It’s about 11.30am. We are at the entrance of Reserva Cientifica Ebano Verde, waiting for someone to open the gate for us. We could actually trespass. There are so many people visiting this Natural Park that there isn’t anyone at the entrance. It was the gua-gua driver that called the gate-keeper.
Entrance to the Natural Park
Last night Luca came back to the room repeating the words “Tambien” and “Manana”. “Tambien, manana”.
Have you learnt two new words Luca? Do you know what “tambien” means?
No.
Too.
I don’t know. They asked me “Tambien” and I replied “Si” and they seemed happy with the answer.
Maybe they asked “Estas bien?” , are you ok?
Mmm… no. It was “tambien”.
Maybe they don’t pronounce the “s” and you understand “ta-bien”.
Mmmm… no. They say tambien to ask if I am ok.
Oh, ok then.
The hills around Constanza
4.04pm After waiting for one hour we decided to enter the park. The road was closed by a gate, but there was a passage covered in scrub that you could cross. Half an hour after we were in the park, here comes a boy, the supervisor. “How could you come in?” Ehm…
To go to the other side of the park, where there is another exit, you have to walk about 3 hours and the other part is supervised by another guy. “Let me call him, let’s see if you can enter. No, you need the authorization from Santo Domingo. You can only get as far as the repeaters.” ???? Which authorization? Nobody told us about that before and the Lonely Planet doesn’t mention it. Of course we can’t go to Santo Domingo to ask for the authorization, so we go to the repeaters. A family lives there, with two kids that instead of going to school run kites. I steal one to the youngest child, but I can’t run it. We go back to the main road.
The 500 pesos, almost 10 euro, for the gua-gua, I would have spent more gladly at food and drinks, instead to try to run a kite.
Not far from the entrance to the park there’s a sanctuary dedicated to Virgin Mary, with an elder lady that spends the whole day here, keeping the area clean and welcoming the few visitors. While we wait for the gua-gua to go back to Constanza, someone drives by and waves hello, others cross themselves (for the Virgin Mary, not for us).
Once we are back in Constanza, Luca has a mirage: a porchetta! Along the road there’s a guy with a whole pork well cooked. We have a piece sliced with the machete, a bit of yuta and dinner is served. Not bad at all!
Porchettona!!!
7.30pm We are having the last burger. Tomorrow at 6.30 we leave for Santiago, where we’ll take a gua-gua towards North, they are waiting for us in Cabarete!
8.33 To get to Constanza from Santiago there’s a gua-gua to Labanico where you take another gua-gua to your destination. Ok, we can do it. As long as they tell us when to get off!
Today the time changed in Italy but not here, so now there are 6 hours difference (they were 5 until yesterday).
3.07pm There’s wifi at the hotel, but it’s not working. I hope they’ll fix it, but I doubt. The owner called a guy a couple of times while we were waiting, but now why should he care?
It’s cold, I’ll have to wear an undershirt and to sleep there’s a duvet. We are in Constanza, 1.200m above sea level. It wasn’t easy to get here! One and a half hour on the truck of a pickup whose owner didn’t bother putting wooden boards to rest our butts, like they did in Cap Haitien. So it was about 10 people sitting on the edge of the truck, a couple in the middle, plus our backpacks and other bags. The landscape was nice, but I was too busy keeping my butts moving (when I could) to shift the pain and to keep tight not to be thrown out, to enjoy the view. All around are cultivations. They even grow flowers and strawberries. As if it wasn’t full enough (there’s never a limit to the number of people they can get on a taxi, that in cases like this is good, because if we are all stuck together it’s more difficult to fall off), a guy took onboard two large bundles of chrysantemums and roses (these with their nice big thorns), that we arranged right in the middle.
There are some huge clouds over there. Nearby thee’s a natural park with a lake where you can bath and walk 12km in the forest, but it’s at the bottom of the mountain, in El Abanico, where we took the camioneta/pick-up.
Encounters on the mountain roads of Constanza
4.45 The sky is darker and darker, almost scary, but I don’t think it will rain. Earlier it rained a couple of minutes only. I think it’s normal here. After a stroll around this tiny village, that is pretty and lives of cultivations and local tourism, we stopped at a baseball field to watch a match, with thousands of white butterflies flying around our heads.
7.02pm We are in a Grill&Tapas, it must be a new place, it doesn’t even have a sign outside. It has diner-style seats and a white Harley Davidson in the middle of the room. Food is not cheap, but we wanted something different from the usual chicken and rice. So angus burger, a chicken cooked I don’t know how, and two caipirinhas. Luca should drink a hot tea, because it’s his turn to be sick, but he couldn’t resist. Ahhh… the caipirinha is so good!
Luca and I got off the bus, but it wasn’t our stop, there are two in Santiago. We are almost there. During the trip I didn’t last long and fell asleep, but Luca says that coming here he saw factories, livestocks, rice fields and nice houses. The bus is luxurious. And the toilet at the station is better than what you would find in Italy.
