Pico Duarte is not only the highest mountain in the Dominican Republic, it's also the highest peak in the entire Antilles. As we are former mountain dwellers, now cruising on a boat named after a high Colorado mountain, naturally we wanted to climb it. But first we had to get there.
Up to this point I haven't said much about public transportation here in the Dominican Republic, so perhaps a little explanation is in order. Major long-distance routes, such as Santiago to Santo Domingo, are served by very nice luxury buses. But most intercity buses -- called guaguas -- are far from luxurious. They are generally minivans intended to seat 8, 12, or 15 people, but the Dominicans do not consider them full until they have at least 12, 16, or 20 people squashed into them. If you're lucky, there will be room in the tiny luggage compartment for your bag -- more frequently, it will sit on your lap. Two men work each vehicle: the cobrador, whose job it is to find people to squash in, and to collect the money during the ride, and the chofer, whose job it is to drive as fast as possible, honk the horn as much as possible, and pass other vehicles as closely as possible. As is typical with island automobiles, most guaguas are patched together with duct tape and baling wire long past what any American would consider its useful life. The guaguas for each destination wait at various stations in each town, taking on passengers until full, then head off to the destination town where they drop passengers off pretty much wherever is requested. For around 20 pesos ($1.25) it's a cheap if uncomfortable ride.
To get to Parque Nacional Armando Bermudez, a distance of perhaps 100 miles, we had to take a succession of five guaguas: Luperón to Imbert, Imbert to Santiago, Santiago to La Vega, La Vega to Jarabacoa, and finally Jarabacoa to La Ciénaga. Each time, we told the driver what our next destination was, and he dropped us off near the appropriate station, where the waiting cobrador waved his arms, shouted the name of the destination, and upon our nods, shoved us and our packs into the next guagua.
We started getting into the mountains on the leg to Jarabacoa, but we were so squashed in that it was difficult to see the scenery. We did notice some fabulously elegant houses, and a fancy development called "The Dominican Alps", places which would not look out of place outside Denver, but which seemed a world away from the tiny tin-roofed shacks of the rural areas here. Jarabacoa turned out to be a busy gateway town in a lovely setting, and everyone who saw our backpacks nodded and pointed to the mountains.
We waited for a while at the corner our previous driver had indicated to us, but saw no minivans. Instead, a beat-up old Toyota pickup drove up, and people started tossing their luggage in the back. A woman motioned me over and told me, in Spanish, that the truck was the guagua to La Ciénaga, so after adding our packs to the pile we climbed up and found precarious seats. There were six adults and three infants in the cab, and nine of us outside perched on the luggage. With a lurch, we were off.
This time we had an up-close view of the spectacular scenery, as the narrow road wound steeply upward along the edge of a gorge. A whitewater river ran far below us. We passed a few stores, bars, and houses, clinging to the side of the canyon (as we were clinging to the sides of the truck!), and every once in a while a waterfall splashed in at a switchback. In some places, swimming pools had been constructed inside the switchbacks, filled by the water pouring in from the side waterfalls. It reminded me a little of Poudre Canyon in Colorado.
It was quite a road, but unfortunately the Toyota was not up to the task. In addition to being only 2-wheel-drive and ridiculously overloaded, it had a malfunctioning fuel pump, so every so often (usually in the middle of steep sections) it would make stuttering noises and slowly lurch to a stop. Everyone in the back would jump out, one guy would grab a rock from the side of the road and use it to chock the wheels, and we'd all push until the truck got started again, then run back up and jump in. Sometimes it wouldn't start at all. Then the driver would get out and lift the hood, revealing a haphazard collection of engine parts which looked like they had been repaired many times, never by anyone who knew what he was doing, and all the men would gather around, poking tentatively at the various bits. Eventually enough fuel would percolate through to where it was supposed to be to get the guagua going again, and we'd make another mile or so before the engine started sputtering again.
