On the Road

A Journey Through the Dominican Republic

previous page


(continued)

I was deep into cloud forest now. The trees dripped with Spanish moss, that melancholy epiphyte that is neither Spanish nor moss. I wanted to savor the quiet, so I stopped the jeep and turned off the motor in the middle of the road.

The strike of a match made an enormous sound in that unearthly stillness. I lit a cigar. It was a Dominican cigar, a León Jimenes No. 4, from a box beneath the seat.

The rich soil and humidorlike climate of the Dominican Republic produce some of the finest cigars in the world. Earlier in the week, in a big, intensely aromatic room at La Aurora factory on the outskirts of Santiago, I had watched more than a hundred craftsmen transform the long, brown leaves of Dominican and Cuban seed tobacco into cigars.

My guide, Juan Isidro Batista, told me that each leaf is aged for at least three years. Most of the wrappers come from Cameroon in Africa; for the León Jimenes, Aurora's finest, they come from a place even more exotic ­ Connecticut.

As Juan Isidro and I spoke, a worker at a nearby wooden bench took filler, which he had rolled and pressed earlier, and applied the smooth wrapper leaf with a few quick, deft motions. Juan Isidro clipped the end from the finished product, a León Jimenes No. 4, and handed it to me. I lit it on the spot. I have smoked cigars for 30 years, and that was the freshest of them all.

Starting the jeep again, I followed the ruts and lurched across the deep scars in the road, making no better than 15 miles an hour. Soon the road leveled out to a scrubby plain where, had I been at home in New England, I might have expected to find blueberries. Instead I found two radio towers (the source, no doubt, of such a clearly audible Julio Iglesias), a forlorn little army barracks with no one around, and a strange concrete pyramid, about the size of my jeep, riven at its corners as if its four sides were about to open like the petals of a flower.

The blooming pyramid was the monument that locates the exact geographical center of the Dominican Republic. It stands here on this desolate stretch of road where, unseen by the overwhelming majority of Dominicans, it marks the center of a creation not remotely geographical (Haiti shares this island of Hispaniola, throwing its center off to the west) but purely political, a republic begun as an imperial adventure at the close of the 15th century. However, the true center of the Dominican Republic is Santo Domingo, where men had organized that escapade.

The Alcazar de Colón, down in the old quarter of Santo Domingo, is the oldest seat of European authority in the New World. It was built in 1510 by Christopher Columbus's son Diego, governor of Hispaniola, only 14 years after the founding of the city.

Of all the rooms in the alcázar, which today is a museum, the most evocative is the music room, with its harp and mandolin and dark Castilian furniture. It is no trouble at all to imagine Spanish court songs drifting out across the Río Ozama to caravels lolling at anchor on a warm, breezy evening half a millennium ago.

The alcázar is an anomaly in this sprawling city scented with car exhaust and jasmine, studded with ugly concrete towers, and drenched in the frantic, humid sexuality of merengue. While Santo Domingo mimics much of what New York has become since 1960, in the old nest of streets around the alcázar the city still dreams of everything Spain was before 1600.

I drove on, more or less on level ground, now through forest, now across those improbable Maine-like clearings.Sometimes I was in the clouds, sometimes above them. Then, just as I sensed that the road finally might be beginning its descent, I came up against a locked gate. Had I traveled all this way only to have to turn around? Why hadn't the soldier at the reserve's northern gate warned me?

At this gate there was no guardhouse, nor any other sign of life. I weighed my options. Even though I could get back to Constanza in daylight, the thought of returning was horrible. But the gate was made of steel, and it was locked. Wooden posts and barbed wire prevented any off-road circumvention of the barrier.

I made up my mind. I would inch up to the gate, put the jeep in four-wheel drive, and give it the gas while I slowly let up the clutch. If that didn't work, I would try the same against the posts and barbed wire. No offense, amigos. Faced with this level of frustration, I would do the same thing at home.

