burnt-looking light tan of my Arizona childhood.
The land continued thusly all the way until we hit the coast at Montecristi. This city was a bustling port town at the turn of the last century, but since being abandoned as a commercial port has fallen into disrepair. Numerous old and stately homes dot its streets, and one can see they must have been grand when freshly painted, but most of them are nearing the point of uninhabitability. One rotten-looking two-story wooden mansion bore a sign stating that it was being restored by a local historical society, but the rest are likely to be gone before long. So it seemed a little incongruous when, next to the park with the famous clock (just a big timepiece on a tall scaffolding), we passed a nice, new museum building of bright white marine limestone. I would have loved to see what was inside, but it was of course closed.
I’d never seen anything of Montecristi, so we decided it was worth a quick stop to take a look at the coastline and El Morro, the big sugarloaf mountain next to the city. It was indeed scenic: the dry-looking mountain towered over the sea, wide and very blue under the intense sun, and so shallow that we saw two men walking in it while presumably fishing a hundred yards out. Lining the road were numerous saleras, the square ponds used for extracting salt from ocean water. A dozen small wooden boats were tied up where the road met the sea, and a few men had cold Presidentes at a tiny cafeteria nearby. We bought juice instead in order to refresh ourselves for the road ahead.
Good thing, too. It wasn’t far in distance, but the road was absolutely abominable for much of the way. Great big potholes, long stretches of missing pavement, bumpiness and rockiness: it really had it all. A little over halfway to Dajabon, however, we suddenly and unexpectedly hit fresh pavement, still black with newness. This was a happy surprise. Later I was told that a local guy had gone all the way to the capital on foot with a cross on his back in order to protest the condition of the roads in these parts, and the new pavement was the result. He was also given a motorbike and some other stuff in recognition of his efforts. I suggested that he needed to take his cross out for another run at it so we could get the damn thing finished. He and the cross could both get to the capital much more comfortably on the new bike, though perhaps it wouldn’t have the same symbolic weight.
We arrived in Dajabon around 3:00, all hot and sweaty, and went straight to the Taveras family home, which was also hot and sweaty. There was no power or gas at the moment, so we found Laura working on the habichuelas con dulce, the sweet beans that are the traditional Dominican fare for Holy Week, over a coal stove on the porch. Or rather, she was going back and forth between stirring these and giving her mom’s hair a new dye job in the outdoor shower. Various and sundry other family members were milling about, the menfolk all engrossed in different fix-it jobs in the space between this house and the next, either cars or CD players or other electronics. Broken-down microwaves and speakers took up much of the space, a new chest of drawers had apparently just been built and sanded nearby, and chickens, roosters, and stray dogs wandered in and out of the whole mess. Chiqui’s blind mother was seated inside, and she seemed to be making a lot of progress in recovery from her recent stroke. The last time I saw her she had been prostrate in a hospital room, unable to care for herself or speak intelligibly, but now she responded to our greetings in a slurred but intelligent fashion.
My friend Chio, the director of the local culture house, had made me a reservation at a hotel, but it seemed that Laura had been expecting me to stay there. I have a hard time sleeping under the best of conditions, though, and these were definitely not the best of conditions. I didn’t want to become a raving b****, but I would do just that if things were half this active here in the morning. I talked this over with Laura, and she suggested maybe I would do better at her mom’s house, which was quieter and in a sort of cul-de-sac at the edge of town with no traffic noise. After a lunch of rice and veggies and an enormous glassful of blessedly iced, freshly made guava juice, we went to the other house to check it out.
The other house was indeed more quiet. Actually, it was two houses at the end of a road on the edge of a field. One of Laura’s sisters, brother-in-law, and several nieces and nephews lived in one; her mother and another sister with family lived in the other. They were made of a few rows of cinder blocks topped with roughly-hewn wooden boards through which light easily shone, as it did through numerous little holes in the tin roofs. It was obvious that electricity was an infrequent visitor here from the kerosene lamps sitting on high shelves in both homes. There was also no plumbing, but I was getting desperate for a shower. I did the best I could with a bucket of water in an outdoor shower stall bricked up to about chin height. Luckily, I didn’t need a toilet at the moment.
I was feeling exhausted, so Laura showed me to a bed in her mother’s house to lay down for a while. Two double beds took up all available space in the room, which offered little privacy, what with the four-inch gaps above and underneath the door, and the window whose screenless shutter stood open. This wasn’t the kind of house that had closets; instead, someone’s (perhaps several someones’) entire wardrobe was hanging from nails on the walls in here. There were a lot of flies and gnats milling about, and, I suspected, mosquitoes as well, so I lathered up with my trusty bug spray before lying down. Naturally there was no power at the moment, which meant there was no relief from the heavy, hot air, but I found it tolerable once I’d been lying there a while.
I very nearly slept, or perhaps I did for a few minutes, but before long the rooster had figured out what was going on and couldn’t let such a thing happen. “Hey!! Hey, YOU!!” he seemed to be shouting right underneath the open window. I could only imagine six AM at this house. Sleep would probably not be happening here, either. Instead, I invited Laura to come stay at the hotel with me, making more space for everyone involved. After I got up, we went to check in, and luckily the place was both much nicer than the ramshackle spot I’d stayed last time I was in town and much cheaper! It was such a good deal that Robinson, Yary’s boyfriend who’d come along for the weekend, decided to stay too. It was also managed by an Argentine, something I’d quickly figured out from the guy’s accent even though he’d already replaced his “vos” with “tu.” I wondered aloud at this, since last time I was in Dajabon I’d met another resident Argentine. Turns out both had ended up here through their stints with the UN Peacekeeping Force on the border.
The night was still comparatively young, so we didn’t stay to chat with my new friend Ruben any further. Instead, we returned to the Taveras house to eat the famous habichuelas con dulce. That served as dinner, since after the heavy sweet soup I couldn’t stomach anything else. So while Yary was anxious to go off and eat homemade pizza prepared by the husband of Chiqui’s sister Rossy, a strange and rather crude French Canadian character, Laura and I instead begged off and returned to the hotel for hot showers and early sleep. There we encountered Chio driving by in an official Centro de la Cultura van. He invited me to join a group he was taking across the border to Haiti in the morning for a two-hour excursion and I happily accepted, being that I had been anxious to try crossing the border anyway.
It was not to be. We waited and waited, but Chio was a no-show. I called him about a thousand times, but half the time the calls wouldn’t go through – all the circuits appeared to be blocked by all the Dominicans calling each other on Good Friday – or it rang and rang with no answer. Exhausted from the day before and being awaked at some ungodly hour by a screaming child, I went back to bed. Of course, shortly after I’d done so the screaming child returned. Oh well. I rested and read my book for a while, fumed about being excluded from the Haiti trip, and then went back to Laura’s mom’s. There, I found Felo, Robinson, and a cousin, Kendry, playing cards. I joined the circle and they tried to teach me their game, but I found it completely unintelligible and gave up. Then I taught them blackjack, five-card stud, and hearts. Then I suggested dominoes, and some other cousins ran to a neighbors, returning a bit later with the necessary equipment.
We appeared to go a bit dominoes-crazy after this, and ended up playing for four hours straight. Players came and went, but Felo, Robinson, and I were constant in our devotion to the game. I started off playing well but grew increasingly tired and inattentive and then started making stupid mistakes. Still I couldn’t tear myself away from the game, even when Robinson started trying to fool us all with his inaccurate point tallying and throwing of “chivos,” the misplaced dominoes for which Chiqui is famous. It started raining, so we moved inside. The power went out, so we lit a candle. The candle burnt down, so we bought another. We consumed more habichuelas. The game went on. And on. It was almost impossible to quit, but eventually my sagging eyelids forced me to do so.
Back at the hotel, we encountered a small child that sounded suspiciously like the one who had awakened us so mercilessly. He was yelling and running around the parking lot as his mother stood around talking on her cell phone. Since he was staring at me anyway, I decided to have a little talk with him. “Hey buddy,” I said, all friendly-like. “You know, you can yell all you like out here in the parking lot. Just not inside, OK? Have fun now!” At which he promptly took off screaming into the hotel and down the hall where my room was located.
His mother told us, “No, that kid making all the noise in the night wasn’t mine. It was a nephew of mine.” Fat chance. We could hear him going on for another half an hour as we showered and got into bed.
In the morning, I stopped by Laura’s family’s house again. I was surprised to find her brother-in-law, Sandy, sporting a pair of University of Arizona shorts. That would be probably one of the last items of attire I would expect here on the Haitian-Dominican border, so I asked him how he’d gotten them. He gave some roundabout explanation about people sending clothes from the US, and Haitians getting ahold of them and then selling them in the market here, etc. In other words, who knows? Let’s just enjoy the bizarre coincidence. I took a picture to remember it by.
The next stop was of course to see how the other side of the family was getting along, and we found Chiqui’s father, brother, and assorted neighborhood children busy in the bakery. The giant brick oven was fired up, but at the moment they were baking chicken rather than bread. Outside, a couple of goats had been brought in to the patio, presumably to escape the on again-off again drizzle that was occurring, and were dozing amidst oil barrels and assorted machinery. We decided the time had come to get out of town and see some different scenery, so Yary, Felo, Laura, Yahaira, and Robinson all piled in and we headed south on the lovely paved highway.
It turned out to be less of a driving trip and more of a stopping trip. My passengers had relatives and friends all along this road all the way to Loma de Cabrera. First stop was at an Isla gas station where a sister ran a small bar/cafeteria/pool hall. The pool table wasn’t in that great shape, but we all shared a beer before moving on. Next stop was a roadside colmado run by a cousin, just next door to Chiqui’s grandmother’s house. This was our main sightseeing stop of the day, since I had been hearing for years about a bizarre mango tree at this location that produces two different varieties of the fruit on the same branch. The stories were true: the tree was huge, and on one of its long limbs you could clearly see a clump of the usual kind of elongated mangos hanging next to another of tiny round ones. But this wasn’t all grandma had to offer: there was also a pig sty, a big bush full of ripe Dominican cherries, a fuzzy little puppy, and a house built entirely of yagua (a kind of palm frond) – even its walls. My companions busied themselves with a bucket and the cherry bush while I photographed and looked for the puppy.
The colmado also had a domino table parked in front, so you know what that means.
The first domino game of the afternoon out of the way (but far from the last), we stopped at a little round sort of enramada/roadside hangout spot in front of an uncle’s house. The main thing to see here were two adorable fluffy gray and white bunnies in a cage in back. We fed them bits of grasses to amuse ourselves until the drizzle began to get harder and we weree forced to take cover and admire the planters full of bromeliads for a bit, as well as the herd of cows being driven into an enclosure just up the street, before moving on.
Further still, and in heavier rain, we came to a roughly built roadside shelter, inconveniently located in front of a large pothole now filled with muddy water, where a stout, dark woman was selling sweets. Across the street, a narrow dirt road led down a hill back into the campo. I was informed that this is where Yary and Felo’s birth father lives with his Haitian wife, and I might as well accompany the kids down there with my umbrella and get a look at him. I did. Clearly, we prefer Chiqui.
From here, it was only about 10 kilometers to Loma de Cabrera and the swimming holes near that town – we saw many pickups full of bathers coming back to Dajabon from that direction – but the road looked like it got worse, and also it was still raining and dusk was approaching. I voted to save that tour for a later date and get back to town while I could still see the potholes. That made us just in time to catch the end of the bakery’s working day. All the trays of sugar cookies were out of the oven. Soon they were being stacked by the dozen into Styrofoam trays by Yahaira and wrapped in plastic by three boys of about 9 or 10 years old. I decided to join in on Yahaira’s side, which meant things quickly got silly, and two trays knocked over, but all was right in the end.
After a couple of those cookies and some habichuelas con dulce, I found I didn’t really need much dinner. Instead, back at Laura’s family home, I sat around in rocking chairs with her, her sister, and their mom, looking at family pictures in the dim light of one energy-saving bulb and discussing them with the sister’s two little girls, age 4 and 18 months. Those two girls had more energy than I could even imagine having, and they kept jumping up and down nonstop on the cement floor, getting right back up again each time they fell. The older girl was counting, “Uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco, seis” as she jumped, but the little one couldn’t get beyond “Dos! Dos! Dos! Dos!”
That’s when I heard the story of the Third House. While now only the two wooden structures (and one half shower stall) stood on this property, Laura and her sister told me that there had been another one up until a few months ago. It belonged to their brother and his wife. She had been a problem all the way along and couldn’t get along with anyone in the family. Eternally jealous, she was always accusing her husband of various things with no basis in reality. Then one night, she burned the house down. Torched it and everything in it: television, refrigerator, everything one has to work so hard to have now. She then went back to the capital, and he has to start over from scratch.
By now I was yawning a bit, but I was told that we had been invited over to the Canadian’s house to eat his famous pizza, so I could hardly turn that down. While waiting for everyone to get ready, I sat around talking to the teenagers. We were talking about different hand signals and what they mean (this was sparked by usage of the middle finger). They showed me how an “L” made with thumb and forefinger of the right hand here stands for the political party PLD, the current president’s party. I remarked that that was funny since in the US it means “Loser,” especially when held up to the forehead. Felo and Robinson found this both hilarious and useful, especially during dominoes games. When we did eventually get to the Canadian’s and get out the dominoes (as well as the beer and pizza), “Loser” became the evening’s theme, along with the “W” Robinson started flashing, gang-style, in order to represent his supposed “Winner” status. “Whatever!”
It was hard to stop playing but at 11 we really had to call it a night. I had a 9 AM appointment with Chio, who had reappeared as mysteriously as he had disappeared the other day, and then we were planning to attempt a border crossing. In Haiti, we probably wouldn’t have to eat any more beans, at least.
After Mom left, it was back to work for me, making the final arrangements for the Folkways recording and press conference. I also had to finish my conference paper and a couple of applications. Nothing too exciting for the blog, expect perhaps for a rehearsal in preparation for the recording. Since one of La India’s tunes combines palos rhythms with merengue, we figured this should be worked out beforehand in order not to waste a lot of studio time. We considered it successful, although we never did manage to coordinate the palos drummers into the percussion breaks, instead opting to let them keep doing their thing. Also, I convinced them to try my favorite arrangement technique- dropping out all the melody instruments for one chorus, letting just the drums accompany the voices. Cubans do this a lot in timba, and it always gets the dancers (i.e. me) all pumped up. Strangely, Dominicans don’t ever use this technique, but I’m advocating for that to change.
