On the Road
A Journey Through the Dominican Republic
By William G. Scheller
On the Road
A Journey Through the Dominican Republic
By William G. Scheller
It was a cool, sunny morning as I began my drive across the roof of the Antilles. I had been in the Dominican Republic for ten days, banging around in a jeep from the capital, Santo Domingo, to the beaches of the east coast and then finally to the north-central interior. Ten days, all in the D. R. but I had the clear notion that I was now entering the third country of my trip.
The first country had been Santo Domingo itself, big and noisy, with its armed guards sitting in aluminum chairs next to Mercedes in the driveways, street vendors hawking bags of peeled oranges, and eager guides best hired as a means of fending off other guides. Sprawling Santo Domingo, simultaneously preoccupied with getting the next meal and getting rich.
The second country was the Republic of Tourism, the D. R. of enormous coastal resorts that Americans have somehow not yet found but that haul in German and English vacationers by the planeload, braceleting them so that the dining room staff will know they are on the meal plan. "I found it on the Internet," said a Swedish lawyer I'd met at one of these places.
And now I was entering my third Dominican Republic, the one I liked best, the one you can't find on the Internet in Sweden. Up in these mountains I wouldn't have to pay any guides for the privilege of walking too fast beside them down hot streets while they pointed out historic sites. Nor would I be on the meal plan.
Oh, I could have been at the beach, and the beach wasn't bad, but this last Dominican Republic had the whiff of adventure about it. Not "adventure travel," which is sliced off nowadays at the tourism counter like an only slightly spicier variety of lunch meat, but real adventure the kind where you're a damned fool who doesn't know what the hell you're doing.
I had come to this mountainous central region of the country because of a chance encounter with a young man named Joaquin, who worked at a jewelry store in a spanking-new beachfront resort full of jolly Europeans, where I had fetched up after a harrowing and confused effort to get out of the city of Higüey to escape its motorbike swarms and gravitational pull. Even out on the highway, the driving had been haywire. Buses would pass on the right-hand shoulder, and every breath I took convinced me that the locals must think that catalytic converters are an order of priests who came over with Columbus.
Joaquin was a likeable fellow in his late twenties who smilingly asked me, in the first minute I talked with him, if I knew where the Dominican Republic was an obvious reference to the cultural and geographical curiosity level of much of his clientele. But I had been on the island for several days. I'd been to Santo Domingo, and I'd escaped singlehanded from Higüey. Of course I knew the D. R. The question was, where should I go next?
"Go to Santiago," Joaquin said. Santiago, in the northwest, is the country's second-largest city, though smaller by far than Santo Domingo. "And from Santiago you should go south into the mountains, to Jarabacoa and Constanza. I was in Constanza once, and it was like being in a different land in my own country," he went on. "They grow grapes and apples North American crops."
By the time I had settled in at Santiago after five hours of driving, I was already looking past that city of half a million, saddled between two ranges of mountains. I was looking south to Jarabacoa and beyond.
Ever since I had left the eastern provinces I had been intrigued by what my map showed as a tortuous thread of road that wound south to Joaquin's garden town, Constanza, and then continued as a faint, broken line through the Valle Nuevo scientific reserve before connecting with a paved highway that had access to the southern coast. It crossed the central massif of Hispaniola not far from the highest peak in the Caribbean, 10,417-foot Pico Duarte and it was by all accounts the worst road in the D. R.
The easy part came first. It was only about 30 miles from Santiago to Jarabacoa for Santiago burghers, the distance from work to play on hot summer weekends. Jarabacoa is a provincial town with a life of its own, but its mountain setting makes it a popular setting for getaway villas. This resort appeal makes for some ironic juxtapositions. Soon after I arrived, I set off into the outskirts and got lost looking for a scenic waterfall. On the way back to the main road, I passed a kid in front of a tumbledown shanty, knocking a golf ball around with a beat-up putter. I wondered how he had gotten hold of these country club totems until, rounding the bend, I came upon a perfectly manicured golf course.
From Jarabacoa to El Río the road south was a rutted mess. It stumbled along a ridge for 16 miserable miles, gaining about 1,700 feet in altitude and passing through some of the most heartbreakingly poor villages in the Dominican Republic.
Ni el Malecón was painted on one cinder-block wall: Not the Malecón. The Malecón is Santo Domingo's stylish seaside boulevard, and, no, this was definitely not it.
Another painted sign said, "No Water" in three different phrases: Whoever lived there must have been pestered by innumerable travelers on this godforsaken road.
And yet another wall shouted Nuevo Camino, "New Road." Nuevo Camino is the slogan of D. R.'s ruling political party, but I took it literally and decided that a new road here wouldn't be a bad idea.
The population was sparse up in the mountains, but I saw plenty of people in the villages people walking barefoot with 50-pound bags of rice on their shoulders, people carrying hoes and machetes into the sharply sloped fields where the soil was a vivid brick red. Some villagers were riding the descendants of the small, sturdy horses that the Spaniards brought, and I thought as they probably did not about what a fine trip this would be on horseback.
In some villages, where the houses had windows with crisp, colorful curtains and cheery flowerboxes, there were women with pretty starched dresses. In others, ragged children ran after my jeep with their hands outstretched, their voices a cross between a chant and a whine.
