orwellianTwo

Stuff I write when I’m travelling

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  • Yo Ho Hoe

    Well the train carried on and I got used to the speed in the end. Which was fortunate because it was a three-hour journey down to Devon.

    Travelling at home this summer presents a double whammy. Millions of Brits who would normally have gone abroad can’t this year and so are taking staycation holidays. And all the uncertainty about where the next outbreak is going to happen makes it risky to plan ahead too far. So, many of the nicer West Country bolt-holes I was interested in were booked out by the time I pinned my colours to the mast and decided to go.

    In the end I settled on taking a short stay in Plymouth, a fascinating place in itself with a rich maritime history and a base for further exploration into Cornwall if I fancied it.

    And so it was that I arrived on a slightly murky afternoon on the Hoe, with a storm on its way and ominous clouds across the Sound.

    Plymouth Hoe. You’re probably already thinking about a game of bowls in 1588, Sir Francis Drake looking to win the match and go through to the next round to face the well-fancied Spanish Armada. The story is probably not true, but Drake’s association with Plymouth, from where he sailed out on his great missions of Spain-bothering derring-do, is indisputable. Drake is Plymouth and Plymouth is Drake.

    And for some people, that’s a problem.

    There he stands, proudly looking out over the Hoe, probably miffed at being represented in this blog by such a poor blurry photo. No, that won’t do for the ebullient figure of the one and only Sir Francis Drake – naval hero, explorer, master sailor – and slaver?

    If you’ve read my posts from earlier this year on the Dominican Republic (you can find them in the Menu under – you’ll like this – “Dominican Republic”) you will know that we spent a great deal of time discussing the memorialisation of figures such as Christopher Columbus and Nicolas de Ovando, men who were crucial to the making of that nation but who inflicted much cruelty on the native populations and left a brutal legacy of slavery and colonialism to subsequent generations. Little did I know that, a few months later, the horrible death of a black man at the hands of US police would galvanise the Black Lives Matter movement and transform it into a global campaign against systemic racism in all its forms. And that it would train a laser focus on just these topics – history, memorials, statues, who is commemorated, who isn’t, and why.

    Drake had an equally notable seafaring cousin, another local man called Sir John Hawkins. Together they got involved in the profitable new business of taking slaves from West Africa and sailing them across the Atlantic to be traded in Spanish colonies. It’s estimated that Drake was responsible for about a thousand people being enslaved and traded. And if it’s not clear to you already how bizarrely 2020 is working out right now, one of their main customers was the colony of Santo Domingo.

    We are back where we started. Same argument, same sides. I don’t know about that statue of Columbus and Anacoana we talked about in DR, but there was talk of taking Drake down from the Hoe. And there then followed the equally predictable reaction. There’s a storm rolling in across the Sound alright, and the Met Office have called it Storm Francis. They think it will blow out in a day or so.

    I’m not so sure…

    Let’s get back to doing what we’re here to do, walk around a bit, take some more bad pictures, generally chill out and learn stuff.

    Smeaton’s Tower, the old Eddystone Lighthouse

    Going back to old rascal Drake, behind him you see another memorial but this time there’s no drama. The Plymouth Naval Memorial commemorates over 20000 naval personnel based at Plymouth or from other Commonwealth nations, who were lost in the world wars. The seemingly endless bronze panels are sobering enough, and that’s before you realise that there are two other memorials of the same design elsewhere. You may have seen them if you’ve been to those other historic dockyards, Portsmouth and Chatham.

    The obelisk was raised after the First World War, the sunken garden commemorates the second. And it was in the 1939-1945 conflict that a cable holding a barrage balloon broke free and its shackle struck the sphere at the top of the obelisk. You can see the dent to this day.

    Along with Portsmouth, Plymouth was the centre of Royal Navy operations during WW2. Which made the port particularly interesting to the Luftwaffe. A few errant balloons weren’t going to get in the way of the German desire to flatten the place. And, unfortunately for Plymouth and its people, they didn’t.

    So if you’re after a little olde-world Devonian charm in your town centres, try Exeter. But if you like your grand Art-Deco-meets-restrained-Brutalism, the 50’s rebuild of the city centre might just do it for you, if you don’t mind the wind. Me? Well I sort of got the point of the grand unified styling of those broad avenues and the general clean-cut feel of the buildings with their Deco flourishes, but I could also understand why there were still rooms free in Plymouth hotels while Falmouth and Dartmouth seemed to be all booked out. Don’t get me started on St Ives.

    There’s plenty more to see and do nearer the shoreline, and I won’t be able to fit it all in on this trip. For now we’re going for a little walk up into town…

    Not to there. And don’t snigger.

    …do the steepish climb into the wide expanse of Central Park, the version of Central Park where you actually get a decent view out…

    …before heading back down to the station. We’re off to spend the afternoon in Cornwall!