Then it was holy week already, and so it seemed like I should leave town once again. Everyone else does, and if I stayed behind, I’d probably just feel lonely. I accepted a long-standing invitation from friend Laura (accordionist Chiqui’s wife) to accompany her and her kids to the family home in Dajabon. Unfortunately, Chiqui couldn’t join us: all their neighbors would be out of town, and someone had to stick around to keep their eye on things in the neighborhood. Also, I couldn’t get away until Thursday, when everyone else had already left, but Chiqui’s sister Yahaira waited around in order to accompany me on the drive. This turned out to be long but uneventful.
The main sights to see along the way were the numerous paradores that start soon after Esperanza selling spicy goat, also known as chivo liniero (goat from the northwest border region), as well as herds of the living versions that every so often attempted to cut off our progress. In the same area, the landscape became more arid and eerily Arizona-like: full of cactus and trees with tiny leaves that looked much like mesquite. The soil too was different. Instead of the bright red-orange of the fertile lands around Cotui or the slightly mellower red-brown near Santiago, it was now the burnt-looking light tan of my Arizona childhood.
The land continued thusly all the way until we hit the coast at Montecristi. This city was a bustling port town at the turn of the last century, but since being abandoned as a commercial port has fallen into disrepair. Numerous old and stately homes dot its streets, and one can see they must have been grand when freshly painted, but most of them are nearing the point of uninhabitability. One rotten-looking two-story wooden mansion bore a sign stating that it was being restored by a local historical society, but the rest are likely to be gone before long. So it seemed a little incongruous when, next to the park with the famous clock (just a big timepiece on a tall scaffolding), we passed a nice, new museum building of bright white marine limestone. I would have loved to see what was inside, but it was of course closed.
I’d never seen anything of Montecristi, so we decided it was worth a quick stop to take a look at the coastline and El Morro, the big sugarloaf mountain next to the city. It was indeed scenic: the dry-looking mountain towered over the sea, wide and very blue under the intense sun, and so shallow that we saw two men walking in it while presumably fishing a hundred yards out. Lining the road were numerous saleras, the square ponds used for extracting salt from ocean water. A dozen small wooden boats were tied up where the road met the sea, and a few men had cold Presidentes at a tiny cafeteria nearby. We bought juice instead in order to refresh ourselves for the road ahead.
Good thing, too. It wasn’t far in distance, but the road was absolutely abominable for much of the way. Great big potholes, long stretches of missing pavement, bumpiness and rockiness: it really had it all. A little over halfway to Dajabon, however, we suddenly and unexpectedly hit fresh pavement, still black with newness. This was a happy surprise. Later I was told that a local guy had gone all the way to the capital on foot with a cross on his back in order to protest the condition of the roads in these parts, and the new pavement was the result. He was also given a motorbike and some other stuff in recognition of his efforts. I suggested that he needed to take his cross out for another run at it so we could get the damn thing finished. He and the cross could both get to the capital much more comfortably on the new bike, though perhaps it wouldn’t have the same symbolic weight.
We arrived in Dajabon around 3:00, all hot and sweaty, and went straight to the Taveras family home, which was also hot and sweaty. There was no power or gas at the moment, so we found Laura working on the habichuelas con dulce, the sweet beans that are the traditional Dominican fare for Holy Week, over a coal stove on the porch. Or rather, she was going back and forth between stirring these and giving her mom’s hair a new dye job in the outdoor shower. Various and sundry other family members were milling about, the menfolk all engrossed in different fix-it jobs in the space between this house and the next, either cars or CD players or other electronics. Broken-down microwaves and speakers took up much of the space, a new chest of drawers had apparently just been built and sanded nearby, and chickens, roosters, and stray dogs wandered in and out of the whole mess. Chiqui’s blind mother was seated inside, and she seemed to be making a lot of progress in recovery from her recent stroke. The last time I saw her she had been prostrate in a hospital room, unable to care for herself or speak intelligibly, but now she responded to our greetings in a slurred but intelligent fashion.
My friend Chio, the director of the local culture house, had made me a reservation at a hotel, but it seemed that Laura had been expecting me to stay there. I have a hard time sleeping under the best of conditions, though, and these were definitely not the best of conditions. I didn’t want to become a raving b****, but I would do just that if things were half this active here in the morning. I talked this over with Laura, and she suggested maybe I would do better at her mom’s house, which was quieter and in a sort of cul-de-sac at the edge of town with no traffic noise. After a lunch of rice and veggies and an enormous glassful of blessedly iced, freshly made guava juice, we went to the other house to check it out.
The other house was indeed more quiet. Actually, it was two houses at the end of a road on the edge of a field. One of Laura’s sisters, brother-in-law, and several nieces and nephews lived in one; her mother and another sister with family lived in the other. They were made of a few rows of cinder blocks topped with roughly-hewn wooden boards through which light easily shone, as it did through numerous little holes in the tin roofs. It was obvious that electricity was an infrequent visitor here from the kerosene lamps sitting on high shelves in both homes. There was also no plumbing, but I was getting desperate for a shower. I did the best I could with a bucket of water in an outdoor shower stall bricked up to about chin height. Luckily, I didn’t need a toilet at the moment.
I was feeling exhausted, so Laura showed me to a bed in her mother’s house to lay down for a while. Two double beds took up all available space in the room, which offered little privacy, what with the four-inch gaps above and underneath the door, and the window whose screenless shutter stood open. This wasn’t the kind of house that had closets; instead, someone’s (perhaps several someones’) entire wardrobe was hanging from nails on the walls in here. There were a lot of flies and gnats milling about, and, I suspected, mosquitoes as well, so I lathered up with my trusty bug spray before lying down. Naturally there was no power at the moment, which meant there was no relief from the heavy, hot air, but I found it tolerable once I’d been lying there a while.
I very nearly slept, or perhaps I did for a few minutes, but before long the rooster had figured out what was going on and couldn’t let such a thing happen. “Hey!! Hey, YOU!!” he seemed to be shouting right underneath the open window. I could only imagine six AM at this house. Sleep would probably not be happening here, either. Instead, I invited Laura to come stay at the hotel with me, making more space for everyone involved. After I got up, we went to check in, and luckily the place was both much nicer than the ramshackle spot I’d stayed last time I was in town and much cheaper! It was such a good deal that Robinson, Yary’s boyfriend who’d come along for the weekend, decided to stay too. It was also managed by an Argentine, something I’d quickly figured out from the guy’s accent even though he’d already replaced his “vos” with “tu.” I wondered aloud at this, since last time I was in Dajabon I’d met another resident Argentine. Turns out both had ended up here through their stints with the UN Peacekeeping Force on the border.
The night was still comparatively young, so we didn’t stay to chat with my new friend Ruben any further. Instead, we returned to the Taveras house to eat the famous habichuelas con dulce. That served as dinner, since after the heavy sweet soup I couldn’t stomach anything else. So while Yary was anxious to go off and eat homemade pizza prepared by the husband of Chiqui’s sister Rossy, a strange and rather crude French Canadian character, Laura and I instead begged off and returned to the hotel for hot showers and early sleep. There we encountered Chio driving by in an official Centro de la Cultura van. He invited me to join a group he was taking across the border to Haiti in the morning for a two-hour excursion and I happily accepted, being that I had been anxious to try crossing the border anyway.
It was not to be. We waited and waited, but Chio was a no-show. I called him about a thousand times, but half the time the calls wouldn’t go through – all the circuits appeared to be blocked by all the Dominicans calling each other on Good Friday – or it rang and rang with no answer. Exhausted from the day before and being awaked at some ungodly hour by a screaming child, I went back to bed. Of course, shortly after I’d done so the screaming child returned. Oh well. I rested and read my book for a while, fumed about being excluded from the Haiti trip, and then went back to Laura’s mom’s. There, I found Felo, Robinson, and a cousin, Kendry, playing cards. I joined the circle and they tried to teach me their game, but I found it completely unintelligible and gave up. Then I taught them blackjack, five-card stud, and hearts. Then I suggested dominoes, and some other cousins ran to a neighbors, returning a bit later with the necessary equipment.
We appeared to go a bit dominoes-crazy after this, and ended up playing for four hours straight. Players came and went, but Felo, Robinson, and I were constant in our devotion to the game. I started off playing well but grew increasingly tired and inattentive and then started making stupid mistakes. Still I couldn’t tear myself away from the game, even when Robinson started trying to fool us all with his inaccurate point tallying and throwing of “chivos,” the misplaced dominoes for which Chiqui is famous. It started raining, so we moved inside. The power went out, so we lit a candle. The candle burnt down, so we bought another. We consumed more habichuelas. The game went on. And on. It was almost impossible to quit, but eventually my sagging eyelids forced me to do so.
Back at the hotel, we encountered a small child that sounded suspiciously like the one who had awakened us so mercilessly. He was yelling and running around the parking lot as his mother stood around talking on her cell phone. Since he was staring at me anyway, I decided to have a little talk with him. “Hey buddy,” I said, all friendly-like. “You know, you can yell all you like out here in the parking lot. Just not inside, OK? Have fun now!” At which he promptly took off screaming into the hotel and down the hall where my room was located.
His mother told us, “No, that kid making all the noise in the night wasn’t mine. It was a nephew of mine.” Fat chance. We could hear him going on for another half an hour as we showered and got into bed.
In the morning, I stopped by Laura’s family’s house again. I was surprised to find her brother-in-law, Sandy, sporting a pair of University of Arizona shorts. That would be probably one of the last items of attire I would expect here on the Haitian-Dominican border, so I asked him how he’d gotten them. He gave some roundabout explanation about people sending clothes from the US, and Haitians getting ahold of them and then selling them in the market here, etc. In other words, who knows? Let’s just enjoy the bizarre coincidence. I took a picture to remember it by.
The next stop was of course to see how the other side of the family was getting along, and we found Chiqui’s father, brother, and assorted neighborhood children busy in the bakery. The giant brick oven was fired up, but at the moment they were baking chicken rather than bread. Outside, a couple of goats had been brought in to the patio, presumably to escape the on again-off again drizzle that was occurring, and were dozing amidst oil barrels and assorted machinery. We decided the time had come to get out of town and see some different scenery, so Yary, Felo, Laura, Yahaira, and Robinson all piled in and we headed south on the lovely paved highway.
It turned out to be less of a driving trip and more of a stopping trip. My passengers had relatives and friends all along this road all the way to Loma de Cabrera. First stop was at an Isla gas station where a sister ran a small bar/cafeteria/pool hall. The pool table wasn’t in that great shape, but we all shared a beer before moving on. Next stop was a roadside colmado run by a cousin, just next door to Chiqui’s grandmother’s house. This was our main sightseeing stop of the day, since I had been hearing for years about a bizarre mango tree at this location that produces two different varieties of the fruit on the same branch. The stories were true: the tree was huge, and on one of its long limbs you could clearly see a clump of the usual kind of elongated mangos hanging next to another of tiny round ones. But this wasn’t all grandma had to offer: there was also a pig sty, a big bush full of ripe Dominican cherries, a fuzzy little puppy, and a house built entirely of yagua (a kind of palm frond) – even its walls. My companions busied themselves with a bucket and the cherry bush while I photographed and looked for the puppy.
The colmado also had a domino table parked in front, so you know what that means.
The first domino game of the afternoon out of the way (but far from the last), we stopped at a little round sort of enramada/roadside hangout spot in front of an uncle’s house. The main thing to see here were two adorable fluffy gray and white bunnies in a cage in back. We fed them bits of grasses to amuse ourselves until the drizzle began to get harder and we weree forced to take cover and admire the planters full of bromeliads for a bit, as well as the herd of cows being driven into an enclosure just up the street, before moving on.
Further still, and in heavier rain, we came to a roughly built roadside shelter, inconveniently located in front of a large pothole now filled with muddy water, where a stout, dark woman was selling sweets. Across the street, a narrow dirt road led down a hill back into the campo. I was informed that this is where Yary and Felo’s birth father lives with his Haitian wife, and I might as well accompany the kids down there with my umbrella and get a look at him. I did. Clearly, we prefer Chiqui.
From here, it was only about 10 kilometers to Loma de Cabrera and the swimming holes near that town – we saw many pickups full of bathers coming back to Dajabon from that direction – but the road looked like it got worse, and also it was still raining and dusk was approaching. I voted to save that tour for a later date and get back to town while I could still see the potholes. That made us just in time to catch the end of the bakery’s working day. All the trays of sugar cookies were out of the oven. Soon they were being stacked by the dozen into Styrofoam trays by Yahaira and wrapped in plastic by three boys of about 9 or 10 years old. I decided to join in on Yahaira’s side, which meant things quickly got silly, and two trays knocked over, but all was right in the end.
After a couple of those cookies and some habichuelas con dulce, I found I didn’t really need much dinner. Instead, back at Laura’s family home, I sat around in rocking chairs with her, her sister, and their mom, looking at family pictures in the dim light of one energy-saving bulb and discussing them with the sister’s two little girls, age 4 and 18 months. Those two girls had more energy than I could even imagine having, and they kept jumping up and down nonstop on the cement floor, getting right back up again each time they fell. The older girl was counting, “Uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco, seis” as she jumped, but the little one couldn’t get beyond “Dos! Dos! Dos! Dos!”
That’s when I heard the story of the Third House. While now only the two wooden structures (and one half shower stall) stood on this property, Laura and her sister told me that there had been another one up until a few months ago. It belonged to their brother and his wife. She had been a problem all the way along and couldn’t get along with anyone in the family. Eternally jealous, she was always accusing her husband of various things with no basis in reality. Then one night, she burned the house down. Torched it and everything in it: television, refrigerator, everything one has to work so hard to have now. She then went back to the capital, and he has to start over from scratch.
By now I was yawning a bit, but I was told that we had been invited over to the Canadian’s house to eat his famous pizza, so I could hardly turn that down. While waiting for everyone to get ready, I sat around talking to the teenagers. We were talking about different hand signals and what they mean (this was sparked by usage of the middle finger). They showed me how an “L” made with thumb and forefinger of the right hand here stands for the political party PLD, the current president’s party. I remarked that that was funny since in the US it means “Loser,” especially when held up to the forehead. Felo and Robinson found this both hilarious and useful, especially during dominoes games. When we did eventually get to the Canadian’s and get out the dominoes (as well as the beer and pizza), “Loser” became the evening’s theme, along with the “W” Robinson started flashing, gang-style, in order to represent his supposed “Winner” status. “Whatever!”
