Day 35

I have been harassed by a mosquito the past couple nights. I know it is one particular mosquito because, even as a species, they collectively couldn’t be this cruel. I have sprayed all the bathrooms regularly, sprayed the bedrooms irregularly, and put spray on my ankles each night. I cover my entire body up to my neck, wrapping myself in the bedsheet. Still, I wake up in the middle of the night with bites on my arms, scratching. Then, just as I’m getting back to sleep, this particular mosquito starts the torture campaign – it starts dive-bombing my ears. At first, I swat the air or shake my head as I hear it approaching. Then, I try to wait it out – I allow it to land, hoping to crush it after it’s settled, like the slow-moving, dim-witted northern mosquitoes back in Maine. But I forget that all the animals down here are hyper-versions of northern varieties. They all move much quicker than ones I have encountered before. The lizards are faster. The birds are faster. The snakes are faster. And the mosquitoes are faster. So I end up swatting myself about the face and head for a while before giving up and getting out of bed.

We have been trying to sleep in the bedroom without a mosquito netting. The other two bedrooms have netting. One we have the kids in – they need it more than we do. The other we have our guests in. Ditto. We need to find another mosquito netting. I also have to try one of the other methods folks have mentioned. These include burning mosquito coils or plugging in some kind of electronic device that either makes a noise or burns some sort of chemical tablet that you place in it. I’m very motivated now, at 4 o’clock in the morning. I hope I’m as motivated when I go to the store later.

We went to Playa Fronton yesterday. We have been hearing about Fronton for the past couple years, but haven’t made it over there – one person we met last year said it wasn’t great swimming, a couple people this year have said the water’s too rough to go there. So we’ve been waiting, but not rushing to get there. With Brad and Hope here, we thought it would be good to check out, and Paul and Katie mentioned going last week and invited us to join them, so the critical mass seemed to be here.

Fronton is in the opposite direction from Rincon, in many ways. Rincon is enclosed, a horseshoe beach on a cove, with sandy swimming, north of Las Galeras. Fronton is southeast of the village, a much rougher boat ride outside of the reef, to a straight stretch of beach with the entire Atlantic Ocean before it. The beach, which sits at the base of 300+ foot cactus-topped rock cliffs is much rockier, and the water is coral and reef-filled from the moment you step in. It is by far the best snorkeling we have seen here – the coral is still faded, but there are grander stretches and depths, with a greater variety of fish than any other beach we have seen. We saw barracuda, a puffer (or was it a cow?) fish, a trumpet fish, and a single scorpion fish, who must’ve been very disgruntled with us, hovering over him while he was trying to hide on the bottom, waiting for unsuspecting fish to swim near his mouth. He kept on swimming to new locations and letting his camouflage settle in again, with us swimming overhead to each new location.

The beach feels deserted and remote but, of course, there is a restaurant there. This one was a little more in character – the thatched roof and wooden limb construction made it seem to grow out of the rock wall and palms on that end of the beach. When we ordered beer and sodas, the man behind the bar said he was out of most of the things we requested, and the soda was all warm. (after we ordered, we realized his “cold beer” wasn’t much different.) He also didn’t have any change, which we thought was a nice trick when you’re on a remote beach and serving mostly tourist clientele who don’t probably don’t have correct change but most certainly do have money on them to pay for the boat ride to Fronton. Fortunately we were able to foil his plot by coming up with the correct change. (note to travelers – carry as many little bills as possible, to swart (?) remote beach vendors.)

It was Independence Day in the DR, yet another opportunity to get misleading information from a variety of people. We were told by different people in the past couple days that Independence Day was Monday, Tuesday (the actual day) or Wednesday. We were also told that all of the businesses would be closed, some of the businesses would be closed, and none of the businesses would be closed. Some were, and we couldn’t tell whether that was for the holiday or just because Tuesday is a good day to be closed.

TRIVIA QUESTION: which country in the western hemisphere is the only country NOT to celebrate its independence from a European colonial power? The Dominican Republic, which declared its independence from Haiti, and has been spitting on Haiti ever since.