The rutted dirt road ended at blacktop in El Río, and it was a pleasant, easy drive to Constanza, heading south and climbing steadily past fields of cabbages, plantains, potatoes, and squash. I passed a sign that indicated an altitude of 4,000 feet.
Constanza itself soon appeared, a workaday market town famous for a climate so cool, by Dominican standards, that there is a menthol cigarette named after it. All around lay a green and fertile bowl of land, bordered on the west and south by the mountains of the Cordillera Central.
Depending on whom you talked to, the road south from Constanza might not be passable at all. A priest at the Salesian seminary in Jarabacoa had told me that a four-wheel-drive vehicle like mine might might, he stressed be able to make the trip. I met two tourists from Curaçao who'd read in a guidebook that a jeep takes passengers on the road once a week. And an American teacher I talked with in Jarabacoa's little supermarket said that someone she knew knew someone who had done it on a motorbike. Good enough, I decided.But I was nonetheless haunted, that last night in Jarabacoa, by visions of perilous stream fordings, of jungle that crowded the road down to the dimensions of an abandoned footpath, and of hanging onto cliffside trails by shifting my weight to the passenger seat.
All this made the road irresistible. How many times, in a life of drives to the post office and soporific interstate highway trips, do you get to face a road that makes people shake their heads and look down at the ground? A crumbling ruin of a road that runs for the better part of a hundred miles through mountains and forests where no one lives? I'd never pass up such a chance. But I didn't sleep well the night before.
Just before setting off in the early morning, I had a couple of leaky valves tightened on the jeep's tires. I told the mechanic where I was going.
"¡Vaya con Dios!" was all he said.
After a few false starts on roads that ended in dusty front yards, I found the one true route out of Constanza and into those daunting, cloud-enveloped mountains. I climbed past terraced farms, past greenhouses and cattle, past steep hillsides eroded in the wake of massive deforestation. At one point, when I reached a sharp elbow in the road, I looked down and saw Constanza, the cool lofty village of the cigarette ads, impossibly tiny and far below.
Ten miles south the road became so bad that I often had to make sure that my tires rode the ridges of the single lane of gravel and dried red mud. Now the last farmhouses were giving way to wilderness. Just beyond the point where the tilled slopes ended, I came to a guardhouse and a gate. A sign said "Reserva Cientifica." A soldier appeared, and I asked him if this was the route to San José de Ocoa, almost 30 miles to the south, where the paved road resumed on the other side of the mountains.
"Yes," was all he answered.
Guarding a scientific reserve is a fine task for a Latin American army, I decided. But soldiers in the Dominican Republic can still give you the creeps. You always see, standing behind them, the ghost of Trujillo.
Rafael Léonidas Trujillo Molina ran the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961. He once renamed the capital city after himself. Late one afternoon, while I was walking along a street in downtown Santo Domingo, I glanced at the sidewalk and read the words cast into an old manhole cover. Ciudad Trujillo, the iron letters said.
Virtually the only place where Trujillo's legacy is aired today is at Santo Domingo's Museum of History and Geography. The malignant spirit of "El Benefactor," as the dictator styled himself, resides in a gallery that traces decades of plunder, brutality, and self-aggrandizement through exhibits that include even his briefcase, boots, toothpaste, and monogrammed socks. On the museum's second-floor landing stands the most graphic artifact of all: a rusting, flat-tired, bullet-riddled 1956 Oldsmobile, one of the cars used in the highway ambush that finished off El Benefactor.
I raised my hand in a quick good-bye to the soldier, and headed into the forest and the mountains.
Beyond the soldier and his gate, the road entered an evergreen forest. Where the trees were thin enough, I could see mountains to the west, but all the while I was climbing in a lofty domain of my own. Not a soul was traveling that road, a single-lane gravel path gouged crosswise by the rivulets of the past rainy season. It was a fortunate far cry from my B-picture jungle nightmares but challenging nonetheless in its own mistily eerie way.The roadside was strewn with daisies and clover. The trees were mostly pines. The vegetation seemed all wrong for that latitude, until I remembered that it was altitude that made the difference here. Fog shrouded the surrounding valleys. The temperature was in the 50s.
It was noon. The radio, which came in clearer up here in the mountains than anywhere else in the country, played the Dominican national anthem. Right after the anthem and the news, the station launched into an hour of Julio Iglesias. I am not one of Iglesias's big fans, but I was happy that at least the station wasn't playing merengue, the ubiquitous and relentless Dominican music that, I had by now decided, must have been invented as a means of removing paint. And besides, Julio and I had something in common. Down on the southeast coast, in a tiny open-air restaurant in the fishing village of Bayahibe, I'd watched the boats come and go, watched the men filleting kingfish on wooden boards laid over some rocks in the shallows. I had drunk icy Presidente beer and, as the stars came out over the Caribbean, finished off a platter of squid in garlic sauce, when the owner of the restaurant came over to talk.
"You see that chair at the end of the table?" he asked, pointing just past where I was sitting. "Julio Iglesias sat right in that chair." It made me wonder why the singer hadn't taken my seat, which had a better view of the water.
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