Adventures in the Caribbean: Back to Santo Domingo

This morning we began the day with a plate each from our hotel's breakfast buffet before our van came to pick us up.  It whisked us through the Port-au-Prince streets and we once again found ourselves desperately trying to catch everything we were seeing outside--the people, the garbage, the homes, the streets, and those enormous black pigs again.

We could have driven those blocks for hours and we would never have been able to absorb it all.  

Eventually we got to the airport, through security, and onto the tarmac to board our plane.

We flew back to Santo Domingo, where we spent a couple hours shopping before making our way to the bus stop and then back to Boca Chica.  

Adventures in the Caribbean: Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

Today, Epiphany, we took a single backpack and walked a few blocks into town to catch a mini-bus.  Apparently they all go to the same place, so there was no concern about boarding the wrong one.  Just in case, I stretched my Spanish to the max by asking, “A Santo Domingo?” 

It took us to the highway, where we were directed to switch buses.  This bus was packed, and we thought it was full. 

Nonsense—these buses have hidden seats that fold down, adding significantly to their capacity. 

Andrea and I were pointed towards the front bench, with a man excited to sit between us and practice his very poor English.  He annoyed me because I prefer to be left alone, but he was also somewhat interesting and helpful, and was apparently a Catholic “missionary,” as well as a father desperate to raise money for a medical procedure for his son. 

Anyway, after a passionate, rousing sermon, he sold CDs to an awful lot of the passengers, including me, for 50 pesos, or about $1.  I felt ripped off, but if the guy was a scammer, he managed to scam an awful lot of locals too. 

The bus ride cost 70 pesos each, which we paid en route to the employee who was in charge of collecting money, opening the door, and yelling to potential passengers to let them know where the bus was going.  All in all, it was an impressive, efficient, cost-effective, and slightly intimidating transit system.

. . .

In Santo Domingo we walked along the waterfront to our hotel, the Renaissance Jaragua Marriot.  It is one of Santo Domingo’s nicest hotels, but only cost $100 for the night, a real steal we thought.  We could see the Caribbean from the window of our room.  It was tremendously hot, so we gulped down lemon-lime ice water from a cooler in the lobby, and bought some sandwiches at the café. 

Then we headed back out to get some cash and see the old town.  After a hot, 8 kilometre walk, we had seen most of what we wanted to, which included old churches;

 city walls;

 a fortress;

public squares;

and so on.  

We also saw a big statue of Christopher Columbus. 

. . .

Back at our room we showered and rested for a bit, then went down to find a taxi.  I had brought a little notebook with the names of the places we might need, as well as a few Spanish phrases like “how much to . . .?” and things like that.  Using this I bargained with our cabbie and we settled on 300 pesos for the fare, or about $6. 

The atmosphere outside the stadium was madness, with fans more or less evenly decked out in red or blue, and loud and boisterous.  We queued for tickets, and in retrospect I realize I was supposed to pick a side to sit on—either Licey or Escogido, but I could not understand the ticket seller, so he asked me in English if I spoke Spanish, I said no, and he just handed me a pair of tickets for 1000 pesos.

We got inside—me after a thorough pat-down, and Andrea untouched—and bought bottles of water and ice-cold cans of El Presidente beer, all for about a couple of dollars.  We found our seats, on the Escogido side, it turned out.  We were just below an impromptu band made up of fans, not stadium or team employees like they would be in Canada.

Man, did we have fun.  The game was compelling, but the best part for me was the atmosphere—those Dominicans really know how to get into a baseball game.  Andrea’s highlight was the margaritas, which truly were something else, albeit not as cheap as almost everything else in Dominican ($7!).

Since our flight was early the next day, and since we were in no way invested in the game’s outcome, we left after the sixth inning.  I managed to watch the final two innings on TV in our hotel room—Licey had extended their lead from 3-1 when we left to 7-1.  Escogido briefly made it interesting with two runs in the bottom of the ninth, but 7-3 was the final. Licey went on to win the 2014 championship.

Adventures in the Caribbean: The Hispaniola Plan

Many Canadians love all-inclusive beach vacations down south—low cost, little hassle, high heat, and all the food and alcohol you want. 

But if you’re like me, you can only do so much lying on the beach while drinking tall cool drinks—as lovely as that can be.  If you’re like me, you want some adventure mixed in with your relaxation.

Last week, stuck in piles of snow and way-too-cold weather, my girlfriend Andrea and I scooped up a last-minute, heavily discounted, all-inclusive, one-week Air Transat vacation to the Dominican Republic that left January 3, 2014.  Once we booked the trip, I immediately began scheming ways to get off the resort and see other parts of the island.  Our flight was to Punta Cana, where we would be transferred to our resort a couple of hours west to Boca Chica, a town thirty or so kilometers east of the capital of Santo Domingo. 

