Settling in.

I´ve been in Las Terrenas only 8 days now, but it´s all becoming quite normal. Cold outdoor showers? Refreshing. TP in the bin? Sure where else would I put it? Strange men hollering HOLA at me in the street? I just holler back HOLA. Some things are hard to get used to - mosquitos, for one.

Right now, it´s raining. As it has been for the last 2 days. Rain doesn´t bother me,  but we´re well equipped for it in Ireland. Roads, drainage, waterproof roofs...we do rain excellently. Here, not so much. My road isn´t paved so mud rivers covering uneven ground make walking difficult. My zinc roof makes lots of noise in the rain, which was comforting at first, but now not so much. Especially since it started leaking. Now every heavy rain shower causes alarm - are my things getting soaked? Some soakage so far, but nothing that can´t be moved around and dried out. Clothes can´t get dry and start to stink, and nobody has a drier, so I brought them to the laundromat. It cost about €6.50 for 3 towels and a bedsheet, which would buy you 4 hot lunches. And a beer.

But let´s focus on the fun, beautiful part. On Monday, it was a public holiday so I took a trip to a nearby waterfall with my housemates. It´s a popular excursion and most people go up to the waterfall on horseback. We got a guagua there, which can be any sort of vehicle really but in this case was a flatbed truck with space for people to sit in the back and the cab. Cost €1 for the 30 minute drive, with the sun out and the wind blowing our hair back. It was lovely.

I look like a 10 year old going to Disneyworld.

There are tours going from Las Terrenas to the waterfall with transport and lunch included, but we just hopped on the local transport and figured we´d sort it out when we got there. We hadn´t even left Las Terrenas when the guagua driver was offering us deals with his "cousin´s" horses, for RD$400 (€8) each. We accepted, and got brought to a little ranch where they were also making cocoa and coffee. 

Smashing up some cocoa beans.

You have to go up with a guide, though the guide isn´t paid by the ranch, so what you tip them is their salary for the day. My guide was called Dichosa, which means happy, but in another context means damn/bleedin´/bloody, as in "Will this bleedin´ rain ever stop???". She walked beside me in welly boots and led my horse up a muddy, slippy trail. It was like sitting on a ludicrously decorated, uncomfortable chair and being unnecessarily carried up a hill. I´ve never felt more touristy. As you will see in the below photo.

Guiriguiriguiriguirigringaaaa

It was fun though, and a great chance to ask poor Dichosa a gazillion questions about her life. She is from Santo Domingo but came to Las Terrenas on holidays with her girlfriends and met a boyfriend here. She´s married, and has 3 kids, 2 boys and 1 girl. She didn´t finish her secondary education and is now trying to get her high school diploma. She´d like to go to university but she thinks that by the time she´s ready to go, her eldest might be too and she won´t be able to pay for both. She doesn´t know whether she´ll send him off to university full time, because then she can´t keep an eye on him. Some kids from there make the 2 1/2 hour trip to Santo Domingo only on Saturdays. Parents worry, because all sorts of things can happen in the city, especially with girls. They put all their money into their education and they come back pregnant. She says there´s no sex education here in schools, but that it´s starting to change. She explains everything to her 7 year old daughter, and wants her to always feel like she can come to her with questions. She pointed out the shack she lives in, surrounded by lush green, right by the start of the trail. Her kids run around freely and play with horses and other animals. Everyone looks out for the kids. It´s not like that in Santo Domingo, she says, kids can get stolen.

The waterfall was beyond worth it. I don´t think I´ve ever seen anything like it, let alone swam under it. There were quite a few people there. There was a guy with a big blue parrot with a little rope tied around his neck and another with a massive iguana trying to get people to pay for photos with them. We swam in the crisp water and ate our packed sandwiches on lovely clean grass. It was heaven. 

I never expected the DR to be so green, but there you are. 

After a trek downhill and a taxi back (for the same price as the guagua) we went straight to the beach, zonked and totally relaxed. Swim, rest, swim, rest, swim, rest. Heaven.

Obligatory frankfurter/leg photo. Except that no frank is that white.

Mi casa

I live in a house owned by the foundation I´m working for. By Dominican standards, it´s really nice. By European standards, it´s extremely basic.

These are great things about my house:

-5 minutes from the beach.

-Secure 

-Outdoor shaded area

-Basic facilities - shower, stove, washing machine (kind of, I´ll explain later), flushable toilet (well...more about that in a minute too).

-Lovely housemates that want to go out and do fun things

-A decent bedroom to myself

These things are kinda funny about my house:

-The washing machine. It´s outside, and has two drums. One is the washing part that is filled manually with a tap. It drains from a pipe in the bottom. Then you transfer everything to the other drum, which spins. Then you hang it up. 