But something held me back. I decided to try one last option. "¡Hola!" I yelled. "¡Hola!" I was sure there was no one for miles, but it cost nothing to holler. "¡Hola!"

In the middle of my third hola, the dense brush shook below the bank to my right, on the other side of the gate. A teenage soldier clambered into view, an assault rifle slung across his shoulder. He took a key from his pocket and unlocked the gate.

"Hello," I said. "It's cold up here."

"Yes," he smiled shyly. "Very cold."

A half mile down the road, I pulled over in the shadow of some moss-draped pines and sat in a roadside clearing where I could look down into a deep ravine. I heard water flowing far below; birdsong was the only other sound. By my reckoning, I was 7,000 feet above sea level.

I took out my lunch ­ a can of Maine sardines, a box of crackers, and a bottle of water I had bought in Jarabacoa. When I finished eating, I got up from my soft, piney seat on the ground, and as I did so I heard a buzzing around my ankles. I looked down expecting to see an insect, but it was an emerald green hummingbird, drinking from a cluster of wildflowers that looked like little pink bells.

Outside the reserve the forest slowly gave way to cultivated slopes ­ so steep that an uprooted cabbage would roll a thousand feet ­ and more hardscrabble villages whose houses seemed all but ready to make a similar plunge. Wood for cooking fuel was stacked outside most of the homes. In a field across from a shack, I saw a girl about 14, wearing a school dress, sitting in an old wooden kitchen chair, doing her lessons with a book and writing tablet in her lap.

San José de Ocoa came into view long before I was able to spiral down and reach it. From the dusty heights it looked larger than what it is ­ a small city with a park full of trees and flowers at its center.

And then, not long after I passed through San José, I was within sight of the blue Caribbean. I looked back the other way and saw a thicket of mountains I would have said were impenetrable, had I not just driven through them.

I was in the arid southwest of the Dominican Republic, a place bristling with cactus instead of clover. I spent the night in the oceanside city of Barahona. My plan was to head from there to Lago Enriquillo, near the Haitian border, before turning back to Santo Domingo and home. I had heard it was possible to boat to an island in the lake, where there are crocodiles.

In the morning I fixed a flat tire (one of the valves had given up here ­ not, by some kindness of fate, in the mountains, where the road surface was nowhere level enough to operate a jack) and drove west toward the lake. The road ran through cane fields and past the barracklike housing for migrant Haitian sugar workers. Women there were washing clothes in a stream.

I passed through some sizable Dominican towns, the first I'd seen that truly deserved the tired cliché "sleepy"; here even the motorbike traffic subsided. Old wooden houses had thatched roofs and wore coats of bright paint with geometrical designs on their doors, like houses in nearby Haiti. At several spots along the road, the Dominican army had set up checkpoints to keep illegal Haitian immigrants ­ those not needed for the sugar harvest ­ out of the country.

A few miles outside of La Descubierta stood a national park office, a pavilion open on three sides. Lago Enriquillo was just beyond, a saltwater lake more than 20 miles long. I walked down and found seven men sitting in the shade, three of them with antiquated double-barreled shotguns cradled in their laps.

The men all greeted me, and I asked if one of them could take me over to the island.

"No," answered one. "The man with the boat is over there now. He left at seven. He'll be back this afternoon at one. You can go over then, but the crocodiles will be out in the water, and you probably wouldn't be able to see them."

"It's ten o'clock now," I said. "What would I do for three hours anyway?"

"You could drink beer," he said, pointing to a cooler full of Presidente behind the counter. "Get the man a beer," he told a junior ranger at the counter.

I opened the beer and gave the kid 20 pesos. It was the wrong end of the day to drink beer for three hours, but I hung around for a bottle's worth of time, shooting the breeze with the boys, thinking about what was possible, and what was not, in the Dominican Republic.


Visitors:

Back to Cuyaya's Site


This page is hosted at Get your own Free Home Page