  • Back on the bike

    At first, the train edged gracefully away from platform 2 at London Paddington, a stately roll-out befitting a grand express service heading out onto an iconic route. Gradually it sped up as it glided through West London, and accelerated a little more, and more, imperceptibly, until you couldn’t avoid the fact this thing was absolutely flying! The whole carriage, the whole train, recklessly shooting along the narrow iron tracks below at an insane speed. Could they contain this bullet? Was this safe?

    Down the years, I’d been on too many high-speed trains to count. If I’d ever even noticed how fast they were going it was only as subconscious reassurance that I’d be getting to where I was going in good time. Today, I needed reacquaintance with the experience. Over the last five months, I had only been taking suburban train journeys. And there had only been ten of them. All in the last two months. One long car journey, and maybe one bus. The rest of my world, suddenly constrained to the three or four miles I could comfortably walk until I could turn back and make for the safety of my own home, a refuge from an outside world that had suddenly, shockingly, turned deadly…

    As I write this, it may still be too early to definitively assess how the Covid-19 pandemic has broken our world. We can count the bodies, think of the millions still struggling with the disease and its aftermath, feel for the millions more who have been ruined financially and psychologically, the lost businesses, the lost futures. But we are currently still in the middle of this thing. And it even seems trivial to fuss about travel and blogging while a global catastrophe continues to unfold, especially as the world of travel itself lies in ashes. We should at this point and in this place consider above all, what is going to become of all those fabulous tour guides, hotel staff, bar staff, etc, without whom none of us could meet the world with such ease and joy, without whom none of these posts could exist.

    For now, the best we can do is rehearse the old lesson; take nothing, nothing, for granted. And look with a keener eye at those fundamental components of your life when they eventually reappear. What had you missed before through overfamiliarity, what had you overlooked, like the dawn chorus you never noticed on the way to work until the competition from the daily hubbub was taken away?

    One thing I had become overfamiliar with, was Britain. In the summer of 2020, the pandemic had essentially made foreign travel impossible or impractical. As much as I could have sat the whole thing out at home, home was virtually the only place I’d been for months and it was time for a change of scenery. But if I was going anywhere I would have to take on the risk I had gone out of my way to avoid before, that I would find myself somewhere that felt too much like home, while all around was grey and bucketing down with rain.

    I knew, of course, that I lived on a stunning island, with an almost unmatched resource of rich green landscape, tumultuous seascape, and a place that was a witness to centuries of stories that shape and shake the world. And now, with nowhere else to go, I had the opportunity to explore some of it. So off I went to Paddington, on my way to the West Country. And why not join me, socially-distanced of course, just grab your face mask, find your seat..there you go, strap yourself in nice and tight please – these things are fast!

  • And now…?

    I’ll let you into a secret. I had not been overexcited about doing that last trip to Dominican Republic. For all the tropical beauty and the ancient colonial history, DR had always seemed to be the home of the all-inclusive. The idea of spending virtually your whole holiday trapped inside one great sanitised all-you-can-eat restaurant complex had never appealed before, and although it had its moments (like not being the office) I missed the local touch of staying somewhere more amenable near the main drag.

    It hadn’t helped, I guess, that I was beginning to wonder whether I’d seen all the places I wanted to see, had gorged on all the travel excitement I wanted to indulge in, sat in all the departure lounges I ever wanted to sit in (easy really, because there’s only one departure lounge. And it’s in every airport. Ever built.)

    So why did I go? Well, the original plan at the beginning of the year was Vietnam, but the beginning of the year is far too late to start planning for a trip there near the beginning of the year. I’d had a hankering to see the bigger Hispanic islands of the Caribbean, but Southeast Asia is one place I do still find endlessly beguiling and going back to Thailand was a strong and achievable backup plan.

    But in the end it came down to reducing risk. At the time I was looking to book, January 2020, it appeared that a new variant of the SARS coronavirus of 2002 had reappeared in the region and cases were being reported in Thailand. So DR it was.

    Far better to stay safe and keep yourself well away from something like that.

  • Thoughts from the Departure Lounge

    A reader has requested that I end my blogging from DR with a detailed description of the departure lounge and the flight back. Maybe they’re just very bored. (I nearly wrote “boring”). Writing up the flight might be tricky as I hope to be asleep for most of it. But here we go with a description of Punta Cana Terminal B, Departures.

    Sort of.

    Ambience

    My flight is one of only three to leave tonight, so it feels refreshingly empty and relaxed for an airport.

    And the Dominican Republic is a relaxing place to come, as long as you’re firm with the persistent offers from taxi drivers, souvenir sellers, masseuses, both the good sort and…the other sort. The people are for the most part welcoming. Tourism is the number one industry here so they will go out of their way to make you feel at home.