-There is a patch of brown grass beside the fence that separates our garden from the house next door, which has a family of Haitians living in a concrete shed. The grass is brown because the little boy pees through the fence. We figure it´s not such a big deal. He doesn´t have a bathroom, where else is he going to pee?

- We have an outdoor shower and an indoor shower. The indoor shower has such low pressure there´s just no point. So we all shower outside. There is no hot water but it´s not necessary.

Our refreshing, high-pressure shower. Don´t worry Mom, there´s a modesty curtain (a bedsheet on a stick) we can pull across!

The only thing I don´t like is that our toilet, like almost all Dominican toilets, flushes but can´t take any toilet paper. ANY toilet paper. So everything goes into the bathroom bin. Which is kind of gross. So far, it´s been ok. But inevitably I´m going to get sick from food cleaned in the tap water (not drinkable) or something and then the toilet situation is gonna be unpleasant. But it´s like that all over the country, with the exception of some newer hotels. 

I was shown around Come Pan, the barrio where the locals live, and my house seems like a mansion in comparison to what I saw there. But that´s another post for another day, I have to go back and take more photos to do it justice. Other things I want to write about are food, the men, the women and the dogs. But all in good time.

YES! IT´S SO GOOD!

I took a guagua (public bus) to Las Terrenas from Santo Domingo. It took 2 1/2 hours, in which I made friends with Isabel, a Frenchwoman, Jesús, a Dominican traffic cop, an American couple and a family of Germans/Dutch (?). There´s so much chat in this country, it´s like Ireland in the sun.

Las Terrenas is beautiful. It´s busy, noisy and in many parts it´s as dirty as Santo Domingo. But it´s so colourful, and lively, and right on the ocean. My new bosses met me at the bus stop and brought me to my house, which I´m sharing with 2 Basque girls and an American girl, all of whom are lovely. I walked on the beach and marvelled at how warm the Atlantic can be. I had a fresh mango & orange juice in a beach bar and tried to spot the humpback whale that other people at the bar had seen on its way to Samaná bay for calving and mating time (it´s like a whale maternity hospital in Copperface Jack´s). Then I joined my colleagues for a free Zumba class on the beach (that was hilarious). An amazing first day. 

I imagine the rest of this blog is just going to be all the beach photos I don´t want to flood Facebook with. I don´t care if nobody reads this, I hope I just keep writing so I can record this experience for myself. I´m very happy I came here.

The beach 5 minutes from my house!

A one-eyed street dog. She was cool.

I´m here! Agh!

Well, I made it. I flew Dublin - Madrid, had a couple of nights in good old Dridzy, saw all my friends and dragged my severely hungover ass to the airport the next day. Bad way to start a transatlantic flight. I was sandwiched between a Spanish man who is married to a Dominican woman, and a Dominican woman going home for the first time in 2 years. They were so sweet and enthusiastic and friendly. By the time I got off the plane, 8 1/2 hours later, I felt like a whole person again. Good thing too, because Santo Domingo is crazy, especially if, like me, you´ve never been in Central or South America before.

I got through immigration and wanted to get a taxi. But I didn´t really want to get in a car with any of the people shouting "TAXI! TAXI! YOU WANT TAXI LIIINDA GUAPA???" but soon copped that I had no choice so I bargained with one guy who was trying to charge me double what my airplane friends told me to pay. It worked. Then he passed me on to another driver. Who radioed another driver. All above board, mind you. They were licensed taxi drivers. It´s just how they do it.

I got into Santo Domingo, checked into my hostel and went to explore and eat. It´s cray. It´s so dirty, and I was in the nice part, the colonial area. There are deep gutters between the road and the footpath, filled with rubbish and brown water, all manners of trash filling the footpath with street dogs rooting around for food. Traffic is insane, and there are no pedestrian crossings. I´m amazed I didn´t see someone ploughed down. Cars stopped to let me cross because I obviously wasn´t getting anywhere if they didn´t.

The men hiss and holler at you in the street, but they aren´t aggressive. There are children EVERYWHERE and most people seem to be in family groups. I arrived on a fiesta day, so families were out having drinks and dinner on terraces. In the Plaza de España little kids rode motorised toy cars and everyone flew kites. There was karaoke, and mostly fat Dominican men sang love songs. People cheered and danced and teenagers ran around from family to family. Everyone was so friendly. Even the street dogs, who looked remarkably healthy. And despite all the rubbish, it didn´t smell. Perhaps because the street dogs had cleaned out the organic matter.

Kites in the Santo Domingo sky

But, I was only stopping off in Santo Domingo for the night. And now I´m in Las Terrenas. Which my next post will be about. Oh God it´s so different from Santo Domingo.