The Dominicans don’t hunt for eggs here, they prefer debauchery and Easter is their favorite time of year to pursue it. They pack the family into the truck with tents, beer, and rum and head to the beach to check out the action. So yesterday we decided to bike our way over to Playa Rincon. No one in town knew how far it was, but the estimates of a few miles sounded like good exercise. And that was the last time I smiled for the next six hours. The hills rolled more up than down and passing trucks would jeer us more than cheer us on. When we told them where we were headed they called us crazy and made motions to peddle faster. We passed by some lovely countryside but I was too focused on keeping my legs moving to notice. It did concern us a bit when we stopped on the side for some water and a local on a scooter with a red cross on his shirt told us not to stop in a remote area because it was “mucho problema aqui con mafioso”, much problems here without other people around. So that gave us some incentive to keep moving since most of the area was desolate. When I stopped in a small gathering of houses at the top of yet another hill, two girls asked me if I was out of gas. All I could do was to try to hold back my panting. They shook their heads when I answered yes we were going to Rincon. Some locals made it a point to walk past us up hills. The joke was lost on no one except us. When we hit the dirt road and I started bouncing violently from rock to rock with my non-suspension bike the passing vehicles enjoyed the entertainment. I could feel the flab on my arms and the chub in my cheeks gyrating to a Euro house beat. After surviving that trial we finally reached the beach only then to swerve through what felt like quicksand. The 2 hour, and what we think was nearly 10 mile, ride was hellacious on our meagerly padded bums. We devoured our grilled fish and coconut bread then loitered around to see if there was any open space on the boats returning to Las Galeras. That’s right, the boat. Because we knew the way back would be twice as far. Luckily we didn’t know the word shame in Dominican.

I’ll blame the week silence on the intermittent internet….

View from the grill at Playa Rincon

But some of the delay was good old fashioned US of A laziness.

After yesterday’s excitement we were looking forward to a nice uneventful day. There was a short but considerable downpour in the morning so we went on a trek for our daily provisions of water, juice, salami, bread and doritos. This time we splurged on peanut butter and crackers for breakfast. Afterwards we negotiated a ride out to Playa Fronton for an exorbant amount of Dominican pesos. This would be our first ride in Caribbean waters and the scenery was more breathtaking than all the brochures and websites we’d seen. Pictures really didn’t do it justice. We rode past huge cliffs with scattered palms and caves. Around a corner the water turned from tidy bowl blue to emerald green and the cliffs opened up to a stretch of sandy beach. There were about 5 other people and a family locals dotted amongst the palms. We walked to the end and jumped over some rocks to find a secluded area that we called home for the day. A little nap here, lunch there, hmm..Steve’s looking red again. As we were having fun with the pagers Steve frolicks in the water and says he found something sharp with his foot. Turns out he stepped on a sea urchin. So we spent the next 20 minutes trying to pry the spines out of his left big toe. The very same big toe that did not get along with the pavement in St. Thomas and ended up losing a chunk of skin a few days earlier. He had a good dozen jabbed into his skin and I sat there with the sharpest object we had, a plastic knife, trying to free the spines from the prison that was Steve’s foot. It really didn’t work, but it did give him an opportunity to practice his zen of accepting pain. In the end he just had to suck it up, not literally cause you bet there’d be pictures of that, and deal with the discomfort. If his foot turns green and he starts seeing purple spots then we’ll deal with that.

Saturday April 8th – I think…
It’s our 2nd full day in Las Galeras on the northeast corner of the Dominican Republic. We arrived Wednesday morning and found a comfy bus to take us the 4 1/2 hours to our nearest big town – Samana. From there, it was a bouncy cab ride down a 10mile dirt road to our current home. This area is growing very quickly. There are huge walled estates sprinkled in between the somewhat impoverished fishing villages. I suppose nothing here is truly “impoverished”, though. Third world, yes. But there appears to be food and warm weather for all. There’s a lot of dogs running around, but they’re all fat, happy and wearing collars.
We had a bit of excitement today. We spent the morning talking with a Bostonian couple that built a house up the road and walked out to a hidden beach she told us about. Had some great fresh pineapple juice and went back into town. Just after we finished lunch, Mary collapsed at the mercado shopping for juice. She’s fine, of course. The people here were great. Even got a ride back to the hotel from someone. The concensus from the locals was dehydration exacerbated by too much pineapple juice. Who would have thought …

We made it out! The last couple days were incredibly hectic and we wouldn’t have made it without some incredible help from Weldon. He must have really wanted to see us leave…
We landed right after lunch in St. Thomas and spent the day recovering from the recent lack of sleep. Now we need to figure out how to repack our luggage to fit onto the puddle jumper that will take us to the Dominican Republic tomorrow. It’s amazing how much space all those little DC power adapters take up and how little luggage space a small plane can have.