It was hard to stop playing but at 11 we really had to call it a night. I had a 9 AM appointment with Chio, who had reappeared as mysteriously as he had disappeared the other day, and then we were planning to attempt a border crossing. In Haiti, we probably wouldn’t have to eat any more beans, at least.
Se me fue la lisa
Eel fishermen in the mangrove swamp at Rio San Juan reminded me of a merengue, "La Lisa"
Saturday, April 07, 2007
Travels with Mom, part 2
4/4/07
The path was very steep and muddy, making me glad we were on horseback. A short ways into our trip we came across another group of tourists, Europeans, waiting for the rest of their party next to a little pond. We passed by as many of them as we could – they were too slow for us with two small, saddle-scared children – and made our way slowly and carefully up through grassy slopes and palm trees. Tiny pineapples grew by the side of the path.
At the top of the ridge was the most perfect little house, painted green with white shutters, surrounded by a vast expanse of naturally occurring lawn, reachable only by horse or by foot, its ramshackle outhouse across the path in a field. The guides told me an old man lived there, farming his plantains and other crops with the best view in town from his rocking chair.
About fifteen minutes later we had made our way down the other side and past a crashing cascade they told me was “the small one,” getting out of the saddle next to a kind backwoods colmado looking a bit like an old west trading post. Behind it, one could look very carefully over a precipice at the top of the waterfall, but it was hard to judge distance from that angle and gauge how tall it really was. So we went down the now even steeper, no-horse footpath to get to the pool at the bottom, accompanied by someone’s little black and white dog. At the bottom we found two swimming holes filled with cold water of a glacial green, the waterfall crashing down from above and covering everything and everyone in a cool mist. According to my guide book, the thing is 53 meters high.
A few daring Dominican teenagers managed to climb their way up the rock face under the pounding water, one of them reaching perhaps twenty feet before cannonballing into the pool below. I wasn’t feeling quite that brave, but since we were there, we had to get in, at least enough to take a picture for the old scrapbook. I managed to get thigh-deep – for about four seconds. I have never made any secret of the fact that I am a cold water wimp, and that water was not only cold, but it was not a warm day, either, with the sun coming and going from behind the clouds. A quick dip was enough for me. Mom, on the other hand, long notorious for being even more of a wimp than me, actually swam around the whole thing, something which no one in the family will ever believe but which I swear is true.
Once reclothed, we and our temporary dog tripped our way back up the path, passing a Domninican tour group of perhaps a dozen people, one of them carrying an enormous piece of hand luggage. “Moving in?” we asked. “For a couple of hours,” was his reply. Must have been some party. When we reached the semi-colmado where our horses and second guide awaited, we mounted our trusty steeds, sure-footed Carmelo and stubborn Ceniza, and packed out what we’d packed in. Passing a few other groups hiking in, tiredly enquiring how far they had to go, the guide and I had a bit of fun at their expense by telling each that it was “only another hour or two now.”
If anything, the landscape seemed even more spectacular on the way back. But we’d forgotten entirely about the scenery along the path in our excitement over the falls and so had left our cameras in the backpack, inaccessible, and thus that perfect house and the impossibly steep, impossibly green ridges dropping down on either side of us are only in our memories.
Caked with mud, we took advantage of the little bathroom and sink in the parada’s parking lot to change clothes and wash ourselves and our shoes. We decided to save road time by eating the apples and nuts we had in the car for lunch, but we’d only gone a few yards before we had to stop again. One of our guides, apparently with a sister and small daughter, was madly hailing us from the side of the road, so we cleared out the back seat as best we could to give them a lift. (Gave them an apple, too).
We deposited them at their mother’s house, halfway to Samana, and continued on our way. This time we were hoping to take a bit more time and get some nice pictures of houses and interesting businesses along the way, so we divided our roles into (a) driver and (b) scenery-watcher. (B) was supposed to shout out “Stop!” whenever something impossibly cute or scenic was spotted, but the plan turned out to be completely unworkable because of (A)’s difficulties in making time, avoiding potholes, and keeping the drivers behind from getting overly horn-happy. It became kind of comical to listen to (b): “Oh, look at that! That’s a good one!” and then, “Oooooooh… never mind, too late. Next time, maybe.” This occurred approximately every 90 seconds until we hit Nagua, where we stopped for a bathroom and batida break before pushing on through, this time onto a highway I’d never traveled before, up the northeastern coast.
Now it really felt like a road trip. We were in unknown territory, speeding along a surprisingly well-paved road. The towns we passed through were so tiny they were not marked on either of my two road maps, nor were they mentioned in the guide book. In between them were vast stretches of fields, hills, marshes, and often, the sea visible off to our right – anything and everything except for civilization. The Falcon seemed to be feeling just as fine as we were as it ate up the kilometers. Perhaps the mechanic was right and we could make it to Puerto Rico. Imagine our surprise when we found out we, in fact, had done just that, as one of the ubiquitous blue Brugal-sponsored signs that mark roadside settlements told us we had arrived in a place called “Puerto Rico A Pie” – Puerto Rico By Foot. This definitely wasn’t on our map.
It was tempting to stop and see what exactly this hamlet might have to offer in terms of diversion, or even simply in terms of explanations for itself, but we had a lot of ground to cover before we got to anyplace likely to hold a hotel. We took a quick turn through Cabrera, the small coastal town from which El Prodigio hails, and then pushed on to Cabo Frances. This northeastern tip of the island was marked as a national park on one of our maps and we were curious as to what it might hold.
Eventually we found a friendly Brugal sign marking the turnoff, but the lip of the road was too high and the road too rough-looking for the Falcon to take on without further information. A few yards further, we came across a man walking alongside the road and stopped to ask about the place. He was Haitian and his Spanish wasn’t so hot, though, so we moved on to a clump of teenage boys. One of them filled us in on Cabo Frances. “It’s a lighthouse.” “Oh! Is it nice? Is it pretty there?” “No! It’s falling down,” he answered honestly, and I laughed. We probably would have found it interesting nonetheless, but it wasn’t worth losing an axle over, so we went on. A bit farther we passed some more mysterious ruins, stone walls weathered down to only a few feet tall, under a palm-topped cliff.
According to our guide book, there were some lovely beaches along this coast, but the writer warned us that they had all been bought up by large hotel chains and would be full of tourists and touristic developments in no time. We pulled off the main road to take a look, stopping first at Punta Preciosa. This was not a swimming beach by any means, but a wild rocky point above a short stretch of sand that ended in another cliff, that one with a small islet off its tip. It was exceedingly scenic as well as windy and choppy. Later we learned that there is an old sunken ship under its waters, a bit of which can be seen sticking up above the waves at low tide.
Just about a half-kilometer further was Playa Grande, the one our book had assured us would quickly become over-developed and practically uninhabitable by the more discerning traveler. We turned off where Brugal directed us to, parked on the dirt amidst palm trees, and strolled down to the glorious, long, sandy beach where about four other foreigners were scattered to watch the four Dominicans working at surfing in the choppy waters. “Development!” Mom exclaimed in worried tones, pointing at a half-dozen shacks selling fish and beer back among the palms. It would have been a lovely place to spend the day sunning and consuming Presidente if it hadn’t been so late already. It reminded me of Oahu’s north coast, where I had been similarly watching surfers only a few months earlier.
Pushing ever onward, we came to Rio San Juan, one of our possibilities for lodging that night, but which had few hotels listed in our guide book. Rio San Juan used to have a dive shop offering scuba excursions, but it’s now closed; the town is mostly known for its unusual lagoon. We took a quick turn around the place, noting two hotel possibilities, one on the rocky coast, looking breezy and cool in its white lobby if a bit run down, the other a couple of blocks from the lagoon, and looking somewhat uninhabited. The town had a couple of beaches but just small ones, on either side of the breezy option. We decided to decide after looking at the Laguna Gri-Gri.
It was right there, seemingly in the middle of town: quiet waters with a dozen small boats afloat on it, shaded everywhere by towering trees sprouting right out of the water. Cement steps led from a little plaza down into the lagoon, and next to them an information booth – closed. There was only one person there to talk to, an old man sitting on a step next to the two-spot car park, so we talked to him. He quickly scared up a couple of guys with a boat, who started to make it ready before we’d even agreed to a tour. This turned out to be over-priced, even after a negotiated deduction, but we decided to do it anyway since we were there and all.
Our guide explained that the waters came from a subterranean river that emerged at that very spot, and that the lagoon’s name came from the trees surrounding it, also called gri-gri. They drove us slowly through a stand of mangroves, very slowly because of the illegal fishing nets strung across our path in spots. There was a swamp house on stilts, just like in Louisiana, and then more illegal fisherman – these ones teenage boys in a wooden boat known as a cayuco, pushing themselves along by pole and looking for eels. Egrets flew above us and some kind of vulture strutted along the interwoven tree roots below.
Emerging from the eerie mangrove swamp, we came out into the choppy waters of the ocean, passing by a minuscule island with a bit of ruined wall on the ocean side. The guide told us it used to be a restaurant, but was destroyed by Hurricane David back in the 1970s. It was hard to imagine a restaurant could fit on such a tiny slice of land, but he explained that it used to be larger, with a dock even, until it started getting washed away due to lack of care. We continued all the way down past the Bahia Blanca hotel and the so-called “Playa de la Guardia,” a beach known for the shacks at its back, occupied by military men. Then we returned the way we came, making sure to note another important local site – “Playa del Amor,” so named because “two go in and three come out.” Didn’t look like it could fit more than two anyway, buried in a sort of thicket as it was, but we were assured 8 could fit if a party were required.
The guide also informed me that land was for sale right on the coast for $65 a square meter. “I can’t do much with a meter,” I complained. When they suggested I buy more than one, I pointed out that things would then become expensive very quickly and they nodded sagely. “Well, buy a meter then. You can grow some flowers,” was the guide’s solution.
Manatees were supposed to live in mangroves like this, I remembered, and asked about them. These locals had seen many of them, both here and up the river from which the town takes its name, but they explained that the manatees don’t like to come out in high, rough seas like this. (The maritime conditions also eliminated the possibility for us to visit the Cave of the Swallows, usually the last stop on this trip, two kilometers the other way up the coast.) At any rate, when the manatees appear they are happy to see them and so are the tourists. The guide said they are so calm, quiet, and slow that they stay right by the boat without moving, allowing everyone to photograph them to their hearts’ content. I hope to return in calm seas next year and see them then.
We’d seen all we could. In fact, we’d seen so much it was hard to believe we’d only left Las Terrenas that morning. The sun was still up, though not for much longer. The guide thought we could make it to Cabarete in an hour so we decided to go for it, opting for the tourist mecca over the sleepy seaside town. This way, we’d have plenty of sleeping and dining options, and we’d have a shorter drive back to Santiago the next day.
Unfortunately, we didn’t make it far before the sun went down, and then Mom had to experience the dubious joys of nighttime driving in the DR – the hidden potholes lurking in the darkness, the blinding lights of other drivers, the inadequacy of our own lights in the unlit streets. Still, we made it, and found a lovely hotel right on the beach with breakfast included – always our favorite part. We particularly enjoyed the European-style bathroom, since we hadn’t showered all day, and the restaurant on the sand with its beer (though that, too, was served European style, which is to say, at a temperature Dominicans would term “hot”). We didn’t so much enjoy the overpowering air-conditioning, but our porter had showed us that it could be deactivated by opening the sliding glass door to the porch, so we did that, and slept the sleep of those who have sat all day in a bucket seat, enduring numerous potholes in a car with questionable shocks.
We arose the next morning fully ready for a final morning at the beach. We hadn’t even gotten much of a look at it the night before, since it was already dark when we arrived, but were pleasantly surprised both by the plentiful breakfast and the beach full of dozens of colorful kites. For us, Cabarete did live up to its reputation as kite-surfing capital of the world, and though we’d never seen this sport before, we were impressed and entertained by the many surfers who went flying past at high speed. I wondered what would happen if two kites got tangled, but we never saw this happen. We did see plenty of hot shots doing spins and flips as their kites pulled them through the air, even jumping far into the air as if they might fly away altogether. This free entertainment, coupled with a paperback murder mystery and sunshine, made for a perfect morning. We felt rested and relaxed as we got back on the road, making for Santiago, if a bit sad that it was mom’s last day in the country!
Instead of the usual highway through Puerto Plata, this time we decided to try the so-called “touristic highway” that splits off near Sosua and gets to Santiago via Gurabo. It appeared to be a short cut, eliminating many kilometers and the trafficky way around Puerto Plata city, and the hotel receptionist assured us the road was fine: even though it “had a lot of curves,” it would be faster than the other way.
The touristic road was certainly scenic, more so than the Puerto Plata route, but we appeared to be the only tourists on it. Also, maybe the road was usually good, but our informant clearly had not taken into account the recent rains. At several points, we were held up at construction sites guarded by military personnel. One was an apparent mudslide, and the road was still covered with the gooey stuff. The sedan in front of us got stuck, but the Falcon valiantly held out in second gear. At another, a piece of the road had simply dropped down the cliff, not an encouraging site, but on the bright side, half of the curve had recently been reinforced with rocks in chicken wire cages.
Because of the lack of tourists, there was also a lack of services on this road. In one little section, there were a ton of tiny businesses advertising amber for sale, and there was a roadhouse there too, but we didn’t pass anything else similar until we were already down in Santiago. The only thing to do was enjoy the views of the Cibao valley stretching out below us, the flamboyán trees just starting to put out their flame-colored flowers, and the roadside stands selling fruit. One had a variety I’d never seen before: a bright, pinkish-red thing, small and elongated, the shape of a half-size avocado. (Later I described it to Rafaelito, who told me it was the fruit of the cashew tree.)
Thus concluded our road trip, DR style, as well as Mom’s vacation. Well, almost – we had a couple more gifts still to buy at the Mercado Modelo, and I still had to pay my totally stupid and unjust parking ticket.
The path was very steep and muddy, making me glad we were on horseback. A short ways into our trip we came across another group of tourists, Europeans, waiting for the rest of their party next to a little pond. We passed by as many of them as we could – they were too slow for us with two small, saddle-scared children – and made our way slowly and carefully up through grassy slopes and palm trees. Tiny pineapples grew by the side of the path.
At the top of the ridge was the most perfect little house, painted green with white shutters, surrounded by a vast expanse of naturally occurring lawn, reachable only by horse or by foot, its ramshackle outhouse across the path in a field. The guides told me an old man lived there, farming his plantains and other crops with the best view in town from his rocking chair.
