Tuesday afternoon Adam mentioned that he wanted to go to Samaná on Wednesday for a day trip. It would be his last trip before he had to leave on Thursday. Then we found out we would have to leave today in order to get there because it takes seven hours to get there and in order to catch the last ferry we would have to leave right then. So we packed and were ready to go in 20 minutes. Darien and Henry dropped us off at the guagua station in Miches and we took a 2 hour guagua ride to Sabana de la Mar.
From Sabana de la Mar we took a 2 hour ferry to Samaná. On the ferry was a boy who had a cast covering the entire legth of one of his legs and the thigh of the other leg. It was amazing how they were transporting him. The cast had a bar between the two legs of the cast so that he could be lifted easily. It was unsettling because Adam and I had just had a conversation about how inacessible health care is in this country. Here's a photo of Samaná from the ferry.
After we got off the ferry, we got on another guagua to Las Galeras that took another 1.5 hours. By the time we got to Las Galeras, it was 8:30 at night. When we got off the bus, we tried to find Paradiso Bungalows, which according to the guide was a cheap place to stay and close to the center of town, where we were. We asked some people for help but they said that Paradiso Bungalows was far away and that we should stay at a hotel across the street. It turned out that they worked on commission for the place and they showed us a room that they were going to charge us 1200 pesos. We said we still wanted to check out the other place and got the response that the price will increase as the night goes on. Almost everyone in town was trying to take advantage of us because we were two young American tourists. I guess I don't blame them though.We left the hotel and went to the street to get our bearings and find the hotel ourselves. It turned out that it was right across the street! The sign was not lit up though so it was hard to see. We walked in along a path that led to the bungalows and it was very dark. It went behind the kitchen of a restaurant and a French woman saw us and greeted us in English, which was very welcoming at this part of our journey. She showed us a bungalow that was really cute, besides the fact that there were a few dead cockroaches around, one of the lights was burned out, the ceiling fan and the shower didn't work (you could tell that the room hadn't been used in a while).
Before we went to bed, Adam for some reason decided to check out the closet and a huge spider that was larger than my hand was plastered to the side of the wall! I didn't want to kill it because I am fond of spiders because I've studied them a lot and had a pet spider when I was a kid. We decided to try to lock it in the closet by shutting the door and leaning a mirror up against it. When we woke up the next morning, we checked the closet and it was gone!
Here's a photo of the beach we woke up to in Las Galeras that we didn't even know was there when we had come in last night. Somehow we had set our biological clocks to wake up exactly at six because we didn't have an alarm clock and we set out for the guagua station. There was a half an hour guagua ride to the entrance to the road to Rincón where we took an hour and a half motoconcho ride down some of the worst roads I've seen in the DR to Playa Rincón. It was a very uncomfortable ride because we were holding all of the stuff that we had brought with us. The motoconcho dropped us off at a restaurant that was the only development on the beach and agreed to pick us up at noon. Less than five minutes after the moto dropped us off, the skies opened and there was a torrential downpour that lasted for twenty minutes. We took refuge in the restaurant and consumed our peanut butter and nutella sandwiches to wait for the rain to stop.
The beach was gorgeous! It was the most beautiful, most deserted beach I had ever seen. The water was crystal clear and the beach was covered in soft white sand. There was still some trash on the beach that had been washed up from the ocean but it was the cleanest beach I have seen in the DR. I took a leisurely walk along the beach and jumped into the water to snorkel along the way while Adam walked to the end of the beach to the river called Rio Frio (which means Cold River and Spanish and it definitely was well-named). Most of the reefs were dead but I still saw some giant brain corals, parrot fish, black and white sea urchins, and tons of other fish.
Playa Rincón!
While I was walking, I ran into two guys around my age running on the beach, one of them was an American and the other was a Dominican. They were camping on the beach with some of their other friends by Rio Frio and were currently stuck there because they were out of gas and water. They were trying to stay hydrated by drinking coffee and rum, which was all that they had. Camping was free because there is no enforcement in such an isolated area. I would definitely want to go back there to do some camping there. It has everything: beautiful beach, cold river to wash off in, mountains to hike in, and a restaurant down the beach if you get tired of roughing it.
This was definitely the most extreme adventure I have ever had, complete with people trying to swindle us out of money, we were exposed to the problems facing this country such as poverty and inaccessibility to health care, bumpy guagua rides, crazy motoconcho drivers, and some genuine good people helped us along the way.
This was definitely the most extreme adventure I have ever had, complete with people trying to swindle us out of money, we were exposed to the problems facing this country such as poverty and inaccessibility to health care, bumpy guagua rides, crazy motoconcho drivers, and some genuine good people helped us along the way.