The Pollo al Carbon, chicken fast food
5h11pm We’ve been looking for a place to eat for an hour. At the end we came to the “Pollo al Carbon”, not really a change from what we’ve eaten so far. We’ve been a couple of hours at a pub to drink beer and plan the rest of the holiday. 500$ (almost 10 euro) for two beers and a packet of 10 cigarettes. What! Well, these are the prices at the places Western-style.
The place where we are now is a chicken fast food; it has yellow and fuchsia walls, and tables of the same colors. I like it! In Santiago there isn’t much to see. The folklore museum is closed for renovations. Since we arrived and left the luggage at our hotel, about 5 hours ago, we saw the cathedral, the fortress, the park with a statue built by Trujillo (the former dictator) as self-satisfaction and that is now a monument to heroes.
We’ve decided to go to Constanza tomorrow, a bit South, in the mountains, and later we’ll come back North along the coast.
Santiago is big. We realized that when we got off the bus. From the map it looked like the hotel was close, but it was at the other side of the town and it took us one hour to get there, with backpacks and weariness that made all more difficult. Near the station, just out of the centre, there are many shopping malls, Mc. Donald’s and big banks. Everywhere smartphones, icecreams, basket fields, florists with real flowers. It feels like Europe.
10.05 Luca is upset because I never speak. Maybe it’s true, but I was checking the hotels in Santiago; if there was something interesting I would have told him. He says that I’m used to be alone and that I like it (we’ve only been dating for a few months and this is my first trip with someone else after a long time). It is true, but I also like being with him.
It’s not raining that much anymore. Luca went to our room, more and more upset.
Now it must have stopped completely because I guy is washing his car. It stopped raining but I don’t want to go anywhere, I would stay here the whole day doing nothing.
4.30 It’s not raining but there’s a strong wind. I’m worried something will struck onto our heads soon. We are at the Comedor Yvelise, the same we had lunch yesterday, for some kid again and a beer. After so much chicken, it’s nice to have a different kind of meat. The sign reads “Benvenidos in Choza”, I almost feel like I’m in Venice (there’s a small town near Venice called “Chioggia” and its pronunciation is similar to Choza, in dialect).
March 28 – 10.33
We are in Monte Cristi, still. It’s cheap and quiet, we need to eat some more good food after 10 days in Haiti.
Today the sun is hot, but on the terrace of the hotel it’s perfect.
Afternoon. Schei fa schei, i peoci fa peoci (money makes money, lice make lice: it’s a Venetian saying, meaning that it’s easier to make money if you already have some, while it’s more likely you’ll be poor all your life if you already are). Luca and I are making projects on how to make money. We are on a bench at the ugly beach of Monte Cristi. The wind is so strong that it moved all the sand and made the beach much larger. We’ll collect lice once we go back home.
Friday: it’s party time with speakers, music and beer at the seaside of Monte Cristi.
Today Luca did a good action: there was a shell walking in the middle of the road, clearly lost. He took it and threw it into the water, saving it from certain death.
It’s Friday night and at Terraza Fedora there’s a party. It’s not dark yet but people are drinking and dancing. Seeing how they move at the rythm of this music so sensual, makes me jealous; I hate how I am flexible like a trunk. We spend a few hours admiring the moving people on the other side of the road, then go back to the hotel. A quick slice of pizza from a hole near the supermarket, served by a girl that kept calling me “sweetheart” and “my love”.
7.25 We are at the bus station in Cap Haitien, on a very hot tap-tap to Ouandinthe, at the border. It should be 3 hours to the border. Let’s hope so. The bus is full, I guess we are leaving soon. Breakfast at the Croissant d’Or. It’s nice to go back to a place you’ve been before, it feels like home. There’s a bad foot smell here. I am starting to think they are Luca’s feet! The usual chaos and a lot of rubbish, in the streets and in the canal. It’s a shame, considering how beautiful and tidy the town centre is, so different from Port au Prince!
Shortly after the departure we had to stop to inflate a tire. Luckly there are mechanics everywhere along the roads, and in a couple of minutes they fix everything. Maybe calling them “mechanics” is a bit too much. They have two pieces of iron and one air compressor (fuelled by gas), no garage nor office. They do everything at the side of the road in a few minutes, the driver doesn’t even need to turn the engine off.