About fifteen minutes later we had made our way down the other side and past a crashing cascade they told me was “the small one,” getting out of the saddle next to a kind backwoods colmado looking a bit like an old west trading post. Behind it, one could look very carefully over a precipice at the top of the waterfall, but it was hard to judge distance from that angle and gauge how tall it really was. So we went down the now even steeper, no-horse footpath to get to the pool at the bottom, accompanied by someone’s little black and white dog. At the bottom we found two swimming holes filled with cold water of a glacial green, the waterfall crashing down from above and covering everything and everyone in a cool mist. According to my guide book, the thing is 53 meters high.
A few daring Dominican teenagers managed to climb their way up the rock face under the pounding water, one of them reaching perhaps twenty feet before cannonballing into the pool below. I wasn’t feeling quite that brave, but since we were there, we had to get in, at least enough to take a picture for the old scrapbook. I managed to get thigh-deep – for about four seconds. I have never made any secret of the fact that I am a cold water wimp, and that water was not only cold, but it was not a warm day, either, with the sun coming and going from behind the clouds. A quick dip was enough for me. Mom, on the other hand, long notorious for being even more of a wimp than me, actually swam around the whole thing, something which no one in the family will ever believe but which I swear is true.
Once reclothed, we and our temporary dog tripped our way back up the path, passing a Domninican tour group of perhaps a dozen people, one of them carrying an enormous piece of hand luggage. “Moving in?” we asked. “For a couple of hours,” was his reply. Must have been some party. When we reached the semi-colmado where our horses and second guide awaited, we mounted our trusty steeds, sure-footed Carmelo and stubborn Ceniza, and packed out what we’d packed in. Passing a few other groups hiking in, tiredly enquiring how far they had to go, the guide and I had a bit of fun at their expense by telling each that it was “only another hour or two now.”
If anything, the landscape seemed even more spectacular on the way back. But we’d forgotten entirely about the scenery along the path in our excitement over the falls and so had left our cameras in the backpack, inaccessible, and thus that perfect house and the impossibly steep, impossibly green ridges dropping down on either side of us are only in our memories.
Caked with mud, we took advantage of the little bathroom and sink in the parada’s parking lot to change clothes and wash ourselves and our shoes. We decided to save road time by eating the apples and nuts we had in the car for lunch, but we’d only gone a few yards before we had to stop again. One of our guides, apparently with a sister and small daughter, was madly hailing us from the side of the road, so we cleared out the back seat as best we could to give them a lift. (Gave them an apple, too).
We deposited them at their mother’s house, halfway to Samana, and continued on our way. This time we were hoping to take a bit more time and get some nice pictures of houses and interesting businesses along the way, so we divided our roles into (a) driver and (b) scenery-watcher. (B) was supposed to shout out “Stop!” whenever something impossibly cute or scenic was spotted, but the plan turned out to be completely unworkable because of (A)’s difficulties in making time, avoiding potholes, and keeping the drivers behind from getting overly horn-happy. It became kind of comical to listen to (b): “Oh, look at that! That’s a good one!” and then, “Oooooooh… never mind, too late. Next time, maybe.” This occurred approximately every 90 seconds until we hit Nagua, where we stopped for a bathroom and batida break before pushing on through, this time onto a highway I’d never traveled before, up the northeastern coast.
Now it really felt like a road trip. We were in unknown territory, speeding along a surprisingly well-paved road. The towns we passed through were so tiny they were not marked on either of my two road maps, nor were they mentioned in the guide book. In between them were vast stretches of fields, hills, marshes, and often, the sea visible off to our right – anything and everything except for civilization. The Falcon seemed to be feeling just as fine as we were as it ate up the kilometers. Perhaps the mechanic was right and we could make it to Puerto Rico. Imagine our surprise when we found out we, in fact, had done just that, as one of the ubiquitous blue Brugal-sponsored signs that mark roadside settlements told us we had arrived in a place called “Puerto Rico A Pie” – Puerto Rico By Foot. This definitely wasn’t on our map.
It was tempting to stop and see what exactly this hamlet might have to offer in terms of diversion, or even simply in terms of explanations for itself, but we had a lot of ground to cover before we got to anyplace likely to hold a hotel. We took a quick turn through Cabrera, the small coastal town from which El Prodigio hails, and then pushed on to Cabo Frances. This northeastern tip of the island was marked as a national park on one of our maps and we were curious as to what it might hold.
Eventually we found a friendly Brugal sign marking the turnoff, but the lip of the road was too high and the road too rough-looking for the Falcon to take on without further information. A few yards further, we came across a man walking alongside the road and stopped to ask about the place. He was Haitian and his Spanish wasn’t so hot, though, so we moved on to a clump of teenage boys. One of them filled us in on Cabo Frances. “It’s a lighthouse.” “Oh! Is it nice? Is it pretty there?” “No! It’s falling down,” he answered honestly, and I laughed. We probably would have found it interesting nonetheless, but it wasn’t worth losing an axle over, so we went on. A bit farther we passed some more mysterious ruins, stone walls weathered down to only a few feet tall, under a palm-topped cliff.
According to our guide book, there were some lovely beaches along this coast, but the writer warned us that they had all been bought up by large hotel chains and would be full of tourists and touristic developments in no time. We pulled off the main road to take a look, stopping first at Punta Preciosa. This was not a swimming beach by any means, but a wild rocky point above a short stretch of sand that ended in another cliff, that one with a small islet off its tip. It was exceedingly scenic as well as windy and choppy. Later we learned that there is an old sunken ship under its waters, a bit of which can be seen sticking up above the waves at low tide.
Just about a half-kilometer further was Playa Grande, the one our book had assured us would quickly become over-developed and practically uninhabitable by the more discerning traveler. We turned off where Brugal directed us to, parked on the dirt amidst palm trees, and strolled down to the glorious, long, sandy beach where about four other foreigners were scattered to watch the four Dominicans working at surfing in the choppy waters. “Development!” Mom exclaimed in worried tones, pointing at a half-dozen shacks selling fish and beer back among the palms. It would have been a lovely place to spend the day sunning and consuming Presidente if it hadn’t been so late already. It reminded me of Oahu’s north coast, where I had been similarly watching surfers only a few months earlier.
Pushing ever onward, we came to Rio San Juan, one of our possibilities for lodging that night, but which had few hotels listed in our guide book. Rio San Juan used to have a dive shop offering scuba excursions, but it’s now closed; the town is mostly known for its unusual lagoon. We took a quick turn around the place, noting two hotel possibilities, one on the rocky coast, looking breezy and cool in its white lobby if a bit run down, the other a couple of blocks from the lagoon, and looking somewhat uninhabited. The town had a couple of beaches but just small ones, on either side of the breezy option. We decided to decide after looking at the Laguna Gri-Gri.
It was right there, seemingly in the middle of town: quiet waters with a dozen small boats afloat on it, shaded everywhere by towering trees sprouting right out of the water. Cement steps led from a little plaza down into the lagoon, and next to them an information booth – closed. There was only one person there to talk to, an old man sitting on a step next to the two-spot car park, so we talked to him. He quickly scared up a couple of guys with a boat, who started to make it ready before we’d even agreed to a tour. This turned out to be over-priced, even after a negotiated deduction, but we decided to do it anyway since we were there and all.
Our guide explained that the waters came from a subterranean river that emerged at that very spot, and that the lagoon’s name came from the trees surrounding it, also called gri-gri. They drove us slowly through a stand of mangroves, very slowly because of the illegal fishing nets strung across our path in spots. There was a swamp house on stilts, just like in Louisiana, and then more illegal fisherman – these ones teenage boys in a wooden boat known as a cayuco, pushing themselves along by pole and looking for eels. Egrets flew above us and some kind of vulture strutted along the interwoven tree roots below.
Emerging from the eerie mangrove swamp, we came out into the choppy waters of the ocean, passing by a minuscule island with a bit of ruined wall on the ocean side. The guide told us it used to be a restaurant, but was destroyed by Hurricane David back in the 1970s. It was hard to imagine a restaurant could fit on such a tiny slice of land, but he explained that it used to be larger, with a dock even, until it started getting washed away due to lack of care. We continued all the way down past the Bahia Blanca hotel and the so-called “Playa de la Guardia,” a beach known for the shacks at its back, occupied by military men. Then we returned the way we came, making sure to note another important local site – “Playa del Amor,” so named because “two go in and three come out.” Didn’t look like it could fit more than two anyway, buried in a sort of thicket as it was, but we were assured 8 could fit if a party were required.
The guide also informed me that land was for sale right on the coast for $65 a square meter. “I can’t do much with a meter,” I complained. When they suggested I buy more than one, I pointed out that things would then become expensive very quickly and they nodded sagely. “Well, buy a meter then. You can grow some flowers,” was the guide’s solution.
Manatees were supposed to live in mangroves like this, I remembered, and asked about them. These locals had seen many of them, both here and up the river from which the town takes its name, but they explained that the manatees don’t like to come out in high, rough seas like this. (The maritime conditions also eliminated the possibility for us to visit the Cave of the Swallows, usually the last stop on this trip, two kilometers the other way up the coast.) At any rate, when the manatees appear they are happy to see them and so are the tourists. The guide said they are so calm, quiet, and slow that they stay right by the boat without moving, allowing everyone to photograph them to their hearts’ content. I hope to return in calm seas next year and see them then.
We’d seen all we could. In fact, we’d seen so much it was hard to believe we’d only left Las Terrenas that morning. The sun was still up, though not for much longer. The guide thought we could make it to Cabarete in an hour so we decided to go for it, opting for the tourist mecca over the sleepy seaside town. This way, we’d have plenty of sleeping and dining options, and we’d have a shorter drive back to Santiago the next day.
Unfortunately, we didn’t make it far before the sun went down, and then Mom had to experience the dubious joys of nighttime driving in the DR – the hidden potholes lurking in the darkness, the blinding lights of other drivers, the inadequacy of our own lights in the unlit streets. Still, we made it, and found a lovely hotel right on the beach with breakfast included – always our favorite part. We particularly enjoyed the European-style bathroom, since we hadn’t showered all day, and the restaurant on the sand with its beer (though that, too, was served European style, which is to say, at a temperature Dominicans would term “hot”). We didn’t so much enjoy the overpowering air-conditioning, but our porter had showed us that it could be deactivated by opening the sliding glass door to the porch, so we did that, and slept the sleep of those who have sat all day in a bucket seat, enduring numerous potholes in a car with questionable shocks.
We arose the next morning fully ready for a final morning at the beach. We hadn’t even gotten much of a look at it the night before, since it was already dark when we arrived, but were pleasantly surprised both by the plentiful breakfast and the beach full of dozens of colorful kites. For us, Cabarete did live up to its reputation as kite-surfing capital of the world, and though we’d never seen this sport before, we were impressed and entertained by the many surfers who went flying past at high speed. I wondered what would happen if two kites got tangled, but we never saw this happen. We did see plenty of hot shots doing spins and flips as their kites pulled them through the air, even jumping far into the air as if they might fly away altogether. This free entertainment, coupled with a paperback murder mystery and sunshine, made for a perfect morning. We felt rested and relaxed as we got back on the road, making for Santiago, if a bit sad that it was mom’s last day in the country!
Instead of the usual highway through Puerto Plata, this time we decided to try the so-called “touristic highway” that splits off near Sosua and gets to Santiago via Gurabo. It appeared to be a short cut, eliminating many kilometers and the trafficky way around Puerto Plata city, and the hotel receptionist assured us the road was fine: even though it “had a lot of curves,” it would be faster than the other way.
The touristic road was certainly scenic, more so than the Puerto Plata route, but we appeared to be the only tourists on it. Also, maybe the road was usually good, but our informant clearly had not taken into account the recent rains. At several points, we were held up at construction sites guarded by military personnel. One was an apparent mudslide, and the road was still covered with the gooey stuff. The sedan in front of us got stuck, but the Falcon valiantly held out in second gear. At another, a piece of the road had simply dropped down the cliff, not an encouraging site, but on the bright side, half of the curve had recently been reinforced with rocks in chicken wire cages.
Because of the lack of tourists, there was also a lack of services on this road. In one little section, there were a ton of tiny businesses advertising amber for sale, and there was a roadhouse there too, but we didn’t pass anything else similar until we were already down in Santiago. The only thing to do was enjoy the views of the Cibao valley stretching out below us, the flamboyán trees just starting to put out their flame-colored flowers, and the roadside stands selling fruit. One had a variety I’d never seen before: a bright, pinkish-red thing, small and elongated, the shape of a half-size avocado. (Later I described it to Rafaelito, who told me it was the fruit of the cashew tree.)
Thus concluded our road trip, DR style, as well as Mom’s vacation. Well, almost – we had a couple more gifts still to buy at the Mercado Modelo, and I still had to pay my totally stupid and unjust parking ticket.
Wednesday, April 04, 2007
Tai Chi in Las Galeras
this is what the Europeans do when on vacation in Las Galeras, Samana, apparently
We Love The Bus!!!!!!!!
fun times on the way back from carnival in Villa Gonzalez. (photo by my mom)
Jose Reyes
this is his very nice new costume (photo by my mom) - he wanted to be sure I showed it on the blog, so here it is!!
travels with my mom, part 1
4/1/07
This week’s long delay in blogging has again been due to traveling and visitors: this time my mom came for her nearly traditional annual vacation in the DR. We spent the first four days of her visit tooling around Santiago, shopping, visiting friends, playing dominoes. She turned out to be particularly lucky in her timing, however, since the day before she arrived I received a call from Tonito of Los Confraternos notifying me of a carnival event on Sunday in Villa Gonzalez. I was surprised to hear carnival was still going on so late, and guessed that this must be the latest carnival in the region, but then I was told that Navarrete would still be having one the following Sunday – April 1 – and that the one after that, Easter Sunday, carnival would still be held in Montecristi. Is there now any doubt at all that this is the most carnival-happy nation?
After a bit of shopping at the Mercado Modelo and a visit to Angelo the mask maker on Sunday morning, we convened with the other Confraternos at Betania’s house at 1:30 to await the arrival of the bus the Villa Gonzalez organizers had kindly sent for us. Eventually, it came, as did some friend and neighbor lechones who had decided to join up with Los Confraternos for the day. We hopped on and passed Tonito’s bottles of Brugal around in order to warm up as we watched the sky anxiously, wondering if rain would come or not.
We had done Villa Gonzalez last year, so I knew pretty much what to expect and explained as much to mom: first, we would wait around for a long, long time, until we got hungry and had to look for snacks. Then, on a signal that seemingly came from nowhere, we would suddenly all have to get dressed in a hurry. Then we would wait around a while longer and then we’d finally join in the parade with all the groups from other Cibao towns. It wouldn’t be too long of a parade because the town wasn’t that big, and then we’d all go home again.
