Sunday, August, 20, 2006, 18:58 UTC
Chapter 7, Part II. The Yamaha guy finally gets back and after he settles back in we drop off the beast. He assures us he will have it running in 2 hours.Wrong. Takes him 3, but here he comes and the little thing is running better than ever. Turns out one of the channels in the carburetor was blocked and he found it with a large magnifying glass and easily cleaned it. One MAJOR problem solved. Get a call that the part is in for the radio and it will be ready in 2 days. Can this be possible?? Pick up the radio, bring it back and it doesn't work. Try everything Mark can think of (I contribute dumb suggestions which he gracefully listens to) but nothing works. Back to Puerta Plata. Radio works fine in the shop. Frustration X 100. Back to boat. Radio doesn't work. Enough is enough. We decide we've had it with Luperon and will move on to Sosua and deal with the radio from there.
Some thoughts on Luperon. We ended up spending nearly a month in Luperon and in spite of it being a pretty ugly place and the frustrations we had to deal with, it was not all bad. Luperon is basically about 8 blocks long and 4 blocks wide. Most of the stores are 1 room and the houses uniformly shanties. There are a few serious villas on the hills above the harbor and overlooking the ocean, but these are owned by a limited number of wealthy Dominicans and foreigners who have obtained residency. There is a bank here, but no ATM machine so foreigners have to go to another city to get dineros. Surprising since there is a fair sized boating community as well as a couple of pretty nice resorts just outside the city. At least there is internet access so I can let my family know I'm alive. It's phone dial up, but works as long as the electricity doesn't go off. It's also the only place I've found in town with an air conditioner.
The people here are generally poor, but again you see no one in dirty or torn clothes. They are generous and helpful and extremely tolerant of us 'gringos' and our not always pleasant ways. Like everywhere else we had no problem sitting down with locals and doing our Spanglish thing. Just one example here of Dominican generosity. On one of our numerous trips to Puerta Plata, we stopped at a gas station. After getting gas, the car (actually a 3 cylinder Dhaihatsu mini-truck which required one of us to sit in the open back) refused to start. Immediately, about 10 guys helped push us out of the way and tried to get us started. As we were playing with the battery wires, etc., someone pulled up in a beat up old pick up truck. He stopped the truck, opened his hood, took out the battery, carried it over to us and held it while we attached our cables and got started. When we thanked him his response was 'nada' and he just got in his truck and drove away. Made quite an impression on me.
In Luperon we frequent several of the little stores (tiendas) which never have more than a few things. In one you might find avocados and tomatoes and in another eggs and mangoes. Everything here is simply cheap by our standards. It's hard getting used to eggs and produce that have never been refrigerated so you can leave them out indefinitely. You can spend $10 on a meal in a restaurant only with great difficulty and the food in the stores (unless imported) is on a similar scale.
After 2.5 months without a haircut (I still have a full head of hair at my advanced age), I decided to bite the bullet and I'll relate the story because it reflects Luperon. Choices were to have one of the boat people who cuts hair do it or go local. Decided to go local. The barbershop is a 1 room shack with a barber chair that doesn't work. Floor is dirt and almost completely covered with hair and fruit rinds from whatever it is the barber is eating while he works. I assume that at the end of the day when it's probably ankle deep, it gets swept out. Like many barbershops, it's a social gathering place and people are in and out and the lively conversation never slows down. I have to wait while a young woman gets her eyebrows trimmed with a straight razor which is whirling all around her face emphasizing points in the animated conversation. Finally, I get my turn and it takes a while as the electricity goes off, a frequent occurrence, in most places here. Get my beard trimmed and a shave which is interesting as there is no shaving cream or hot water, but for $2.50 I shouldn't complain because I hate to tell you what I would pay in Washington.
Mark has one of those to remember experiences one afternoon when he sits down to watch a group of kids playing 'baseball' with a tennis ball and a palm frond. He is the only adult there and is at first ignored by the kids. When he applauds their successes and cheers their efforts, they immediately take to him and he becomes somewhat of a 'pied piper' with an entourage. He draws so much attention that a group of the young local ladies insist on treating him to Cuba Libres, but it's the adulation of the children for something most of us would take for granted that really makes the day for him and the kids. These are the kinds of things we will remember from the DR.
Luperon also introduces us to Dominican chicken carbone. Nothing goes to waste here. On the back streets in front of their houses people take used 50 gal. drums, cut them in half and make them into grills where they slow roast chickens which cost about $4. It's a treat to once again eat chickens that have no fat on them (sorry Frank, don't care for your product) and actually taste like chicken.
The foreign community - Most of the boaters here are American although there are people from all over. A large segment hangs out at the Puerto Blanco Marina. As you might expect, some are really nice people and some are duds. Some go out into the country and enjoy Dominica while others sit around the Marina and complain about how incompetent the people are and how nothing works. You wonder why the latter are here in the first place. A surprising number of boaters have bought property here (land is cheap) and at least say they plan to build homes. There is also a small group that I have a real problem with. These are people who do work for other boaters (fix things, clean boat bottoms, provide taxi service if they have a car, etc.). They are not residents so the work is illegal. Illegal aliens. Sound familiar?? It's one thing to provide a service that doesn't exist here, but quite something else when you compete with some of the poor, but honest people (such as our friend Papo) who are just trying to do anything to get by and take care of their families.
I apologize for the rambling discourse, but this covers almost a month in time and it's being done retrospectively. Mark and I are both tired of Luperon so we'll leave early in the morning and see what Sosua has to offer.
Stuart
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