9.44am Au revoir tap-tap et “Dieu tout Pouissant” (printed everywhere, from the tap-tap to the banks, the walls of the houses, in any place), bienvenidos gua-gua and “Cristo ya viene”. We are in Dajabon, on a gua-gua to Monte Cristi, our destination for today. I hope the hotel is ok because we need to rest a bit! We lost a few euro exchanging the gourde into pesos (we did it in the street with a man we met by chance, there isn’t an authorized exchange bureau), but we saved 40 dollars each coming here by tap-tap instead of Caribe Tours: 25 dollars (-5 that we spent for the public buses) for the bus, and 20 for the Haitian border (at the Caribe Tours office they asked 30 USD each for the customs taxes, 10 for the Dominican border, that we actually paid, and 20 for the Haitian border, that we weren’t asked to pay when going out). This confirms that when you travel in groups of foreigners many people take advantage of it, it’s better if you travel independently when you can. Sure, maybe their bus was faster and more comfortable, but our journey wasn’t too bad. Tha tap-tap was full but after half an hour many got off, and the gua-gua has air-con and is comfortable, everyone with its own seat. According to the Lonely Planet it should have taken us three hours to get to the border, while in one and a half we had already crossed it.
It was fun, when we arrived in Ouanaminthe, as soon as we got off of the tap-tap we were assaulted by about 20 bikers, everyone offering to take us to the border. Luca was strangely quiet, he shunted aside a couple of them and lit a cigarette, keeping quiet. We had to take a motorbike, but he couldn’t stand to be assaulted like this. Watching him made me laugh, knowing that he probably was much angrier than what he showed, and I explained the drivers that we needed some space or he was going to break out. At the end we took one bike each and with less than one dollar we were at the border. First office and stamp to get out of Haiti, hundred of meters of walk along a wide road, and the border on the other side. We were followed by a group of people that wanted to exchange our gourdes. The first that offered had the best rate, so we went back to him.
6.30pm Monte Cristi. So beautiful, so quiet! Now I realize Haiti wasn’t easy at all. We pay 650 pesos, about 12 euro, for a room that has no window to the outside, and that when we fart they can hear from the reception, but it’s clean, large and it smells good. Two coffees cost us 30RDS, in Haiti it wasn’t this cheap not even by the street. We had a dish each of rice with kid, and I’m really full, I wasn’t used to eat so much anymore. Internet is everywhere and free, not like Haiti where we had to go to luxurious hotels and pay. People are kind and smile at you, nobody is angry or violent, the buses don’t need to steal passengers each other.
In Monte Cristi the beach is a bit far and not that nice, I don’t think I will bath, but in the centre there are people and it’s pleasant. There’s a supermarket with an aisle dedicated to tampons, a working ATM machine is just outside our hotel. It feels another world. People here live well. Earlier we saw a guy driving a Yamaha R1 (Luca said).
We are the dock now, it’s lovely. Four men brought something to drink from home and are here at the end of the dock waiting for the sunset. Nice.
Green water and white sand. Yes, we definitely are in the Caribbeans. One of those beaches you could see in postcards, if there still were postcards. This beach is so beautiful because it’s in a National Park and you can only get here by renting a boat (or with your yacht, like the English couple we met here, who are doing a tour of the Caribbeans).
You can only come on a day trip, there are no restaurants nor anything else, so the chances to find basura (rubbish) is low, and probably someone comes to clean from time to time.
We paid 2500 pesos to come here from Pedernales, about 40 euro. Not bad, considering that in Los Patos a travel agency that works with Giordano asked us 90 US dollars, so we saved about 100 euro. “The best money we’ve spent so far”, said Luca. It is true and it definitely deserves a visit.
We were the first to arrive and took place in the shade of one of the few trees that are on the beach.
This morning we had breakfast in a street in Pedernales with something that looked like a sweet potato, but it wasn’t sweet, it was disgusting, maybe dried and salty fish, and something very good, pig with rind.
A boat full of Dominicans has just arrived. We should go for a stroll now, before it gets too crowded. It’s Sunday, it will probably get busy later on.
We came here on a motorbike, 3 on the same bike. On the paved road it wasn’t bad. The last 6 kilometers on gravel were painful. Pedernales, a region of red soil, that they use to make aluminum and concrete. There’s a factory not far from the beach.
15.22 So beautiful. We got sun burned even though we put the sunscreen 3 times and stayed in the shade. We probably got burned during the walk and the time spent in the water.
Against all odds we were almost alone all the time. From time to time a boat would arrive with a few people, stayed half an hour or one hour and left.
4pm
Back to Pedernales. Little snack with sancocho, a soup with pork ribs and potatoes, really good.
6pm. We are now in the main square of Pedernales. There are two cafes, at about 50 meters one from the other, both with music at very high volume that if you are in the middle you can’t hear well of any, a mix of the two. Fortunately a car stopped between the two cafes, took out two huge speakers and we can now listen to that music, even though you can still hear the other music in the background.
The dominicans: they park their car in the street, turn the music on at the loudest possible volume, take down a few chairs and sit there, chatting on the pavement or in the square. Today it’s Sunday, so they wear wedges and heels and miniskirts. I just love them.
The sun is still shining, but we are burnt and keep away.