It took us over two hours to get up to La Ciénaga, elevation 1800 meters. For the privilege of sitting on top of the luggage, we were charged what I thought was a blatant rip-the-foreigners-off fare of about $3 each, although I later found out that this relatively high (for the DR) price is standard for this long and low-traffic route.
The entrance to Armando Bermúdez National Park was a short walk away. The park office was a large but simple building, most of the rooms empty or with a few ancient beds with older mattresses, and there were picnic tables and camping areas behind it. In the office we attempted to negotiate with the park warden, the park secretary, and the four or so guides that had followed us in. Of course, none of them spoke English, so we had to do it in Spanish, and it was tough going.
The entrance fee for the park was 50 pesos each, or about $3. Park regulations required hikers going up Pico Duarte to be accompanied by a guide; there was an organized guide association, and the fee was fixed at a reasonable 200 pesos/day (about $12), so it was not as scammy as we feared. The problem was that each of the guides, as well as the warden, insisted we needed to take a mulo (at 125 pesos/day), for the gear. We were perfectly content to carry our own backpacks, we insisted. But the guides were adamant -- none of them even owned backpacks, therefore they needed the mule, therefore we needed the mule. Then it turned out that although we had planned a two-day hike, everyone is required to pay for a minimum of three days. Totalled all up, it came to 1075 pesos, a lot more than we had expected to pay, but after a lot of arguing during which we probably came off as seriously ugly Americans, it was agreed that a flat 1000 pesos (around $60) would cover it. After we paid and signed the register, the park warden showed us to our "room" in the park building -- all the rooms with beds were taken, so we spread our sleeping pads and bags on the floor, then headed outside to wander around for a while.
Lots of people were at the park. It was Thursday night of Easter Week (Semana Santa), a holiday in the Dominican Republic roughly equivalent, in terms of local attitude, to Labor Day weekend in the US. In other words, it's an excuse for partying, camping, and going to the beach, with the original meaning of the holiday completely irrelevant to just about everyone.
After we explored the beginnings of a few trails, we headed back to the park building, planning to put together a dinner out of some of our camping food. (We didn't bring our camp stove on the boat, so all our food for the hike was no-cooking-needed stuff, things like bread, cheese, sausage and chocolate.) A man in his fifties greeted us, which wasn't unusual because most people at the park greeted us as we walked by, but what was unusual was that he did it in English.
"Hello! You Americans? I lived in America ten years. Boston, New Jersey." (Pronounced "Yersey".) Manolo lived in Santiago, and he was at the park with his extended family, nearly twenty strong, for a long weekend camp-out. His English showed that his ten American years had been a long time ago, but between his English and my Spanish, which were about at the same level, the three of us were able to communicate just fine.
Manolo
insisted we come over to his family's camp, which sprawled over a
large section of the park's picnic area, and meet his clan. We were
immediately shown to seats around the picnic table and poured drinks
of soda and of rum, as each person in turn was introduced to us.
Theirs was a tangled clan, cousins and brothers and nephews and
aunts, and we never quite did figure out exactly how everyone was
related to everyone else. Some spoke no English at all, others spoke
a little, and a few of the younger cousins spoke quite a bit.
Eighth-grader Alex was actually an American citizen, who lived with
his mother in the US but had been spending a year with his father in
the DR, and he was perfectly fluent in both languages. Whenever
anyone wanted to say something that their English or our Spanish
couldn't handle, we turned to Alex to translate. But overall our
conversation was dizzyingly bilingual, zooming from one language to
another and back again, and what it lacked in grammar was made up in
passion. We talked politics (US and Dominican), sightseeing (US and
Dominican), baseball (most of the top US major league players are
Dominican), and a little bit about just about everything else.
After dinner (which they invited us to stay for, over our token protests), we crept back to the park headquarters and our beds. It was hard to get much sleep, though, because the other rooms were all filled with noisy Dominicans who yakked until late, and when they woke up in the middle of the night they would talk in normal voices rather than in whispers. Far too early in the morning, it was time to pack up and head up the trail.
