Admirals Log:
DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
We were so glad that we had decided to make our own minds up about DR as we had spoken to so many cruisers who recommended we avoid it as it's so corrupt and expensive, with everyone you deal with expecting a bribe of sometimes hundreds of dollars US!!!
We just spent one night anchored off Isla Saona, off the eastern end of DR, - (where there are no officials so no need to check in) and then went onto Punta Salinas the next day to check in, as David had read that it's a small port that doesn't have many cruisers coming through so the officials haven't learnt to be too greedy!!
Well we really enjoyed it. It has such a vitality to it and everything goes at such a crazy pace with very little adherence to law and order as we know it, but somehow it all seems to work! We only stayed about 10 days as we had guests arriving in Jamaica in a few weeks but it was definitely worth it.
It was different than we have encountered anywhere else. It's certainly poor but not with the hopeless apathetic feel that some other places we have visited had. In the front of the big supermarket was a guy in civilian clothes with a pump action shotgun standing guard against shop lifters!!! Not that I was considering it but it certainly was a pretty effective deterrent!!!! There is obviously crime but everyone we dealt with were fine.
Things are really cheap as well - Christine gave a street vendor the equivalent of $1 US and got 18 mangoes!!! What do you do with 18 mangoes!!!!
Here are some examples of its craziness from when we hired a car and drove to the Jarabacoa valley : (by the way we didn't see one car accident in the whole time we were there)
Motorbikes are often the mode of choice, but most don't use a helmet or have protective clothing, most don't even have headlights or taillights for night driving and weave in and out of the traffic at crazy speeds
They tow anything behind their motorbikes, including a big trailer filled with huge palm trees!! or this guy who had 4 live goats in his saddle bags!! We counted 6 as the most people on one motorbike!
talk about back seat driving!!
Just hanging out!!!
We were driving down the new 3 lane motorway that you paid a toll to go on, after a hectic day touring and hiking, latish in the evening and all very tired (with David the most exhausted of all of course) when we saw bright lights coming towards us from the other direction along the edge of the road. The motorway had concrete barriers down the middle and wire fencing down the sides. We were traveling in excess of 100kms/hr and the unlit motorbikes use the edge of the road to go on so that hopefully no-one hits them! The lights coming towards us were flying along as well and then just before they passed us they turned off - apparently to avoid paying the toll there is a place they can cross across the median barrier and go down the wrong side of the road and link up - through a gap in the fencing -to a side street that works as an off and on ramp after the toll booths!!!!!! We ARE talking about going 100 plus kms per hr!!!
I was so glad I didn't have to do the navigating!! I think it would have ended up in either an accident or a very messy divorce as David would have been so fed up with me!! Laura (my daughter) very kindly said to me once that not only do I have no sense of direction but also have no spacial awareness at all!!! She assured me that I do have lots of good qualities but navigation is NOT one of them. What with the speed the traffic travels at, (it reminded me of the traffic in Paris and Rome but on steroids!!!) and the road signs all in my non existent spanish, it would have been a recipe for disaster! Thank goodness for our friends Christine and David as navigators!!
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Salinas foreshore
It had a lovely hotel (that had a local bus stop right outside the door) that would let you use their pool for a minimal cost and the owner spoke good english and was really helpful. He organised for all the officials to come and see us.
We paid $105 US for all our processing including a $20 tip/bribe to be divided among them all. The thing that pissed David off was that as soon as they met you they said propina propina which means tip tip!!!
It's different if they give good service but they hadn't even done their basic job at this stage!! David and I just did the dumb tourist gig of non comprende and eventually they shut up!! (you get up to 6 people coming on board tromp all over your boat and basically doing nothing) We have read of people who have paid up to $700!!!!! We think the official price is somewhere between $63 - $90 depending on who you talk to and what site you are reading, so we didn't think we did to badly. They did go and talk to another American couple - David and Christine - who can speak some spanish, when we went back to the hotel and got them to interpret what propina meant!!!
In Salinas they harvest huge amounts of salt and the trucks were continually being loaded all day at the west end of the harbour, not that it disturbed us.
Also checking out can be just about as bad but we went to Barahona (as you are not allowed to check out in Salinas) and David absolutely refused to give any tip/bribe, saying that he had paid $20 at the previous port for both!! to say they weren't happy is a bit of an understatement!! In fact the guy in charge rang the previous place in front of us and gave the guy an absolute bollocking!! But David stuck to his guns and we didn't pay any more!! Good on David! I just kept in the background!!
We met a lovely couple from America - Christine and David - who were cruising with their 5 yr old grandchild Mark, that they were raising, and we hired a car together and had some great adventures!! Apart from the driving I mean!! (my David did all the driving )
Jarabacoa Valley is a huge fertile valley that produces the most of Dr's coffee beans and fruit and veges. It was truly beautiful with stunning waterfalls and lush scenery.
We went on a walk down to a lovely waterfall - when I say went down I MEAN DOWN - it was really steep and way down but well worth it!
The water was crystal clear but cold!!
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My David and Christine are dwarfed by the falls - It was a very long way down
You can see a glimpse of the falls through the trees
We stopped off a coffee plantation and factory that had the best coffee I have ever tasted!!! the dried beans were so mellow and full of flavour you could eat them like crunchy lollies!! Just with a little more buzz than your average M&M!!!!
They took in coffee beans from the farmers all over the valley and paid according to how many of these boxes they filled
