Day 82

We are making plans to go to Haiti next week. This makes for several logistical operations – a) we have to plan our route to the western part of the Dominican, then to the Haitian border, then to Cap Hatienne, the city on the northern coast that we plan on visiting. If this were the US, it would be a 4-5 hour trip. Here it will take us a couple days. b) I have to get my work done for the week by end of day Tuesday. c) we have to figure out what money we will carry, and what will be accepted on our journey. There aren’t ATMs all along this route. (come to think of it, it’s been a while since we’ve seen a fast food joint.)

So I worked for most of the morning, while Amy and the kids rented an ATV and visited La Gazuma, a remote town in the hills outside of La Galera – no paved road, barely a dirt road into and out of the group of maybe 10 houses with a comedor. Amy reported that it is beautiful in its location, the hills around Fronton – there are no cars to be seen, and maybe a couple motorcycles. This may be a community with people living as they did 100 years ago here.

I met Amy, Lane and Benjamin at Playita in the afternoon. It was a nice day at Playita – the weather was good, the sea was calm, and there were not many people there – a situation we haven’t had there yet on our stay. I went snorkeling – Playita has a substantial turtle grass region in the water, and you have to carefully walk out about 100 yards before the water becomes clear enough, or the bottom sandy enough, for you to swim in. I put on my mask and started out. It was boring for the longest time – mostly sand with a few patches of grass on one side, the turtle grass making the water shallow on the other. After swimming out quite a ways, I started seeing some fish, an interesting crab, and a huge wall of a reef, which sat just under the surface. There were all kinds of fish here, and the most interesting were a school of needle fish, which swam just below the surface, requiring me to crane my neck to see them.

While not the most remarkable day of snorkeling I’ve had here, it was a very good day at Playita, where I haven’t had the best of luck snorkeling in the past. I feel as if I’m learning where to find the better snorkeling locations at all of the beaches here.

READING NOTE: While perusing a brought-to-the-island-two-weeks-later May 7, 2007 issue of TIME magazine, I caught this, the last line in an unsigned review of Michael Chabon’s newest book, “The Great White Jewish North” - “ Chabon may be incapable of writing a bad book. But it’s still not clear if he can write a great one.” As someone who thinks Chabon is a great writer and that whether he has written a “great” book is irrelevant, I find this statement irritating, not adding anything to the reader’s information on the book, and sounding like something the writer has had sticking around in their notebook since freshman composition, waiting for the right moment to use it.