Our guide (selected by the guide association, I suppose; we didn't choose him) was named Carlos, which with the local accent came out sounding something like "Ky-lo". As it turned out, he was a terrible guide. He spoke no English; in fact, he spoke very little in any language, mostly just grunting or muttering three-word sentences in Spanish. Most Dominicans we met were friendly, and despite our limited Spanish they would try to converse with us anyway, but not sullen, uncommunicative Carlos. I don't think he smiled on the whole trip. But we hardly needed a guide on this trail, as it was well-marked and obvious the whole way (unlike the route up Loma Isabel de Torres in Puerto Plata) so for the most part we just hiked on ahead with a little daypack, while Carlos coaxed the "mule" (actually an overworked and equally sullen pony) up the trail with the rest of our gear.
The
trail itself was quite interesting, as it wound from the bamboo
jungle along the Yaque river, up through dense rainforest filled with
lizards and richly scented orchid-like flowers, and past the cloud
level to a dry pine forest like that in the New Mexico mountains. In
this highest zone, the sky was a rich, dark blue we hadn't seen since
Colorado, and the mist shrouded the valleys below us, so although we
got great views of the surrounding mountains, we couldn't see nearly
as far as the oceans.
We eventually caught up with a group from Santo Domingo, and we chitchatted with them a little as we traded the lead back and forth. A few groups came down as well, all with their mulos, and there was one small group of Americans, riding rather than hiking. But in general there was far less traffic than we saw hiking the Colorado "Fourteeners" -- at least until we got to Caseta La Compartición.
The
caseta (hut) sits about 12 miles up the trail; it's the place
where hikers spend the night before the final 3-mile push to the
summit the next day. It's a pretty rough structure, just intended for
protection from the elements, with a cocina in back with a big
cast-iron wood stove for cooking, and a few extremely stinky
outhouses. Oh, and two telephone booths. No kidding. Codetel, the DR
phone company, is one of the main sponsors of the park and the trail
to the top of Pico Duarte, so in addition to having their little logo
at the bottom of each of the trail signs, they installed two
solar-powered wireless pay phones just outside the hut. People were
using them, so I guess they worked just fine.
There must have been well over fifty people at the hut. Most of them had spent the previous night there, summitted that morning, and were going to stay another night before heading down. There was a French-speaking group, a church group from Chicago along with an affiliated church group from Santo Domingo, and a few other small Dominican groups. We were the only individuals not on a group trip, and (with the exception of a few of the guides) probably the oldest people there. Lots of people had brought tents, but still, there was no room in the hut, so since rain looked unlikely, we laid out our rain gear as an improvised tarp, and set up our sleeping pads and bags under the sky. This astonished and worried many of the Dominicans, who warned us about how terribly cold it was going to get, but in fact it probably only got down to the lower 50's (which I suppose is sub-arctic in the minds of these tropical folk!), and our down bags kept us toasty.
At 5 a.m., Carlos woke us to begin the attack on the summit. We very reasonably pointed out that it was too dark to see well enough to hike, that it was only four kilometers to the summit, and that we were absolutely not going to get out of bed for another hour. He grudgingly allowed us our extra hour of sleep, but by 6:30 we had our gear packed up and were on the summit trail. (The pony stayed behind, no doubt thankful for the break.) Britt and I are fast hikers, and we soon passed the others who'd started before us, and outdistanced Carlos. It was a steep hike, and actually we had to descend quite a bit before starting up toward the 3,087 meter high summit. We arrived at the top at 8:15, and had it to ourselves for ten minutes before the first of the others began to show up.
The top of Pico Duarte was covered with all sorts of interesting junk. In addition to a survey marker, the rocky summit was adorned with a huge and tattered Dominican flag, a metal pole, a wooden cross, and a bronze bust of Duarte. There were also several plaques with assorted messages, set into the rock. One said (in Spanish) something along the lines of, "Our most glorious patriot deserves your respect," but from the amount of graffiti on the rock and the bust, it was clearly ignored. The first Dominicans to arrive behind us ignored the plaque too, throwing their arms around Duarte's bust and giving him big smooches, putting their baseball caps on his head, and so on.