It did work like that, more or less, although it involved even more waiting, and in costume, when it’s practically impossible even to bend over, much less get comfortable. The clouds gathered and we continued to wait, apparently for it to start raining, as Julio pointed out. The firemen came by on their truck, as did a group of taimascaros from Puerto Plata and a float depicting Santiago’s monument on the back of a red pickup truck. Some guy, either drunk, insane, or both, danced suggestively on the raised platform in the middle of the town square all by himself.
Finally, well after 4:00, we began. The route was only about half of what we usually do in Santiago but it still couldn’t be called short. We had to sprint the last few blocks, too, when the downpour finally began. I’d been soaked to begin with – from sweat – and finally we were all thoroughly drenched, sore, and tired when we boarded the bus back. Everyone was in high spirits though, and the ride back was far more animated than the ride up had been. There was much shouting, singing, dancing, and playing of air guitars along with the bachata songs the driver blasted for our amusement. Funny how being exhausted can actually make people more energetic.
On Monday I actually attended my accordion lesson, after having missed it for several weeks in a row, then learned a new dominoes game. On Tuesday, I had to catch up on some work. Turned out I have to organize a press conference, of all things, in conjunction with this Folkways recording I’m producing here. And turned out that organizing a press conference here is a completely ridiculous undertaking, like throwing a wedding party or something. Invitations must be sent, follow-up phone calls must be made, refreshments and snacks must be served and, I’m told, even the tables must be decorated and flower arrangements purchased. I agreed to write up the invitations, and I secured a room at the Centro Leon for our location, but I’ve left the rest to La India who, I hope, knows far more about such things than I do.
That night we attended an opening at the Centro Leon, although since it was not a visiting show but simply the latest installment of the ongoing Dominican fine arts exhibit, there were not as many people (or as many speeches) as usual. Still, we got free beer, and also Nixon Roman (Rafaelito’s son) and El Prodigio’s saxophonist were there playing típico duets, something I don’t think anyone had ever conceived of before.
We kept our free-beer-drinking to a minimum, though: first, because I still had work to do afterwards, and second, in order to not jeopardize our plans for the morning. We had to get up early in order to get contracts Fed-Ex’d off to Washington and hit the road early if we wanted to get to Samana at a decent hour. It’s a long drive out there.
Our Dominican road trip took us first to San Francisco de Macoris, a town known mainly for its drug dealers. After a long stretch of bone-jolting road from which the pavement had been recently removed, we began to pass gigantic mansions, all glass and columns, some still under construction. Once we got into town, those gave way to the car dealerships with fleets of SUVs in front. “My leetle horse!” mom called them, reminded of the corny Colombian drug lord in “Romancing the Stone.” As we exited town on its eastern edge, we took advantage of the giant La Sirena branch to use its sparkling bathrooms, and to comment on how interesting it was that this country town’s department store had a better selection than Santiago’s.
Outside of San Francisco one sees a lot of rice fields, practically glowing in their emerald greenness, a couple of rice factories, and some tiny towns where colmados (corner stores) consist of a 5x5 shack with hinged shutter, supplied with an ancient scale and the most basic of provisions and canned goods. There’s not much else until you get to Nagua, a hot and dusty town located where the Nagua river meets the sea. It doesn’t seem to have much to recommend it, which makes it all the more astounding that it is this land that has produced more great típico accordionists than any other. Exiting the town to the southeast and following along the coast, things become more scenic. Thick groves of palm trees grow all the way down to the water’s edge. The sea here is always choppy, which perhaps explains why no tourism has developed here, but the view of mountainous Samana topped with an eternal ring of fluffy clouds is amazing. In this crook of the island’s arm, the only dwellings are the small shacks of a fishermen’s village, a half-completed hotel, and some kind of Buddhist retreat with a big “om” symbol painted on the wall facing the highway. Things are changing, however: a brand-spanking-new rest stop was nearing completion when we passed through – probably the only one in the country.
Samana was an island when Chris Colombus first came here. But soon after, it became a peninsula as the channel between it and mainland filled up with sediment. Still, it was long a haven for pirates and visitors can easily see why: the rugged landscape and numerous tiny, rocky islands surrounding it must have provided a limitless supply of hideouts. Even today, the province retains a bit of its piratey feel. As soon as you cross into it from Nagua and begin the ascent to Sanchez, you can feel a difference in the air. It is hard to put your finger on what it is. It is the air with its inviting breeze; the sun, which seems to make the green of the trees and the blue of the ocean that much more intense; the pace of life and of walking, which seems slower here than back on mainland Cibao. Even the houses are different. The traditional structures are wooden ones, as startlingly painted as those in other small Dominican towns, but they have different air vent decorations above the doorways and windows, in straight-lined geometric patterns rather than the curved carvings of Santiago.
We arrived in the city of Samana (technically Santa Barbara de Samana) after 3 ½ hours on the road, and definitely ready to eat. Pescado con coco, the classic Samanese dish of whole freshly-caught fish cooked in coconut milk, was clearly in order, and we thought we could use some fried plantains, too. So we made a stop at my usual restaurant, Bambu, which is right on the Malecon and affords a nice view of the Samana bay. This isn’t a beach town but rather a port, so the bay is always full of sailboats, and the motor boats that take tourists out to see whales or the keys leave from a dock right in front of the restaurant. An elevated walkway connects two tiny, rocky keys covered with palms right in the middle of the bay to the land and a fancy hotel. The whole effect is very scenic, and the malecon itself has been well-tended since the town became a cruise ship stopoff point two years ago, so it’s pleasant just to walk along the water on the brick path with crow’s nest lookout towers every block or so.
I still needed to talk to my new friend Virgilio, the town’s former mayor, in order to see if I could meet with any folkloric musicians during my quick visit. I called but since he hadn’t showed up by the time we finished lunch, I decided to just stop by his place. Virgilio and the whole family – wife, children, aunts, uncles – all live on the second story of an unfinished apartment building. The first floor is just cement and rebar, but the apartments upstairs are nice and have both a great view of the bay and a comfortable ocean breeze. The stray dog, Anita, who always follows Virgilio around was waiting in front of his door as I knew she would be. She barked at us at first but let us pass after we greeted her – I think she remembered me from last time (I gave her a cookie).
Virgilio welcomed us in and we ended up spending much longer than intended, although that’s usually to be expected in this country. We looked at family pictures, talked about Samana and music, and he gave me a Samanese carnival mask to take home – a bull-faced devil pained in pink, red, and white. A cruise ship would be arriving the next day, he told us, and to entertain the tourists he’d organized a small folklore show. It would be a good opportunity to see some Samanese traditions and talk to the folks, so we made plans to be back in town the next day at 2:00 sharp.
We still had at least 45 minutes on the road before we got to our day’s final destination, Las Galeras – a little town literally at the end of the road on the very tip of the peninsula. I’d never been beyond Samana before, so didn’t know what to expect of either the town or the road. I discovered that the road was not great but tolerable, and very scenic. We passed a town with a small dock where boats set out for Cayo Levantado, then an enormous resort where the road turned into a kind of secret passageway between overhanging trees, and then a long stretch of open road leading over a hill and down again. We passed occasional Samanese houses in pink and blue, a small cemetery with a chapel dedicated to the virgin, and a few men going to or from the fields wearing rubber work boots and carrying long machetes. There were also horses and burros loaded with wicker baskets or sacks of plastic burlap full of fruits and vegetables, usually driven by small boys perched on rag-rug saddle blankets, or very old men. I also found my all-time favorite barber shop. A 3x3 wooden shack with a shutter propped open revealed a shelf with combs, brushes, a spray bottle. The barber sat in front on a tiny cement patio of about the same size where the work was apparently done. It would have been hard to build anything smaller.
Eventually we got to the end of the road and Las Galeras. It consisted of: the end of the road, and one other road. One intersection, no stoplights, about four restaurants. Hotels were to either side on the second road, but two were closed down. A nonfunctional Jeep was parked in front of one; the other was being converted into pricey condos, we were told. Our lodging options were therefore limited, but there were several nice spots, mostly run by French. We ended up staying in the only one with a Dominican manager, “Hotel Todo Blanco.” It was an old rambling Victorian type of hotel which reminded Mom of some she’d stayed in in Africa, and appropriately enough, it was all white. It had a spacious, airy feel and was right on the beach, separated from the sand by a garden of tropical flowers and a lush lawn, the kind that grows here naturally with no investment required. There was no air conditioning, but once we threw open the doors to our second-floor balcony, the ocean breeze provided all the cooling necessary.
We had had two main worries on our long drive. First, the weather: the country had been experiencing torrential downpours and powerful winds that had destroyed roads, caused mudslides, and toppled trees and power lines all over the place. We were hoping not to experience such a thing on our drive. Second, the car: while the Falcon had undergone extensive repairs and my mechanic had assured me it was now fit to go to Puerto Rico if I so desired (though I hadn’t known that swim capabilities had been included in the work he’d done), since that time I’d also had to replace some wet spark plugs that were causing the motor to die at random intervals. We were hoping the car was indeed in optimal working condition now, but I remembered all too well that the last time I’d been on a long drive it was just at the point that I’d been thinking “the car is running great!” that everything had gone to hell in a handbasket. This time, I’d be careful to neither say nor think anything about the Falcon’s performance – at least, not where it could hear me.
In the end, we lucked out. Clouds gathered that night and things got breezy; when we woke up the Falcon was covererd in raindrops, but we stayed dry. The Falcon did die, but not until Las Galeras. It was not exactly traffic central and it started again right away, so it was no big deal. The next morning it seemed fine once again. Perhaps we’d simply jostled something loose on one of the many uncovered and uncommonly deep drainage ditches we’d had to cross since Samana.
We were relieved to have reached our destination intact, but it was already nearing sunset. It had been a long day. Clearly, it was time to drink tropical rum beverages and pig out once again. The fish shacks right on the beach at the end of the road looked inviting and were full of the local expats, but we’d had fish for lunch and didn’t want to repeat. Instead, we walked up the street to see what we could find. The Italian restaurant was closed (it was 9 already), so we had our choice of one vaguely French one and two sort of international ones with nearly identical menus of fish and pasta. We decided on two courses: first, beer and a spinach and cheese crepe at Chez Denise in the company of Germans, then spaghetti and beer at Gri-Gri in the company of aged American hippies. Gri-Gri (aka La Esquinita) was far more happening, though, and before we were have done with our pasta it began its conversion into what was apparently the town’s only disco. The regular energy-saving lights went out, a spinning colorful disco light took its place, and a selection of electronica, funk, and yes, disco, began to emit from the speakers. Both the Americans and the Dominicans loved this, especially one middle-aged Dominican in shorts (must have spent too much time with the ex-pats) who needed neither partner nor encouragement to do his own disco solo.
After they got to “Staying Alive,” however, we decided it was probably best to get going.
Back at the hotel, we were enjoying the ocean breezes and a round of our newly-learned dominoes game when the lights went out. This happens often in the DR, sure, but at a large hotel one would expect them to have a generator or inverter that would kick in after a minute. This didn’t happen. After seeing the level of hotel development and the number of French tourists and expats in the area, we’d begun to be suspicious of our guide book, which had told us that Las Galeras was a sort of undiscovered tourist Shangri-la. But now it seemed that maybe Las Galeras really was at the end of the earth. They hadn’t provided us with a lantern or even a candle, so all we had to see by was the half moon and the tiny light on my keychain. We finished our game by its minute beam, but by the end my thumb was worn out from holding down its button, so it seemed that it was time for bed.
In the morning, we were the only ones in the breezy breakfast patio by the sea. Fresh fruit and juice, eggs, coffee, toast and jam helped rouse us from our beachy stupor. Well, that, and the yowlings of the breakfast room’s resident cat, Tigre, demanding that we share. The other guests seemed to have breakfaster earlier, as a big group of them were out on the lawn doing Tai Chi exercises in the appropriate outfits, even. (How had they known there would be a Tai Chi master here? We certainly hadn’t known until we saw the flyer – in German – on a table yesterday.) It was a bit of an upstairs-downstairs moment, as while the Europeans practiced their Tai Chi on the lawn, three young Dominican men were down on the beach just below doing toe-touches and stretches.
Before we’d come out here, Virgilio had given us the names of two people we should look up. One was the mayor. The other was named “Wow” (though written as Guao in Spanish). I was frankly incredulous that this could be anyone’s name, and of course it was only his nickname, but still. Virgilio told me he was a big man so I surmised that when people saw him, they said “Wow! What a big guy!” The woman at our hotel knew him well (I suppose it would be hard not to in a place of this size) and said she would send for him, telling him to arrive at 8:30 or 9 the next morning. She also said that Las Galeras was full of so many odd names that Guao had begun to seem quite normal to her. She herself had apparently escaped this strange curse of Las Galeras – her name was Juliana.
Just as we were finishing breakfast, two Dominican men came in from the beach and we greeted them in the customary fashion. They disappeared and then reappeared a few minutes later, the bigger one saying, “was one of you looking for me?” “Guao!” I exclaimed happily. “Yes, I have been wanting to meet the famous Guao. I also have a message for you from my friend Virgilio,” I explained, handing him the business card on which the former mayor of Samana had scrawled a note telling Guao that we were his special friends and he should treat us as he would Virgilio himself.
Guao smiled and told me Virgilio was a good man. “I helped him out during his campaign, and when he was mayor, he helped me too.” Later I found out that this district is about 75% PRD, the left-leaning party to which both Virgilio and Guao belonged. Guao had long worked in local politics, helping to incorporate the Galeras municipal district which ran from some distance down the Samana road all the way up to the mountains of the Cabo Cabron peninsula, locally known as Loma Travesada. However, Guao lost in the latest elections to a hardware store owner who had given out free lumber on the day before the elections. Well, the guy might have had the goods, but I can’t imagine he could have had a catchier name.
What we wanted was a ride to Playa Rincon on Guao’s boat. Unfortunately, Virgilio’s note didn’t seem to change the price any. There was one going rate for two tourists going to el Rincon, and that was the rate we got. We took it anyway, since we were anxious to see the place before having to go back to Samana city. Our ride, a fiberglass hull of perhaps 18 feet with a few bench seats, a Yamaha motor, and a whale’s tail painted on the side, awaited us just a few feet down the beach. It was tied up to a palm tree that also served as lamp post. Guao proudly told us that the craft was one of the original 3 boats of that type in Las Galeras; all had been acquired in 1998. “How did people get to El Rincon before that?” I inquired. “Wooden boats,” he explained. That also explained all the abandoned-looking canoe-like craft moldering all over the beach. Modernity had arrived late in Las Galeras, but now that it was here, canoes served little purpose.
