beyond Santo Domingo

I may as well warn you: this is going to be long. But this weekend was the first time I finally went to the beach after living in the Caribbean for a month (I know, something is clearly wrong with me), and the first time I escaped from the bustle of Santo Domingo for the countryside.

On Saturday I went with some friends to Guayacanes, a beach about 35 minutes outside the capital. It was nice, but my standards for beaches are impossibly high after spending time on the Samaná peninsula in the north and on the southwestern coast of the country on previous trips. The best part about Guayacanes was hanging out with some buena gente and getting to know the cousins of one my friends here. We mostly played football/dunking and jumped around yelling every time one of those 10-minute Caribbean rainshowers passed through. You don’t realize how warm the ocean is until a curtain of cold rain washes past, turning the surface of the water into beautiful silver pinpricks. And we ate beach food, of course – pescado frito (deep-fried fish), tostones (deep-fried plantains), and yaniqueque (deep-fried dough). There seems to be a recurring culinary theme.

I thought I was too exhausted to go out on Saturday night, but as usual I was wrong. My roommate, her visiting friend, and I went to see a live merengue band playing (and dancing) furiously in a plaza in the Colonial Zone. When that ended, we headed to La Espiral, a club/bar a few blocks away. La Espiral was definitely one of the coolest places I’ve been to in Santo Domingo. They play pretty much all of my favorite Bob and Damian Marley songs, plus a good blend of hip-hop and dancehall. The crowd there is a unique mix of foreigners and Dominican youth who have opted for an alternative to the techno-blasting, hyper-air-conditioned lounges of the Colonial Zone that sometimes ask for identification if your skin is too dark (it’s happened to me). The events that La Espiral hosts and publicizes are also a bit outside of mainstream culture in the capital. On Saturday we saw a live performance of palo music, which, if you can ignore the fact that the musicians are singing in Spanish, sounds like something straight from West Africa. It was definitely one of the coolest musical performances I’ve ever seen – and La Espiral has palo nights on a weekly basis!

On Sunday we started The Grand Move into our new apartment. We’re already planning the obligatory housewarming party, though we haven’t actually finished moving everything into the new place. Previously undiscovered perks are that I can see the ocean from my bedroom windows and that there is a little shop a block away where a couple makes all-natural, homemade ice-cream. Good thing there is also a gym a few blocks down! Sunday night found us once again at the outdoor son concert, which is always a lot of fun. Imagine a huge crowd with people of various ages, complexions, and nationalities all dancing and singing along with the band, which has its own memorable personality. There is nothing like this in the US.

On Monday, my roommate, her friend, and I left Santo Domingo for the countryside. We went with a friend who is a fellow William & Mary alum and a current Peace Corps volunteer here. He lives in Canoa, a small, dusty town outside of Barahona, which is the largest city in the Dominican Republic’s southwestern region. Until we got outside Santo Domingo’s city limits, I’d forgotten how *beautiful* the Dominican campo is. In Canoa everything moves more slowly. I’m always fighting for my right to walk down the street in the capital, threatened on one side by speeding guaguas and motorcycles, and on the other by more out-of-control vehicles and also men (see my Sept. 17 post). But in Canoa, we walked in the middle of the street without a problem. The barrage of smells that I am accustomed to no longer accosted my senses (garbage, cigarette smoke, excrement – mostly from donkeys and dogs, but you never really know, exhaust fumes, etc.). And it was quieter – not silent, though; my theory on the Dominican Republic (that silence doesn’t exist in this country) still holds true, as I could barely fall asleep to the nocturnal cacophony of what sounded like dying cows and every dog within 10 km barking at the top of its lungs.

But the campo is indeed tranquilo, for the Dominican Republic. We walked to the canucos (small plots of farmland) at sunset, where many residents of Canoa raise plátanos (plantains) to sell. We sat outside (disgustingly covered in Deet) and talked to my friend’s host mother. We sat outside and ate sandwiches. We sat outside and drank soda at a colmado. We sat outside and listened to music at an outdoor bar. Then we sat outside and looked up at the stars. Much of the social life of Canoa (as well as the DR as a whole) revolves around sitting outside in various locations, typically in white plastic chairs. But the sky was beautiful. I saw 7 shooting stars! Maybe it’s my nickname, or maybe I just keep my neck craned longer than most people do, but I always see an uncanny number of shooting stars. Luckily the electricity didn’t go out until I was almost finished my bucket shower, and by then I was sufficiently acquainted with the “bathroom” that I was able to feel around for my towel. You hear “se fue la luz” (“the lights went out”) a lot here; it’s a national problem that has become a fact of life in this country. Where we live in the capital, we’ve been lucky to have lost power only a couple of times, for just a few hours each time. But there are some places, like Canoa, where blackouts are a daily occurrence. OH, and I got some amazing peanut butter, thanks to my friend. Another Peace Corps volunteer has been working with a women’s group making peanut butter. I’m not really overly into peanut butter to begin with, but this is the most amazing stuff I’ve ever tasted…I’m totally addicted.

The next day we set out for la Ciénaga, a small town along the southwestern coast. A couple of guagua rides through the gorgeous coastal mountains, and we finally arrived. A fellow passenger asked us, “who do you know in la Ciénaga?” We confessed that we knew no one, and she replied “well, now you know me. It’s better to walk around with someone you know.” Our amazing new friend then let us keep our backpacks in her house while she accompanied us to a beautiful nearby river, to lunch at a little restaurant on the side of the road, and to the beach. The beaches of the DR’s southwestern coast are incredible. My first experience with the region was on a trip to Paraíso, another small town outside Barahona, almost three years ago. The coast was even nicer than I remembered, and the area is virtually untouched by tourism. I have trouble understanding why, when the water is so blue that I could have sworn I’d walked into a painting. Rivers leap out of the mountains and trickle down between palm forests until they reach the sea, whose waves are significantly more commanding than the calm, languid waters of Guayacanes and Boca Chica, near the capital. Accompanied by our friend and her daughter and nieces, we swam in the river and in the ocean, and tried not to trip over the many small pebbles that line the coast instead of sand. Thanks to the didactic demonstration of my young hosts, I learned how to recognize the wild almonds that were strewn across the beach and how to pound them open with rocks to reveal the freshest, most delicious almonds I’ve ever eaten. I tried in vain to capture everything from behind my camera lens, but as usual I found this a futile exercise. Words are scarcely better to describe the incredible generosity of our new friend, who made us feel so at home, and her adorable daughter and nieces, who demanded photo after photo (again, my little Canon point-and-shoot is incapable of capturing the essence of their beautiful smiles). Our new friends have extended to us an open invitation to return whenever we want, at which point we’ll get to see the larimar mines (larimar is a light blue precious stone that is found only in the DR) and be fed a large amount of fish.

We were loathe to leave, but we wanted to return to Santo Domingo on Tuesday night. After all, I am getting paid to do research, and my William & Mary workaholic sensibilities are well-ingrained; with so much to do on my research, it’s hard to justify more than a few days’ reprieve. Lately I’ve started to consolidate into prosaic form the pages of literature review that are steadily accumulating. Thus I will not look up in a panic one day with a hundred pages of lit review notes and nothing actually written. Additionally, organizing my thoughts and notes into an outlined paper format forces me to constantly reconsider and revise basic research questions that are easy to lose sight of when you’re mired in endless (and sometimes only tangentially relevant) sources. So yes, I’m still doing my research.

Now it’s back to the Santo Domingo routine…which is not really a routine, but more like this quote from Che Guevara’s character in The Motorcycle Diaries: “the method: improvisation.”