After nearly an hour at the top of the Caribbean, we started back down. At the caseta we refilled our water bottles and had an early lunch, then Carlos loaded up the mulo and we retraced our steps down the trail. Actually, "down" is a misnomer here, because the trail to the hut had gone almost over the top of a nearby mountain, then down its shoulder to the notch where the hut sat, so the first few hours were spent gaining altitude rather than losing it. But we picked up speed when the trail really did start heading down, and we made it back to the park headquarters by 5:00 p.m. We dropped our gear in one of the rooms and walked the short distance to La Ciénaga, where we bought a couple of ice-cold El Presidente cervezas to celebrate our successful ascent.
We managed to snag a couple of beds in the headquarters building this time, but in the middle of the night three drunk Dominicans came in to take the other beds in the room, waking us up. Then a few hours later, some even drunker people came in the building (although fortunately not into the room) and started raising hell. The park warden, a little old man named Julio, came out from his room and yelled at them a while, and eventually he ended up getting out his shotgun, and that ended the argument right there.
We were looking forward to sleeping in, but around 8:00 a.m. Julio came in and told us the guagua to Jarabacoa would leave soon. We packed up our stuff, but it had already left, so we sat out on the porch eating the remains of our food (we were down to a few rolls and half a sausage) while we considered our options. We'd run into Manolo the night before, and he'd said that if we had transportation problems he would take us to Santiago. So we found him and asked if please maybe we could hitch a ride with him, and of course it was no problem at all. There was no room in any of the cars, but he was driving a great big Daihatsu truck, something that José, one of the cousins who was an engineer, used for work, and he arranged the luggage such that we'd have a nice place to sit in the truck bed. Joining us in the back were three of the teenagers, Alex, Hernando, and Carolina, and we all had a great time, shrieking and laughing and hanging on as the truck lurched down the steep mountain road.
In Jarabacoa, the convoy stopped in front of a building with no sign, just an open door and a little display case just inside what looked like someone's living room. It turned out to be a sweets shop. A favorite Latin American treat is dulce de leche, a kind of milk fudge, and we had brought a coconut-flavored block of it, bought at the Santiago supermarket, along on our hike. The dulce de leche in this shop bore no resemblance to the dense, shrink-wrapped stuff we'd devoured on the mountain. These sweets were gooey and gloppy, wrapped in cylinders of some kind of bark, and they tasted absolutely heavenly. It was like the difference between Chips Ahoy and cookies from grandma's kitchen.
After we'd all eaten a little dessert, we hopped back in the truck and continued on toward Santiago. We hadn't gone very far when José, in the lead car, stopped again. This time it was a roadside stand with a whole pit-roasted pig on a big table. Britt and I hung back in the truck bed, but the rest of the family beckoned us to join them. The stand owners hacked off hunks of roast pork and put them in a styrofoam dish in the middle of a small table, and we all tore at the bits with our fingers and chomped them down. Delicious! Alongside the pork there were plates of a waxy whitish vegetable that tasted a little like potato. This was yuca, and when I asked one of the women how to prepare it she explained slowly in Spanish for me; José overheard and went over to the "kitchen", returning with a few raw yuca roots for me to try cooking back on the boat. We had contributed a few dollars for gas money, but they waved us away when we tried to kick in a little for lunch.
Finally we were on the road again to Santiago, and this time we got to see the scenery we'd been too squashed to see on the way up. Down in the Cibao valley we got on the highway and zoomed the last bit at 60 mph before arriving in the city. They stopped at a place where we could catch a city "bus" (actually a passenger car) to the guagua station we needed, and after an emotional goodbye with the rest of the family, the three kids we'd been riding in the back with escorted us to the car, gave the driver instructions for us, and then waved madly as the car pulled away. For my part, I was nearly in tears. That whole family was so incredibly warm and friendly to us, practically adopting us for the weekend, and it made our whole experience in the Dominican Republic just that much more special. We will be very sad if we don't hear from them by email soon!