The proximity to Santo Domingo made that an obvious place to visit.  I had trouble finding reliable information in English on how to do things like visit Santo Domingo’s old town on our own, but I did find this helpful blog that explained the bus system well. 

Boca Chica is infamous for its prostitutes, but also happens to be a popular beach destination for Dominicans trying to escape the big city, so there is fairly efficient and (by Canadian standards) very cheap transportation between Boca Chica and Santo Domingo. 

Beyond Santo Domingo’s old town, the best idea for Dominican adventure came from a guide book: béisbol.  I am a huge baseball fan, so I persuaded Andrea that we should catch a Dominican winter league game while in Santo Domingo.

So my pre-trip plan was this: once in Santo Domingo we would tour the old town on foot, then taxi to the Estadio Quisqueya, where we would buy our tickets and watch the ball game—one in a playoff round-robin between Santo Domingo’s two teams, the Tigres del Licey and the Leones del Escogido, on Monday, January 6. 

After the game I was less confident about how to get back to Boca Chica, but I read somewhere that a taxi would only set us back $40 or so, which did not seem like the end of the world.

. . . 

On January 2, the night before we left, with my alarm set for 5:00 the next morning, and the taxi scheduled to pick us up at 5:30, I couldn’t sleep and got obsessed with another idea for adventure: visiting Haiti.  Santo Domingo and Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince are less than 350 kilometers apart, after all.

I had already looked into this cursorily, but had given up, deciding it was too much trouble.  I had found out the following: 

·        rental cars are not allowed across the border, so that was out of the question;

·        buses do run between Santo Domingo and Port-au-Prince, but somehow the trip takes at least 8 hours, involves significant hassle at the border, and all arrive in Port-au-Prince after dark—not a situation we as white, Anglo tourists wanted to put ourselves in;

·        kayak.com showed that the fastest, cheapest flight option involved going through Miami, and was exorbitantly priced;

·        commercial ferries run between Santo Domingo and San Juan, Puerto Rico, but not between Dominican Republic and Haiti.

That night, however, as the hours of potential sleep dwindled, I wanted to look again.  I hated the thought of being so close and not getting to see Haiti.  “We can go some other time,” I tried to advise myself; but I was too taken with the idea of seeing Port-au-Prince just four years after the devastating earthquake to allow myself to be dissuaded.

I fired up my laptop and began researching again.  I happened to find the website of a hotel in Jacmel, Haiti that happened to mention flights from Santo Domingo to Port-au-Prince (PAP) on an airline called Aerolineas Mas, a local Dominican airline operating out of Santo Domingo’s secondary airport, La Isabela International Airport (JBQ). 

The link was broken, but I managed to find the airline’s website on Google.  It was entirely in Spanish, but I was able to figure it out enough to realize we could fly roundtrip JBQ-PAP, leaving the morning of January 7, and returning the morning of January 8: the cost, about $300 each  Not cheap, certainly, but not unaffordable either. 

“Maybe this is a crazy thought,” I told myself, “spending that kind of money for a 24 hour visit.”  

But I booked a room for the night of 7^th at the Plaza Hotel, directly across from Port-au-Prince’s famous Champs De Mars, in Port-au-Prince, and one in Santo Domingo for the night of the 6^th, just in case.  I would be able to cancel them at no cost if necessary, and even if we didn’t go, staying over in Santo Domingo after the baseball game seemed to make middle-of-the-night sense.

The next morning en route to the airport, I pitched the idea to Andrea. 

“I really want to go to Haiti,” she said, much to my surprise.

. . .

So it was that the next day, Saturday the 4^th, we were in our hotel’s lobby attempting to buy flights to Port-au-Prince.  This was far more difficult than we expected, because the Aerolineas Mas website’s reservation system seemed to be missing a crucial field for credit card information.  Emails and phone calls to the company went unresponded, so we began assuming that the airline was defunct.  

But now Andrea was almost as motivated as I was, and this morning she managed to discover a second airline—Tortug’ Air—that flew the JBQ-PAP route with roughly the same schedule, and for exactly the same price.  Moreover, their website was nearly identical, except it had the one key field necessary to complete the reservation.

With tickets bought, I emailed the Plaza Hotel in Port-au-Prince to arrange airport transfer for the hefty fee of $50 US. 

Then I spoke to the Boca Chica resort concierge to confirm my plans for getting from Boca Chica to Santo Domingo, and I spoke to the Air Transat representative to ensure it would be okay to abandon our hotel room for two nights.  We were, more or less, all set.