Day 54

I had coffee for the 4th time in my life. I may never again, as I doubt it could top this one.

Every Belgian I have met here is a very pleasant - and talented - person. I don’t know if this is true of all Belgians, or just the 3 who’ve escaped. Today we rode - with Kent and Agnes - on horses owned and maintained by Karyn and Ronald, the Belgian couple I had met in my earlier internet searches. They own La Ranchetta, a B&B outside of town. It consists of 3 houses built by Ronald, and a restaurant / bar that he also built, very rustic and beautiful. We rode out to the hill called La Loma (“The Hill”) where many wealthy ex-pats and Santo Domingans are building large houses for the great view of Las Galeras bay. We rode a couple miles up the hill, on a one-horse-wide lane that came to the hilltop above Playa Madama. We got off the horses, climbed down the coral hill to the beach – a little horseshoe cove with a protective reef and a cliff wall rising along the left hand side. We swam for a while, and got out to dry and have some sandwiches that we brought. Karyn asked us if we wanted some of hers, and we told her we didn’t think we got sandwiches on the ½ day trip. She said she thought we were on the full day trip. After a quick conference, which basically involved deciding whether it was okay to pull the kids from school for the third straight day (we were a little apprehensive, but not too) we decided to go for it, and had some of her (well, Ron made them) great bread with eggs and vegetable sandwiches. After this the two Dominican horse guides climbed some palm trees for coconuts, of which they shared 3 styles – the big green shell kind that exist in the trees, which you have to pare down to the brown center, which gives coconut water and the white lining, which is soft and fatty at this stage. They opened some older brown hairy centers, where the white lining had dried and become crisper – Karyn had told us the white lining was all fat – and then found some brown centers that had become seeds, with small trees growing out of them. The white lining of these was even drier and crispier. Then we climbed up the hill on the left side of the cove. We saw some colorful lizards, Karyn told us even more about the local flora, including information on the tree that everyone here claims has cancer-fighting qualities, and we had a wonderful view of Playa Madama. Karyn told me that above Playa Fronton, a beach down the coast, there used to be a lighthouse on the high point, and there are a lot of iguanas there. I’d like to check it out. We came back to the beach, and then Karyn gave us a tour of some caves that are in the hill in back of the beach. We got pretty far inside, where we needed flashlights, and got up close with some rock formations – stalactites, stalagmites and the such.

Karyn was a fount of information. She has obviously lived here awhile, is very interested in the land and the natural conditions, and has explored considerably, although she said Ron tells her about many of the local areas after he explores them. She knew most of the plants, knew where to find and identify many of the animals, and knew most of the local residents. Her respect for the region and its inhabitants was obvious, and at a marked contrast to many of the ex-pats here.

We got back to the beach, and hiked up to the horses. We rode for a couple miles through a small lane, ending up in what looked to be the middle of nowhere but ended up being a remote Dominican farm. Karyn told us we would have coffee or tea here, in a small thatched roof –covered opening with a small kitchen on the end. It rained while we had our drinks, and it was yet another surreal, timeless setting – sitting under a thatched hut in the middle of mountains on a farm that showed no clues of what era it was, through the complete lack of technology. As I said, the coffee was great, and the tea - which was made from grass and herbs the farmer had picked from his own land - was good, also.

GREAT KARYN QUOTE: When describing her neighbor, a farmer who shot an 8 foot Caribbean boa one night – “You can’t wake Dominicans for anything, but if they hear one of their chickens in trouble, they’re up immediately.”