Since cruisers are only permitted entry to a few particular ports in the Dominican Republic, we are keeping the boat in Luperón and doing our sightseeing by land. Fortunately, this is easy to do. Luxury buses -- comfy seats, air conditioning, and old American action movies, dubbed or subtitled in Spanish, on video monitors -- run all over the country for ridiculously cheap ticket prices. For about $4.50 each we rode in style to Santo Domingo, a trip of about 150 miles, which took four hours.
The scenery was magnificent, and we spent most of the trip with our faces pressed to the window. We passed over a small mountain range to the Cibao valley, a major agricultural region with extensive fields of tobacco and groves of citrus, cacao, and coffee trees. After a pause in Santiago, the country's second largest city, we rolled on through the countryside. In the distance we could see the huge and mist-shrouded mountains of the Cordillera Central, including Pico Duarte, at 10,417 feet the highest mountain in the Caribbean. As we descended toward the capital we passed miles of irrigated rice paddies and rice processing factories.
Santo Domingo, founded by Christopher Columbus's brother Bartolomé in 1498, is the oldest capital city in the New World. The Zona Colonial -- the old part of the city -- is still surrounded by a crumbling wall. Inside the wall are fortresses, cathedrals, and mansions from the early sixteenth century, some ruins and some fully restored. A few jarringly modern buildings stick out here and there among the narrow streets and stone walls, but for the most part the Zona Colonial remains a monument to the past.
Christopher Columbus, or Cristobal Colón as he's known in Spanish, is without a doubt the city's favorite son. Monuments, museums, street names all honor him; his bones, or what are thought to be his bones, rest in an elaborate marble tomb at the center of a huge cross-shaped museum, the Faro de Colón (Columbus Lighthouse). These bones were found during restoration of the Catedral de Santa María, the first cathedral in the Americas, founded by Columbus's son Diego Colón in 1514. This ancient cathedral, still used today, sits on a lovely open square, called (surprise!) the Plaza Colón. (Sir Francis Drake, on the other hand, is vilified as "that English pirate who sacked our city".)
We stayed in a hotel just down the street from the Plaza Colón, a sort of dormitory / guest house run by an expatriate American who also owns an art gallery and a restaurant. We had learned of Bettye's Guest House from a little info sheet that some of the longer-term residents of Luperón harbor put together and distribute; it was reasonably nice, reasonably inexpensive, and since Bettye speaks English it was an easy way to get started in Santo Domingo.
I've been working on my Spanish, but Dominicans don't speak quite like the Castilians on my language tapes. They seem to understand me, for the most part, but in general I get only about one word in five that's spoken to me. Imagine some Frenchman or Spaniard, who has learned a little British Standard English from a Londoner, trying to get around Alabama or Georgia -- that's about the situation I'm in.
Not too much Spanish is needed, though, since many people in tourism-based jobs in Santo Domingo speak at least some English. It seems a little odd, since most tourists here aren't American. I think I heard more German than anything else spoken among members of tour groups, but since English is the de facto lingua franca (as it were!) of the western world, that's what's used. But it still seems polite to at least attempt to speak the local language, and certainly it got us through a few restaurant meals and taxi rides. (Although in one case we ended up about a kilometer away from our intended destination, due to my imperfect understanding of Spanish, and had to walk the rest of the way.)
Both unofficial and official guides pester tourists at the museums and monuments, with varying levels of English proficiency, historical knowledge, and persistence. We were leeched onto by a seemingly nice fellow in front of the Fortaleza Ozama (Ozama Fortress, the oldest fort in America, constructed in 1503-07), but after he told us for the third time that the Ozama river was named after the native Indian word meaning "deep water", and tried to rush us quickly through the fort and on to other places, we gave him a small tip and asked him to go away. At the Museo de las Casas Reales (Royal Houses Museum, and the first courthouse in America) we had a much better guide, and in the Museo Naval de Atarazana, a museum dedicated to items recovered from historic shipwrecks, the display texts were in both English and Spanish, so we had no need of a guide.