So Diosmare, Guao’s companion, pushed us off and we set across the waves in a northwesterly direction. The sea was choppy, especially at the rocky point we had to skirt to enter the bay of Playa Rincon. We were bouncing way off our seats, and it was a bit of a miracle that neither us nor our stuff bounced straight out into the sea. Still only 9:00, clouds hung over the mountains as they do every morning in Samana.
I had been studying the map of the peninsula earlier, and it had shown nothing for the mountainous area I was looking at now, a small peninsula jutting out of the main body of Samana to the northeast. Only Cabo Cabron, the cape at its tip, was marked, but only as a destination for scuba divers, not as a settlement. No towns, no roads, nothing else – could that really be possible? I had asked Diosmare what was over there and now asked Guao for confirmation. They confirmed that people lived in the mountains, growing ñame, plantains, yuca, “and kids,” Diosmare added. The place could be reached by boat to a small port at a dip in the mountains, and then by foot up a trail. I was intrigued – who knows what kind of music could be hiding in this remotest corner of the Dominican Republic? – and made plans to take a little field trip when I return next year. More locally, Guao, who helped to plan the town’s patron saint festivals each year, told me that Las Galeras had its own bachata, típico, and palos groups.
After only a 15 or 20-minute ride, Playa Rincon came into view. The beach was recently hailed by Conde Nast Traveler as one of the top 10 best beaches in the world, and it was easy to see why. The boat leaves you in the protected waters around the back of the rocky point, where you wade through clear, shallow, turquoise (or perhaps larimar) waters onto the beach, just at the point where a cold mountain stream flows into the bay. From there a long narrow strip of white sand sweeps a long arc around the bay and around a corner, where it ends perhaps a half-kilometer away against a cliff that forms the base of the Loma Travesá. Its entire length is backed by a thick stand of coconut palms, and a few of their fruit roll gently back and forth in the surf. There are few sounds to hear other than those of the waves, rough on the day we went because of recent storms, and birds calling out of the palm trees above, entirely unafraid of the people standing right below them. No one lives here, though locals come here to work each morning. It is remote and wild-looking, with the mountains rising steeply up on one side and the palms hiding the rest of the land from view. Mom and I comprised exactly half of the tourists on the beach that morning.
Nonetheless, Playa Rincon has been discovered. Our guide book praised it as being pristine and undeveloped, which is still mostly true because of the difficulty in reaching the place. Yet when we arrived, Mom pointed and exclaimed: “Development!” There were two restaurants on the landing end of the beach, one a cement-block structure right on the water’s edge, the other a typical thatch-roof rancho set back among the trees, both with all the fried fish and drinks you could want. Also, a few plastic tables and a line of white beach chairs were arranged at the landing point, in expectation of perhaps 20 tourists. And after we’d been there a while, we noticed some 4WD vehicles coming up the dirt track leading back to Las Galeras. A few strolling vendors even appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, one of them wearing a three-foot stack of palm-frond hats that completely covered his face, turning him into a sort of Dominican Cousin It.
The beach was long, though, still mostly empty, and nearly perfect. Let’s just hope they don’t build a better road any time soon.
We spent an idyllic two hours on Playa Rincon, bothered only by a couple of horseflies (my natural bug repellent took care of that, though) and a guy looking for change, in dollars, for a $50. Fat chance! The sea was choppy but still good for a swim in the warm water. But ever wary of check-out time, at about 11:30 we figured we should jump back in the boat. This time, we got a better look at some of the tiny, piratey islands just off the coast, including one perfectly flat one with a clump of palm trees right in the center that made it look like a fancy hat. Back at the hotel, we got in one more game of dominoes on our balcony with its fluttery white curtains, and then it was time to return to the Falcon.
On the road back to Samana, we tried to take our time and get some pictures of the interesting things we’d noted on our way out, but with only partial success. I missed my favorite barber shop. But Mom managed to get two enormous cruise ships sitting in the bay, in view just past a ramshackle dock from which Dominican boats left for Cayo Levantado. And we did get to town on time for the folklore show Virgilio had invited us to. They hadn’t started yet, but I found one of the musicians tinkering on an ancient accordion with a screwdriver back behind the bandstand.
This being a clue that nothing was going to happen very soon, Mom and I decided to take a look around the park, which had been filled with craft vendors in honor of the cruise ship tourists’ arrival. We bought a few items, doing our part to support the local economy, while listening in on the vendors laughing about the tourists’ cluelessness. One was particularly amused by the ugly black plastic sack one was carrying her purchases in, commenting that it “looked like she was carrying an old black cat.” “Why would any one give her that?” he wondered aloud in my general direction. “We have nice ones that say ‘thank you’ on them and everything.” He offered to change it for her and she refused indignantly. To a Dominican, always conscious of his appearance, this was very funny indeed.
Before long Virgilio returned – we could tell because we heard him start rapping on the microphone. He really was rapping: improvising rhymes about Samana and tourists to an electronic reggaeton beat. After this interlude, they moved on to the promised folklore show. Unfortunately, the tourists seemed more interested in shopping than in taking a look at the dancers and musicians. (You can bring a cow to water…) At least we were there to enjoy it. The local traditional musicians were there, playing tambora, palo, güira, and accordion, and a group of students in matching outfits of a blue tropical print fabric performed dances along with them. They did many of the classic Samanese numbers like the bamboula and chivo florete. They also did some palos dancing, and I saw that palos is played very differently in Samana: the one long drum was laid on the ground and the drummer sat on top to play it. Behind him, a guy with two sticks beat out ever-changing, improvised rhythms on the drum’s body. A third percussionist played on one head of an upright tambora held between his legs. Only the güira resembled the kind of palos I see and play in Santiago.
After the folkloric portion of the show was over, they moved on to popular music as provided by a guitar band playing both merengue and bachata. They wanted me to play a tune on the accordion, and I tried to oblige, but I couldn’t seem to get any sound out of the ancient instrument – air was escaping from so many holes in the bellows that before I’d played three notes, I’d reached its capacity. I had to beg off simply because I couldn’t figure out how I could get a whole phrase out of the thing. Afterwards, I spoke with the accordionist, a native Samanes of advanced years, so dark that in other parts of the country he’d surely be thought Haitian, and we laughed about the fact that no one but he could play his accordion. I’d been hoping to hear and see traditional merengue redondo at last, but it hadn’t been included in the day’s program. I asked him about it and he told me he was the only musician in town who played merengue redondo, and they usually only performed it out in the countryside on January 21, the day of the Virgen de la Altagracia. You can bet I’ll be back next year for this event.
We could have stayed around talking for quite some time, but there was still more on our agenda. Mom and I planned to stay that night in Las Terrenas, another town populated largely by French-speaking ex-pats, though on the north coast and with a larger hotel and restaurant selection. We had to cross the mountains again to get there so were anxious to set out; we were also hopeful that on the way, if we made good time, we could stop to see the famous waterfall, the Salto El Limon. Naturally, Virgilio had contacts in the tiny mountain town of El Limon, and we were told to look for (a) a Spaniard restaurant owner and waterfall excursion operator called Santi, and (b) a fantastic accordionist, the best in the peninsula, called Santos.
So far, we’d had enormous luck with the weather. Though it had looked ominous a couple of times, we’d had no more than a few drops of rain the whole trip, in spite of the fact that most of the rest of the country was experiencing dangerous amounts of tropical storm precipitation. By mutual agreement, we were not speaking of it, in an attempt not to jinx our trip – just as I would only discuss the Falcon’s performance out of its earshot. (I’d taken mom aside in the park to whisper, “don’t say anything, but I think the car is running pretty good.”) Yet as we reached the mountain’s summit just before El Limon, our luck appeared to run out and the rain started. So much for waterfall trips on horseback.
We looked sadly at all the paradas or roadhouses offering the tours as we passed through El Limon looking for Santi’s, but just as we got to the other side of town, the rain stop. Mom felt that all was not lost and urged me to go back. It was only 4:30, surely there was still time for a quick trip. We hadn’t yet found Santi but I turned back and we stopped at a likely-looking point. A guide met us at the gate and explained that they usually take the last tour at 5:00 but that they had closed early for the rain. If we came back tomorrow, he told us, he would take us for 250 pesos each, round-trip on horse. He also explained to us where the accordionist lived.
We turned around and made for Las Terrenas once again. This time I was looking for the landmark that would lead me to Santos, the accordionist. I didn’t find that, but we did find Santi’s. Looked like a good restaurant, but now it was time to find a hotel. Soon we were back on the coast on a very pleasant, well-paved, two-lane road that skirted the water behind a line of palm trees. We passed the tiny landing strip that serves as the El Portillo airport, from which a tiny propeller plane was just taking off, and then, before we knew it, we were in Las Terrenas.
You can tell you are in Las Terrenas because the road narrows and the traffic increases into a mass of motorbikes and 4WD vehicles, along with the occasional ATV. Then adorable bed-and-breakfasts start popping up in between the trees, most of them built in a kind of tropical plantation style, and most of them French or Dutch-run. It seemed that although the French had been kicked out of Haiti, here they had found another niche on the island. And so had the Haitians, it seemed – we soon noted that many of those who worked in the hotels and stores were indeed Haitians. Here, French was the language of tourism, not English. Even Spanish seemed to be in short supply!
All the hotels were equally adorable and most included breakfast, so we ended up staying at the first one we looked at. It was definitely an island-living type of place: wooden slatted windows rather than drapes or blinds, open woodwork above windows and doors, meaning fans rather than A/C. The roofs were of thatch and inside the ceilings were of wide-set wooden planking. The courtyard was full of tropical flowers, hammocks, and lounge chairs placed along a path where sand and grass mixed together. We loved it – well, except for the shower curtain that kept falling down – and you couldn’t beat the price, at $24 with breakfast for two.
By the time we got settled it wasn’t long til sunset, but we decided to hit the shops before dinner. Many of them had Haitian art and crafts, kinds not sold in Santiago; others had Dominican jewelry and the carved gourds that I’m pretty sure come not from here but from Salcedo. Everyone tried to speak French with us. They had little success.
Night fell, and hunger grew. I knew where to go, though, from my brief jaunt out here last year: El Pueblo de Los Pescadores, the so-called “fishermen’s village” at the river’s mouth, now converted entirely into tiny beachfront restaurants and bars. I hadn’t counted on mud, though. The recent rains made our walking difficult and messy in this town of dirt roads and no sidewalks. The wind off the ocean was kicking up, too, blowing palm fronds every which way. When we made it to the restaurant area, we were looking disheveled and ready to sit a while, but first we had to examine all our options. The restaurants run the gamut from Italian to French to Dominican to Spanish to Japanese, and two were new since last year. Since we’d enjoyed our two-course dinner last night, we decided to do it again in order to try more restaurants.
Our first stop was a brand new tapas bar with modern décor, all in red and black with a cut out of a metal bull above the bar and a nearly lifesize electric palm tree, white lights running up and down its length. We had sangria, Spanish tortilla, olives, and a tuna-potato salada type thing, and just as we were ready to leave the rain started in full force. The wind sounded like it was trying to rip off the tin roof, and water started pouring in through the heavy metal double door that stood open, down the (now muddy) tile steps and into the restaurant. The waiter closed them, then brought us a couple of trilingual newspapers to amuse ourselves with until the rain stopped. Luckily, it didn’t take long. By the time we’d looked at photos of Fefita La Grande’s recent performance in town, read our horoscopes in Spanish and a summary of international headlines in English, the coast was clear.
We crossed the street to our second course, wood-fired pizza at the Pizza Patio. It was too cold in the breeze to sit on their porch, even with their storm curtains tied down, so we took two stools at the bar where we could watch the pizza being made. The place was popular, evidently because you could order pizza for take-out or delivery, too. We ordered one with arugula, eliminating the need for a separate salad. Tasty. But because the wind was still threatening to start something again, there was no time to linger. Plus, we wanted ice cream. We walked as fast as we could through the muddy streets, across the bridge, back to our hotel, but not fast enough – the rain caught up with us at last, thoroughly soaking us, especially when a fellow American in an SUV stopped us to ask for directions to an internet café and then an inordinately long conversation considering that we were standing in the rain. Our little wood-plank room never looked so inviting.
There was some debate in the morning about where the day should take us. We could spend another night in Las Terrenas, giving us a whole day on the beach. Or we could pack up and move on to another town. We definitely wanted to get to the waterfall, and from there we could simply go back down to Samana and out through Nagua, perhaps heading up the coast to see what other beaches we could find. After a walk down the beach, a chat with the beach dogs, and a look at the kite-surfers, we opted for adventure and loaded the car.
It was really only a 15-minute drive back up to El Limon when we weren’t stopping to look at anything. Once in town we went to Santi’s restaurant for water, bathrooms, and an inquiry into road conditions. I already knew that the shortest route, the road from Las Terrenas to Sanchez, was extremely steep and dangerous, and had been subject to mudslides from the recent rains. The road to Samana took us quite a bit out of the way, however. Looking at my maps, I saw a branch that ran from El Limon down to Majagual, halfway to Sanchez, that would save us time if it was any good. The waitress’s advice was, “I wouldn’t recommend it.” Didn’t sound promising.
We drove on to the parada of the 250 peso rides. They confirmed that that road was no good. One woman said, “It’s really steep. I’m from here and it scares me.” Looked like the long way was the only way for us, but we still couldn’t pass up our chance to see the Salto. As we changed into our water shoes, the guides went to get our horses, already saddled up. In five minutes we were in the saddle and on the trail, heading over a grassy ridge.
This week’s long delay in blogging has again been due to traveling and visitors: this time my mom came for her nearly traditional annual vacation in the DR. We spent the first four days of her visit tooling around Santiago, shopping, visiting friends, playing dominoes. She turned out to be particularly lucky in her timing, however, since the day before she arrived I received a call from Tonito of Los Confraternos notifying me of a carnival event on Sunday in Villa Gonzalez. I was surprised to hear carnival was still going on so late, and guessed that this must be the latest carnival in the region, but then I was told that Navarrete would still be having one the following Sunday – April 1 – and that the one after that, Easter Sunday, carnival would still be held in Montecristi. Is there now any doubt at all that this is the most carnival-happy nation?
