Dominican Republic – Day 5 – To Barahona

I finally found a dictionary for 160 pesos at a supermarket to supplement my heavy phrase book which had become useless as the day went by.  Reading news in Spanish was still a challenge but surprisingly doable.  Only a few weeks ago, I was not able to follow through simple paragraphs of news in Spanish sites, but here only a few days I can do it somewhat easily. It has nothing to do with my skills, rather it´s all about the excitement of being here and forced to just do it.

Not able to find a gua-guas to Barahona, we opted with Carribe Tours (250 pesos/oneway) since this was the only name we knew to tell the publico driver. The trip took a little more than 3 hours with almost half an hour being stuck in the city.

If you only see tourism promotion ads about Dominican Republic, you will think of this country as a Carribean paradise with picture perfect beaches. Beautiful it really is; we made a short trip this morning to Paraiso beach  south of Barahona this morning (day 6) and found only ourselves ruling the entire blue-green beach with four other local boys. If this simple, isolated non-tourist beach during hurricane season is as beautiful as this, how superb those advertised in ads along the North Coast are?

However, during our entire bus ride from the capital to Barahona, we passed by many desolate landscape of the Southwest, with tattered wooden houses behind puddles of brown mudd left over from the rain. Old men, young men, women and children stood or sat idly in front of the house, starring at vehicles passing through. I saw a bony old man taking a bath by a muddy river/creek next to aconstruction site. It was not all  depressing sight as there was also plenty of green patch of banana fields, palm trees and the imposing mountain range lying behind.  Whenever I looked at the afar mountain, I got a bit depressed. This means that there is noway how I can get to Jarabacoa from here without either returning to Santo Domingo or heading to Santiago.

We arrived at Barahona around 5 pm. and immediately took a liking to this small coastal city. As usually motoconchos honking and driving everywhere and waving at us for a ride. Fortunately, it was only a walk down from the Carribe bus station to our hotel El Cacique, which we found from Lonelyplanet. The price range from 3 years ago was $9-14, so we expected $15 for the cheapest choice. We found a room with fan for only 350 pesos/$10. Rooms with air-condition and TV cost 650 pesos.

We fumbled into a deserting open market which promised to be an interesting exploration for tomorrow.