The
whole guide thing, of course, is just a way of getting more money out
of the tourists and into the pockets of locals. It's a little weird
because even those museums which charge foreigners more than locals
have very cheap entry fees -- generally on the order of 10-30 pesos,
or between 60 cents and $2. But the guides want to be tipped a couple
of hundred pesos (we gave our good guide 100 pesos, around $6). At
Tres Ojos, a park containing three water-filled caves and a blue
hole, we were greeted by guides at the gate. "Only 350 pesos!
Includes everything -- guide service, entrance to the caves, and the
boat ride!" We declined, and at the ticket booth bought our entrance
tickets for 20 pesos each. Down in the caves another guide accosted
us. This one wanted 150 pesos, for his services and the boat ride,
but we politely declined again. The scenery was perfectly lovely
without narration. Pathways led around jungle vegetation and down to
each stalactite-framed lake in turn. The water in the lakes was clear
and clean and still. At the third lake the "boat" waited -- a sort of
raft pulled across by ropes, it posed at the black edge of the
largest of the caves like the ferry on the Styx. Charon, who in this
case was a dark-skinned teenager, charged us 10 pesos each for the
roundtrip to the other side. There we crossed a rocky ledge to emerge
in the bright light of the sun by the edge of a large blue hole, sunk
deep in the surrounding limestone.
We frequently walked through the Plaza Colón on our way to the various sights around town, and we'd noticed a particular elegant, historic-looking building on the square. On Friday afternoon we poked our heads inside, to see what it was, and discovered it was city hall -- the first city hall in the Americas, naturally! Most people had gone home early, but a young man named Rinaldo offered to give us a little tour. Although he spoke only Spanish, he spoke slowly enough that we got the general gist of his narration as he showed us the Spanish woodwork and the 500-year-old staircase. Like many public buildings in the U.S., the Santo Domingo city hall displays local artwork. That evening, Rinaldo said, would be a reception honoring the artists of the latest exhibition, and there would be music, and we should come.
So we did. The art was modern, the music African. We were almost the only white faces in the crowd; Dominicans tend to the cafe au lait, although they vary in shade depending on each person's particular mix of Spanish, Taino (native), and African ancestry. There was one other white person, an older man, and he came over to us and asked (in Spanish) if we were from Spain. He was from Barcelona, six months into a year-long visit, and although he spoke no English, I found him very easy to understand since his accent perfectly matched my language tapes. When I said this, he replied that the Dominicans speak "a very poor Spanish." In fact he was quite bigoted, disparaging of not only their accent but also their behavior, intelligence and culture, saying that the local people had forgotten their European heritage, which in his view was clearly the only bit that matters. Of course in his opinion the U.S. has no culture either, but I thought it was an interesting comment on his prejudices that he seemed to prefer conversing with us, in our barely-grammatical, limited Spanish, than with the locals who speak at least a version of his language.
To us uncultured Americans, though, Santo Domingo was a treat. We walked through many other art galleries; the local art tradition is a naive folk-arty style, bright colors and bold strokes. We poked around some of the unrestored ruins, and ate our meals at outdoor restaurants, watching the people go by. (The Dominicans are for the most part quite attractive, and Britt was definitely getting into some serious girl-watching!) And we did a little shopping.
On El Conde, a pedestrian street that's a major shopping area, we found an Ace Hardware where Britt bought new fishing-spear tips, and a camera store where we got new batteries for our watermaker salinity probe for a mere 60 cents apiece -- in the Bahamas, they were being sold for $6.50 each! We are enjoying the low prices here while we can, because everything's much more expensive in the rest of the Caribbean. It was impractical to do any real provisioning in Santo Domingo, so far from our boat, but we'll hit the grocery stores in Luperón and Puerto Plata before we head out. After all, five hundred years ago the Spaniards established a base here so they'd have a place to stock up on inexpensive provisions before setting out to explore the rest of the Caribbean. We might as well follow their example!