You can continue to follow Elena’s Journey by subscribing to STRADE
December 6, 2024 – This morning, I left the sub-par hotel where I’d spent the night, my backpack pressing on yesterday’s bruises and a significant doubt in my mind. It was about the route to reach the Dominican Republic’s south coast from the town where I was, Constanza, in the middle of the mountains. Trusty Google Maps suggested one that looked relatively small from the satellite view. Still, the other one considerably lengthened the journey (though it would have allowed me to see the highest waterfall in the Caribbean).
I went for breakfast at the nearest colmado (we could call it a little variety shop), which served me rice, salami, and fried plantain (savoury banana). You don’t get a choice in these places. I asked the owner for advice on the road, and the usual spiel began: “Oh dear, you’re here alone, hitchhiking, are you mad? Why didn’t your husband come…?” I endured it for a while and then extracted the information I wanted: go via the smaller road. Then I tried to pay, but no way, they offered me breakfast, half of which was takeaway, because I wasn’t going to eat 200 grams of rice at 8 a.m.
But I didn’t want to miss the highest waterfall in the Caribbean, so the plan was to find a lift there (less than an hour for about 20km), do the trek to the waterfall, and then go back to take the other route. Such optimism, eh? On the road, some girls passed me on their way to school, and I heard them whispering to each other: “She’s a mochilera tourist” (backpacker), as if I were some strange alien species. Eventually, one of them plucked up the courage to ask me if I was a mochilera tourist because they were tourism students.
I gave myself ten minutes to find a car while the moto taxis mocked me, and I didn’t even wait for them all: there was something in my gut telling me it was time to go. I crossed the road, and after ten seconds, a red truck picked me up, confirming the great truth I’d learned when I hitchhiked around Iceland: red cars always stop.
It only took a moment to find myself on a road that looked more like a path of red mud, without a single car in sight. I thought I’d perhaps made a blunder when Juan appeared on his motorbike. “Can you give me a lift?” I discovered he was going to Padre Las Casas, the first town after the dirt track. I don’t know if you’d call that luck. The next five hours were spent on the back of the motorbike, with me clenching every muscle in my body to avoid being dragged off by my backpack on the steep and bumpy uphill sections that characterised the route. The view was stunning: verdant and red mountains one behind the other, often cultivated even on the steepest slopes, with banana groves on the hillsides. I’d wanted to see this when I thought about the island’s interior. It was a shame I could barely take any photos because I needed both hands desperately to avoid ending up splattered in the mud.
Halfway there, we stopped at an avocado, lemon, and bean farm, where Juan, a vegetable trader, negotiated the price of avocados (something around 13 pesos each, about 20 euro cents). They offered us a very sweet coffee and lunch prepared by Jasmine, 17 years old; she cooks on a wood fire in a shack outside the house, with chickens inside and a pig grazing nearby. She goes to school once a week, on Saturdays, from 8 am to 4 pm, in Constanza. She filled our plates with rice, making a kind of tower well over the rim, and it felt a bit bad that Juan gave 3/4 of it to the chickens, but in the end, I had to give some to them, too.
After lunch, the journey of hope resumed, and I often had to get off the motorbike and walk uphill, much to the detriment of my arms, which were full of bruises from the effort of holding on: my hands were trembling. After negotiating the price of beans, we came out onto the tarmac road at two o’clock in the afternoon, and it almost didn’t seem real. The wheels rolled smoothly, and I wasn’t at risk of being thrown off every three seconds. I could finally breathe, and we arrived in Guayabal, where there was a fantastic little hotel to spend the night. I walked around the town with my legs barely holding me up from the day’s exertion, and people looked at me as if I’d just landed on the moon. But when I asked if they saw many tourists, they always answered, “Yes, loads.” Hmm.
It’s a town so full of life that it spills out from the open windows of the dimly lit houses and pours into the street where children run, old men play chess, someone repairs mopeds or sells clothes and vegetables, with the stereos pumping out music always at full volume.
I was leaning against the doorframe of my room, trying to get internet access, when the hotel owner’s son invited me to have coffee with his family. I didn’t get up from that chair until 10 pm. Conversations with friends from all over the town followed one another, and they organised an Italian evening in my honour with pizza and even a bottle of wine.
It was a fitting end to a day when I asked myself several times if I was living a great experience or a horror film. And yes, also the story of the day when I was offered three meals out of three.