After a bit of shopping at the Mercado Modelo and a visit to Angelo the mask maker on Sunday morning, we convened with the other Confraternos at Betania’s house at 1:30 to await the arrival of the bus the Villa Gonzalez organizers had kindly sent for us. Eventually, it came, as did some friend and neighbor lechones who had decided to join up with Los Confraternos for the day. We hopped on and passed Tonito’s bottles of Brugal around in order to warm up as we watched the sky anxiously, wondering if rain would come or not.
We had done Villa Gonzalez last year, so I knew pretty much what to expect and explained as much to mom: first, we would wait around for a long, long time, until we got hungry and had to look for snacks. Then, on a signal that seemingly came from nowhere, we would suddenly all have to get dressed in a hurry. Then we would wait around a while longer and then we’d finally join in the parade with all the groups from other Cibao towns. It wouldn’t be too long of a parade because the town wasn’t that big, and then we’d all go home again.
It did work like that, more or less, although it involved even more waiting, and in costume, when it’s practically impossible even to bend over, much less get comfortable. The clouds gathered and we continued to wait, apparently for it to start raining, as Julio pointed out. The firemen came by on their truck, as did a group of taimascaros from Puerto Plata and a float depicting Santiago’s monument on the back of a red pickup truck. Some guy, either drunk, insane, or both, danced suggestively on the raised platform in the middle of the town square all by himself.
Finally, well after 4:00, we began. The route was only about half of what we usually do in Santiago but it still couldn’t be called short. We had to sprint the last few blocks, too, when the downpour finally began. I’d been soaked to begin with – from sweat – and finally we were all thoroughly drenched, sore, and tired when we boarded the bus back. Everyone was in high spirits though, and the ride back was far more animated than the ride up had been. There was much shouting, singing, dancing, and playing of air guitars along with the bachata songs the driver blasted for our amusement. Funny how being exhausted can actually make people more energetic.
On Monday I actually attended my accordion lesson, after having missed it for several weeks in a row, then learned a new dominoes game. On Tuesday, I had to catch up on some work. Turned out I have to organize a press conference, of all things, in conjunction with this Folkways recording I’m producing here. And turned out that organizing a press conference here is a completely ridiculous undertaking, like throwing a wedding party or something. Invitations must be sent, follow-up phone calls must be made, refreshments and snacks must be served and, I’m told, even the tables must be decorated and flower arrangements purchased. I agreed to write up the invitations, and I secured a room at the Centro Leon for our location, but I’ve left the rest to La India who, I hope, knows far more about such things than I do.
That night we attended an opening at the Centro Leon, although since it was not a visiting show but simply the latest installment of the ongoing Dominican fine arts exhibit, there were not as many people (or as many speeches) as usual. Still, we got free beer, and also Nixon Roman (Rafaelito’s son) and El Prodigio’s saxophonist were there playing típico duets, something I don’t think anyone had ever conceived of before.
We kept our free-beer-drinking to a minimum, though: first, because I still had work to do afterwards, and second, in order to not jeopardize our plans for the morning. We had to get up early in order to get contracts Fed-Ex’d off to Washington and hit the road early if we wanted to get to Samana at a decent hour. It’s a long drive out there.
Our Dominican road trip took us first to San Francisco de Macoris, a town known mainly for its drug dealers. After a long stretch of bone-jolting road from which the pavement had been recently removed, we began to pass gigantic mansions, all glass and columns, some still under construction. Once we got into town, those gave way to the car dealerships with fleets of SUVs in front. “My leetle horse!” mom called them, reminded of the corny Colombian drug lord in “Romancing the Stone.” As we exited town on its eastern edge, we took advantage of the giant La Sirena branch to use its sparkling bathrooms, and to comment on how interesting it was that this country town’s department store had a better selection than Santiago’s.
Outside of San Francisco one sees a lot of rice fields, practically glowing in their emerald greenness, a couple of rice factories, and some tiny towns where colmados (corner stores) consist of a 5x5 shack with hinged shutter, supplied with an ancient scale and the most basic of provisions and canned goods. There’s not much else until you get to Nagua, a hot and dusty town located where the Nagua river meets the sea. It doesn’t seem to have much to recommend it, which makes it all the more astounding that it is this land that has produced more great típico accordionists than any other. Exiting the town to the southeast and following along the coast, things become more scenic. Thick groves of palm trees grow all the way down to the water’s edge. The sea here is always choppy, which perhaps explains why no tourism has developed here, but the view of mountainous Samana topped with an eternal ring of fluffy clouds is amazing. In this crook of the island’s arm, the only dwellings are the small shacks of a fishermen’s village, a half-completed hotel, and some kind of Buddhist retreat with a big “om” symbol painted on the wall facing the highway. Things are changing, however: a brand-spanking-new rest stop was nearing completion when we passed through – probably the only one in the country.
Samana was an island when Chris Colombus first came here. But soon after, it became a peninsula as the channel between it and mainland filled up with sediment. Still, it was long a haven for pirates and visitors can easily see why: the rugged landscape and numerous tiny, rocky islands surrounding it must have provided a limitless supply of hideouts. Even today, the province retains a bit of its piratey feel. As soon as you cross into it from Nagua and begin the ascent to Sanchez, you can feel a difference in the air. It is hard to put your finger on what it is. It is the air with its inviting breeze; the sun, which seems to make the green of the trees and the blue of the ocean that much more intense; the pace of life and of walking, which seems slower here than back on mainland Cibao. Even the houses are different. The traditional structures are wooden ones, as startlingly painted as those in other small Dominican towns, but they have different air vent decorations above the doorways and windows, in straight-lined geometric patterns rather than the curved carvings of Santiago.
We arrived in the city of Samana (technically Santa Barbara de Samana) after 3 ½ hours on the road, and definitely ready to eat. Pescado con coco, the classic Samanese dish of whole freshly-caught fish cooked in coconut milk, was clearly in order, and we thought we could use some fried plantains, too. So we made a stop at my usual restaurant, Bambu, which is right on the Malecon and affords a nice view of the Samana bay. This isn’t a beach town but rather a port, so the bay is always full of sailboats, and the motor boats that take tourists out to see whales or the keys leave from a dock right in front of the restaurant. An elevated walkway connects two tiny, rocky keys covered with palms right in the middle of the bay to the land and a fancy hotel. The whole effect is very scenic, and the malecon itself has been well-tended since the town became a cruise ship stopoff point two years ago, so it’s pleasant just to walk along the water on the brick path with crow’s nest lookout towers every block or so.
I still needed to talk to my new friend Virgilio, the town’s former mayor, in order to see if I could meet with any folkloric musicians during my quick visit. I called but since he hadn’t showed up by the time we finished lunch, I decided to just stop by his place. Virgilio and the whole family – wife, children, aunts, uncles – all live on the second story of an unfinished apartment building. The first floor is just cement and rebar, but the apartments upstairs are nice and have both a great view of the bay and a comfortable ocean breeze. The stray dog, Anita, who always follows Virgilio around was waiting in front of his door as I knew she would be. She barked at us at first but let us pass after we greeted her – I think she remembered me from last time (I gave her a cookie).
Virgilio welcomed us in and we ended up spending much longer than intended, although that’s usually to be expected in this country. We looked at family pictures, talked about Samana and music, and he gave me a Samanese carnival mask to take home – a bull-faced devil pained in pink, red, and white. A cruise ship would be arriving the next day, he told us, and to entertain the tourists he’d organized a small folklore show. It would be a good opportunity to see some Samanese traditions and talk to the folks, so we made plans to be back in town the next day at 2:00 sharp.
We still had at least 45 minutes on the road before we got to our day’s final destination, Las Galeras – a little town literally at the end of the road on the very tip of the peninsula. I’d never been beyond Samana before, so didn’t know what to expect of either the town or the road. I discovered that the road was not great but tolerable, and very scenic. We passed a town with a small dock where boats set out for Cayo Levantado, then an enormous resort where the road turned into a kind of secret passageway between overhanging trees, and then a long stretch of open road leading over a hill and down again. We passed occasional Samanese houses in pink and blue, a small cemetery with a chapel dedicated to the virgin, and a few men going to or from the fields wearing rubber work boots and carrying long machetes. There were also horses and burros loaded with wicker baskets or sacks of plastic burlap full of fruits and vegetables, usually driven by small boys perched on rag-rug saddle blankets, or very old men. I also found my all-time favorite barber shop. A 3x3 wooden shack with a shutter propped open revealed a shelf with combs, brushes, a spray bottle. The barber sat in front on a tiny cement patio of about the same size where the work was apparently done. It would have been hard to build anything smaller.
Eventually we got to the end of the road and Las Galeras. It consisted of: the end of the road, and one other road. One intersection, no stoplights, about four restaurants. Hotels were to either side on the second road, but two were closed down. A nonfunctional Jeep was parked in front of one; the other was being converted into pricey condos, we were told. Our lodging options were therefore limited, but there were several nice spots, mostly run by French. We ended up staying in the only one with a Dominican manager, “Hotel Todo Blanco.” It was an old rambling Victorian type of hotel which reminded Mom of some she’d stayed in in Africa, and appropriately enough, it was all white. It had a spacious, airy feel and was right on the beach, separated from the sand by a garden of tropical flowers and a lush lawn, the kind that grows here naturally with no investment required. There was no air conditioning, but once we threw open the doors to our second-floor balcony, the ocean breeze provided all the cooling necessary.
We had had two main worries on our long drive. First, the weather: the country had been experiencing torrential downpours and powerful winds that had destroyed roads, caused mudslides, and toppled trees and power lines all over the place. We were hoping not to experience such a thing on our drive. Second, the car: while the Falcon had undergone extensive repairs and my mechanic had assured me it was now fit to go to Puerto Rico if I so desired (though I hadn’t known that swim capabilities had been included in the work he’d done), since that time I’d also had to replace some wet spark plugs that were causing the motor to die at random intervals. We were hoping the car was indeed in optimal working condition now, but I remembered all too well that the last time I’d been on a long drive it was just at the point that I’d been thinking “the car is running great!” that everything had gone to hell in a handbasket. This time, I’d be careful to neither say nor think anything about the Falcon’s performance – at least, not where it could hear me.
In the end, we lucked out. Clouds gathered that night and things got breezy; when we woke up the Falcon was covererd in raindrops, but we stayed dry. The Falcon did die, but not until Las Galeras. It was not exactly traffic central and it started again right away, so it was no big deal. The next morning it seemed fine once again. Perhaps we’d simply jostled something loose on one of the many uncovered and uncommonly deep drainage ditches we’d had to cross since Samana.
We were relieved to have reached our destination intact, but it was already nearing sunset. It had been a long day. Clearly, it was time to drink tropical rum beverages and pig out once again. The fish shacks right on the beach at the end of the road looked inviting and were full of the local expats, but we’d had fish for lunch and didn’t want to repeat. Instead, we walked up the street to see what we could find. The Italian restaurant was closed (it was 9 already), so we had our choice of one vaguely French one and two sort of international ones with nearly identical menus of fish and pasta. We decided on two courses: first, beer and a spinach and cheese crepe at Chez Denise in the company of Germans, then spaghetti and beer at Gri-Gri in the company of aged American hippies. Gri-Gri (aka La Esquinita) was far more happening, though, and before we were have done with our pasta it began its conversion into what was apparently the town’s only disco. The regular energy-saving lights went out, a spinning colorful disco light took its place, and a selection of electronica, funk, and yes, disco, began to emit from the speakers. Both the Americans and the Dominicans loved this, especially one middle-aged Dominican in shorts (must have spent too much time with the ex-pats) who needed neither partner nor encouragement to do his own disco solo.
After they got to “Staying Alive,” however, we decided it was probably best to get going.
Back at the hotel, we were enjoying the ocean breezes and a round of our newly-learned dominoes game when the lights went out. This happens often in the DR, sure, but at a large hotel one would expect them to have a generator or inverter that would kick in after a minute. This didn’t happen. After seeing the level of hotel development and the number of French tourists and expats in the area, we’d begun to be suspicious of our guide book, which had told us that Las Galeras was a sort of undiscovered tourist Shangri-la. But now it seemed that maybe Las Galeras really was at the end of the earth. They hadn’t provided us with a lantern or even a candle, so all we had to see by was the half moon and the tiny light on my keychain. We finished our game by its minute beam, but by the end my thumb was worn out from holding down its button, so it seemed that it was time for bed.
In the morning, we were the only ones in the breezy breakfast patio by the sea. Fresh fruit and juice, eggs, coffee, toast and jam helped rouse us from our beachy stupor. Well, that, and the yowlings of the breakfast room’s resident cat, Tigre, demanding that we share. The other guests seemed to have breakfaster earlier, as a big group of them were out on the lawn doing Tai Chi exercises in the appropriate outfits, even. (How had they known there would be a Tai Chi master here? We certainly hadn’t known until we saw the flyer – in German – on a table yesterday.) It was a bit of an upstairs-downstairs moment, as while the Europeans practiced their Tai Chi on the lawn, three young Dominican men were down on the beach just below doing toe-touches and stretches.
Before we’d come out here, Virgilio had given us the names of two people we should look up. One was the mayor. The other was named “Wow” (though written as Guao in Spanish). I was frankly incredulous that this could be anyone’s name, and of course it was only his nickname, but still. Virgilio told me he was a big man so I surmised that when people saw him, they said “Wow! What a big guy!” The woman at our hotel knew him well (I suppose it would be hard not to in a place of this size) and said she would send for him, telling him to arrive at 8:30 or 9 the next morning. She also said that Las Galeras was full of so many odd names that Guao had begun to seem quite normal to her. She herself had apparently escaped this strange curse of Las Galeras – her name was Juliana.
Just as we were finishing breakfast, two Dominican men came in from the beach and we greeted them in the customary fashion. They disappeared and then reappeared a few minutes later, the bigger one saying, “was one of you looking for me?” “Guao!” I exclaimed happily. “Yes, I have been wanting to meet the famous Guao. I also have a message for you from my friend Virgilio,” I explained, handing him the business card on which the former mayor of Samana had scrawled a note telling Guao that we were his special friends and he should treat us as he would Virgilio himself.
Guao smiled and told me Virgilio was a good man. “I helped him out during his campaign, and when he was mayor, he helped me too.” Later I found out that this district is about 75% PRD, the left-leaning party to which both Virgilio and Guao belonged. Guao had long worked in local politics, helping to incorporate the Galeras municipal district which ran from some distance down the Samana road all the way up to the mountains of the Cabo Cabron peninsula, locally known as Loma Travesada. However, Guao lost in the latest elections to a hardware store owner who had given out free lumber on the day before the elections. Well, the guy might have had the goods, but I can’t imagine he could have had a catchier name.
What we wanted was a ride to Playa Rincon on Guao’s boat. Unfortunately, Virgilio’s note didn’t seem to change the price any. There was one going rate for two tourists going to el Rincon, and that was the rate we got. We took it anyway, since we were anxious to see the place before having to go back to Samana city. Our ride, a fiberglass hull of perhaps 18 feet with a few bench seats, a Yamaha motor, and a whale’s tail painted on the side, awaited us just a few feet down the beach. It was tied up to a palm tree that also served as lamp post. Guao proudly told us that the craft was one of the original 3 boats of that type in Las Galeras; all had been acquired in 1998. “How did people get to El Rincon before that?” I inquired. “Wooden boats,” he explained. That also explained all the abandoned-looking canoe-like craft moldering all over the beach. Modernity had arrived late in Las Galeras, but now that it was here, canoes served little purpose.
So Diosmare, Guao’s companion, pushed us off and we set across the waves in a northwesterly direction. The sea was choppy, especially at the rocky point we had to skirt to enter the bay of Playa Rincon. We were bouncing way off our seats, and it was a bit of a miracle that neither us nor our stuff bounced straight out into the sea. Still only 9:00, clouds hung over the mountains as they do every morning in Samana.
I had been studying the map of the peninsula earlier, and it had shown nothing for the mountainous area I was looking at now, a small peninsula jutting out of the main body of Samana to the northeast. Only Cabo Cabron, the cape at its tip, was marked, but only as a destination for scuba divers, not as a settlement. No towns, no roads, nothing else – could that really be possible? I had asked Diosmare what was over there and now asked Guao for confirmation. They confirmed that people lived in the mountains, growing ñame, plantains, yuca, “and kids,” Diosmare added. The place could be reached by boat to a small port at a dip in the mountains, and then by foot up a trail. I was intrigued – who knows what kind of music could be hiding in this remotest corner of the Dominican Republic? – and made plans to take a little field trip when I return next year. More locally, Guao, who helped to plan the town’s patron saint festivals each year, told me that Las Galeras had its own bachata, típico, and palos groups.
After only a 15 or 20-minute ride, Playa Rincon came into view. The beach was recently hailed by Conde Nast Traveler as one of the top 10 best beaches in the world, and it was easy to see why. The boat leaves you in the protected waters around the back of the rocky point, where you wade through clear, shallow, turquoise (or perhaps larimar) waters onto the beach, just at the point where a cold mountain stream flows into the bay. From there a long narrow strip of white sand sweeps a long arc around the bay and around a corner, where it ends perhaps a half-kilometer away against a cliff that forms the base of the Loma Travesá. Its entire length is backed by a thick stand of coconut palms, and a few of their fruit roll gently back and forth in the surf. There are few sounds to hear other than those of the waves, rough on the day we went because of recent storms, and birds calling out of the palm trees above, entirely unafraid of the people standing right below them. No one lives here, though locals come here to work each morning. It is remote and wild-looking, with the mountains rising steeply up on one side and the palms hiding the rest of the land from view. Mom and I comprised exactly half of the tourists on the beach that morning.
Nonetheless, Playa Rincon has been discovered. Our guide book praised it as being pristine and undeveloped, which is still mostly true because of the difficulty in reaching the place. Yet when we arrived, Mom pointed and exclaimed: “Development!” There were two restaurants on the landing end of the beach, one a cement-block structure right on the water’s edge, the other a typical thatch-roof rancho set back among the trees, both with all the fried fish and drinks you could want. Also, a few plastic tables and a line of white beach chairs were arranged at the landing point, in expectation of perhaps 20 tourists. And after we’d been there a while, we noticed some 4WD vehicles coming up the dirt track leading back to Las Galeras. A few strolling vendors even appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, one of them wearing a three-foot stack of palm-frond hats that completely covered his face, turning him into a sort of Dominican Cousin It.
The beach was long, though, still mostly empty, and nearly perfect. Let’s just hope they don’t build a better road any time soon.
We spent an idyllic two hours on Playa Rincon, bothered only by a couple of horseflies (my natural bug repellent took care of that, though) and a guy looking for change, in dollars, for a $50. Fat chance! The sea was choppy but still good for a swim in the warm water. But ever wary of check-out time, at about 11:30 we figured we should jump back in the boat. This time, we got a better look at some of the tiny, piratey islands just off the coast, including one perfectly flat one with a clump of palm trees right in the center that made it look like a fancy hat. Back at the hotel, we got in one more game of dominoes on our balcony with its fluttery white curtains, and then it was time to return to the Falcon.
On the road back to Samana, we tried to take our time and get some pictures of the interesting things we’d noted on our way out, but with only partial success. I missed my favorite barber shop. But Mom managed to get two enormous cruise ships sitting in the bay, in view just past a ramshackle dock from which Dominican boats left for Cayo Levantado. And we did get to town on time for the folklore show Virgilio had invited us to. They hadn’t started yet, but I found one of the musicians tinkering on an ancient accordion with a screwdriver back behind the bandstand.
This being a clue that nothing was going to happen very soon, Mom and I decided to take a look around the park, which had been filled with craft vendors in honor of the cruise ship tourists’ arrival. We bought a few items, doing our part to support the local economy, while listening in on the vendors laughing about the tourists’ cluelessness. One was particularly amused by the ugly black plastic sack one was carrying her purchases in, commenting that it “looked like she was carrying an old black cat.” “Why would any one give her that?” he wondered aloud in my general direction. “We have nice ones that say ‘thank you’ on them and everything.” He offered to change it for her and she refused indignantly. To a Dominican, always conscious of his appearance, this was very funny indeed.
Before long Virgilio returned – we could tell because we heard him start rapping on the microphone. He really was rapping: improvising rhymes about Samana and tourists to an electronic reggaeton beat. After this interlude, they moved on to the promised folklore show. Unfortunately, the tourists seemed more interested in shopping than in taking a look at the dancers and musicians. (You can bring a cow to water…) At least we were there to enjoy it. The local traditional musicians were there, playing tambora, palo, güira, and accordion, and a group of students in matching outfits of a blue tropical print fabric performed dances along with them. They did many of the classic Samanese numbers like the bamboula and chivo florete. They also did some palos dancing, and I saw that palos is played very differently in Samana: the one long drum was laid on the ground and the drummer sat on top to play it. Behind him, a guy with two sticks beat out ever-changing, improvised rhythms on the drum’s body. A third percussionist played on one head of an upright tambora held between his legs. Only the güira resembled the kind of palos I see and play in Santiago.
After the folkloric portion of the show was over, they moved on to popular music as provided by a guitar band playing both merengue and bachata. They wanted me to play a tune on the accordion, and I tried to oblige, but I couldn’t seem to get any sound out of the ancient instrument – air was escaping from so many holes in the bellows that before I’d played three notes, I’d reached its capacity. I had to beg off simply because I couldn’t figure out how I could get a whole phrase out of the thing. Afterwards, I spoke with the accordionist, a native Samanes of advanced years, so dark that in other parts of the country he’d surely be thought Haitian, and we laughed about the fact that no one but he could play his accordion. I’d been hoping to hear and see traditional merengue redondo at last, but it hadn’t been included in the day’s program. I asked him about it and he told me he was the only musician in town who played merengue redondo, and they usually only performed it out in the countryside on January 21, the day of the Virgen de la Altagracia. You can bet I’ll be back next year for this event.
We could have stayed around talking for quite some time, but there was still more on our agenda. Mom and I planned to stay that night in Las Terrenas, another town populated largely by French-speaking ex-pats, though on the north coast and with a larger hotel and restaurant selection. We had to cross the mountains again to get there so were anxious to set out; we were also hopeful that on the way, if we made good time, we could stop to see the famous waterfall, the Salto El Limon. Naturally, Virgilio had contacts in the tiny mountain town of El Limon, and we were told to look for (a) a Spaniard restaurant owner and waterfall excursion operator called Santi, and (b) a fantastic accordionist, the best in the peninsula, called Santos.
So far, we’d had enormous luck with the weather. Though it had looked ominous a couple of times, we’d had no more than a few drops of rain the whole trip, in spite of the fact that most of the rest of the country was experiencing dangerous amounts of tropical storm precipitation. By mutual agreement, we were not speaking of it, in an attempt not to jinx our trip – just as I would only discuss the Falcon’s performance out of its earshot. (I’d taken mom aside in the park to whisper, “don’t say anything, but I think the car is running pretty good.”) Yet as we reached the mountain’s summit just before El Limon, our luck appeared to run out and the rain started. So much for waterfall trips on horseback.
We looked sadly at all the paradas or roadhouses offering the tours as we passed through El Limon looking for Santi’s, but just as we got to the other side of town, the rain stop. Mom felt that all was not lost and urged me to go back. It was only 4:30, surely there was still time for a quick trip. We hadn’t yet found Santi but I turned back and we stopped at a likely-looking point. A guide met us at the gate and explained that they usually take the last tour at 5:00 but that they had closed early for the rain. If we came back tomorrow, he told us, he would take us for 250 pesos each, round-trip on horse. He also explained to us where the accordionist lived.
We turned around and made for Las Terrenas once again. This time I was looking for the landmark that would lead me to Santos, the accordionist. I didn’t find that, but we did find Santi’s. Looked like a good restaurant, but now it was time to find a hotel. Soon we were back on the coast on a very pleasant, well-paved, two-lane road that skirted the water behind a line of palm trees. We passed the tiny landing strip that serves as the El Portillo airport, from which a tiny propeller plane was just taking off, and then, before we knew it, we were in Las Terrenas.
You can tell you are in Las Terrenas because the road narrows and the traffic increases into a mass of motorbikes and 4WD vehicles, along with the occasional ATV. Then adorable bed-and-breakfasts start popping up in between the trees, most of them built in a kind of tropical plantation style, and most of them French or Dutch-run. It seemed that although the French had been kicked out of Haiti, here they had found another niche on the island. And so had the Haitians, it seemed – we soon noted that many of those who worked in the hotels and stores were indeed Haitians. Here, French was the language of tourism, not English. Even Spanish seemed to be in short supply!
All the hotels were equally adorable and most included breakfast, so we ended up staying at the first one we looked at. It was definitely an island-living type of place: wooden slatted windows rather than drapes or blinds, open woodwork above windows and doors, meaning fans rather than A/C. The roofs were of thatch and inside the ceilings were of wide-set wooden planking. The courtyard was full of tropical flowers, hammocks, and lounge chairs placed along a path where sand and grass mixed together. We loved it – well, except for the shower curtain that kept falling down – and you couldn’t beat the price, at $24 with breakfast for two.
By the time we got settled it wasn’t long til sunset, but we decided to hit the shops before dinner. Many of them had Haitian art and crafts, kinds not sold in Santiago; others had Dominican jewelry and the carved gourds that I’m pretty sure come not from here but from Salcedo. Everyone tried to speak French with us. They had little success.
Night fell, and hunger grew. I knew where to go, though, from my brief jaunt out here last year: El Pueblo de Los Pescadores, the so-called “fishermen’s village” at the river’s mouth, now converted entirely into tiny beachfront restaurants and bars. I hadn’t counted on mud, though. The recent rains made our walking difficult and messy in this town of dirt roads and no sidewalks. The wind off the ocean was kicking up, too, blowing palm fronds every which way. When we made it to the restaurant area, we were looking disheveled and ready to sit a while, but first we had to examine all our options. The restaurants run the gamut from Italian to French to Dominican to Spanish to Japanese, and two were new since last year. Since we’d enjoyed our two-course dinner last night, we decided to do it again in order to try more restaurants.
Our first stop was a brand new tapas bar with modern décor, all in red and black with a cut out of a metal bull above the bar and a nearly lifesize electric palm tree, white lights running up and down its length. We had sangria, Spanish tortilla, olives, and a tuna-potato salada type thing, and just as we were ready to leave the rain started in full force. The wind sounded like it was trying to rip off the tin roof, and water started pouring in through the heavy metal double door that stood open, down the (now muddy) tile steps and into the restaurant. The waiter closed them, then brought us a couple of trilingual newspapers to amuse ourselves with until the rain stopped. Luckily, it didn’t take long. By the time we’d looked at photos of Fefita La Grande’s recent performance in town, read our horoscopes in Spanish and a summary of international headlines in English, the coast was clear.
We crossed the street to our second course, wood-fired pizza at the Pizza Patio. It was too cold in the breeze to sit on their porch, even with their storm curtains tied down, so we took two stools at the bar where we could watch the pizza being made. The place was popular, evidently because you could order pizza for take-out or delivery, too. We ordered one with arugula, eliminating the need for a separate salad. Tasty. But because the wind was still threatening to start something again, there was no time to linger. Plus, we wanted ice cream. We walked as fast as we could through the muddy streets, across the bridge, back to our hotel, but not fast enough – the rain caught up with us at last, thoroughly soaking us, especially when a fellow American in an SUV stopped us to ask for directions to an internet café and then an inordinately long conversation considering that we were standing in the rain. Our little wood-plank room never looked so inviting.
There was some debate in the morning about where the day should take us. We could spend another night in Las Terrenas, giving us a whole day on the beach. Or we could pack up and move on to another town. We definitely wanted to get to the waterfall, and from there we could simply go back down to Samana and out through Nagua, perhaps heading up the coast to see what other beaches we could find. After a walk down the beach, a chat with the beach dogs, and a look at the kite-surfers, we opted for adventure and loaded the car.
It was really only a 15-minute drive back up to El Limon when we weren’t stopping to look at anything. Once in town we went to Santi’s restaurant for water, bathrooms, and an inquiry into road conditions. I already knew that the shortest route, the road from Las Terrenas to Sanchez, was extremely steep and dangerous, and had been subject to mudslides from the recent rains. The road to Samana took us quite a bit out of the way, however. Looking at my maps, I saw a branch that ran from El Limon down to Majagual, halfway to Sanchez, that would save us time if it was any good. The waitress’s advice was, “I wouldn’t recommend it.” Didn’t sound promising.
We drove on to the parada of the 250 peso rides. They confirmed that that road was no good. One woman said, “It’s really steep. I’m from here and it scares me.” Looked like the long way was the only way for us, but we still couldn’t pass up our chance to see the Salto. As we changed into our water shoes, the guides went to get our horses, already saddled up. In five minutes we were in the saddle and on the trail, heading over a grassy ridge.
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