    As I say that, the airport staff behind me are making one hell of a racket with their chatter. Dominicans are ebullient, which can be engaging, but not that time in Puerto Plata old town when that woman started hurling abuse at someone for a good few minutes…I don’t know why, maybe he’d said something about the fact she only had one hand.

    Green chairs

    It all gets a bit green once you pass security – green chairs, big green disks on the tops of the pillars, green tea-table-things-you-only-see-in-airports.

    It reminds us that, like many tropical paradises, DR is brought to you by the colours Blue and Green. The stunning run through the mountains between Santo Domingo and Puerto Plata is particularly verdant but the scenery is engaging in most places I went through.

    Recycling points

    I’ve spotted a recycling bin to drop off my drink cup when I’m done here. And that’s not something the country is great at to be honest. You can take a photo like this

    walk along a bit, and see this…

    Some could argue that the environment is not the priority in a country where 40% live in poverty, but is it really either/or? And it’s a country heavily dependent on tourism, what do we go there for? It’s certainly not the driving.

    Ah, still some time before my flight. Time to chill out and relax before the return to the cold drear of reality. And, in the same way, that’s what a holiday here is all about, general recuperation and fun in the sun. Not everything is as efficient as it could be, but don’t worry if your 3-hour bus ride to Santo Domingo takes an extra hour to negotiate three bus stops in Santiago de los Caballeros, just go with the flow and relax. And enjoy.

    Adios!

  • Shadows around the Hotel Pool

    With one day to go before my flight home from Punts Cana, it was time to start the journey back from the lovely northwest coast. And “time” in this case means the five hours it took to get from Puerto Plata to my hotel in Santo Domingo, bus and taxi. The scenery is fantastic, but it’s no wonder there were no other British holidaymakers up there, given they’d stopped direct UK flights to Puerto Plata last year.

    Still, getting back to Santo Domingo was worth it. I’m in a fine historic hotel for the last night of my trip. Though I did have my doubts about staying here.

    It’s nothing to do with the location on the river, or the pretty courtyards

    Or the super-friendly bar staff.

    No. It’s about who it commemorates…

    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    When Santo Domingo was settled by the Spanish, it was originally built on the east bank of the River Ozama. That’s the far bank in the photos. In the centre of the second you can see the little Capilla del Rosario, built in 1544.

    By then the settlement had moved to the west bank. The Spanish governor after Columbus, one Francisco de Bobadilla, proved unpopular with the royals and in 1502 they sent a replacement over to sort things out.

    His name was Nicolás de Ovando.

    It was Ovando who moved Santo Domingo over the river and then set about creating much of the town we now know as the Zona Colonial. His was a major contribution to the future of the colony, but Ovando also set about the native Tainos. To quell rebellions he repressed them mercilessly and wasn’t shy of the odd massacre.

    Remember Anacoana, the Taino queen we saw on Columbus’s statue? Here she is again.

    She may look rather fetching there, on Columbus’ plinth. But it appears that Ovando was no admirer. In circumstances that are not entirely clear, he suspected her of being involved in rebellion and ended up capturing her in what looks like another slaughter of Tainos. Poor Anacoana ended up on the hangman’s gibbet.

    Not a pleasant piece of work, our Nick. Oh, I forgot about him forcing the Tainos to work in the sugar cane fields he introduced from the Canaries. And, of course, that jolly wheeze of dragging in Africans to do the work as well.

    In the end, even 16th century Spain were perturbed by these excesses and Ovando went back over to defend himself. He was replaced as governor and received the gruesome punishment of, err..being able to keep all his New World properties. That’s him told.

    All in all, it feels uncomfortable celebrating such a man by linking him to a prestigious and stylish hotel, while evoking that era by lauding “colonial elegance” and “colonial romance” on the website. If it wasn’t for men like Columbus or Ovando, there may not be anything to see here at all. But how would we feel if the great house on the Wannsee near Berlin, where the Jewish Holocaust was agreed and planned, was to be turned into the Hotel Heinrich Himmler? Would you stay there? Are we comparing like with like?

    Well the die is cast, and here I am. The past is the past, and it can only be recognised for what it really was, so we understand its resonances in the present and ensure that the future is different. Something like that. I have a more pressing problem…

    Given what I’ve just written about Ovando, and how ruthless he was when alive –

    – how do I feel about spending the night in his old house?

  • Good to know

    Another trip today.

    I had an excursion booked with a company called Outback Adventures, who take you out to a number of rural communities to show you something of the way of life out in the hills and the fields of this beautiful island. Outback Adventures provide financial support to the people we meet – a cassava maker, a homestead, and a school – in return for allowing tour groups in to look around.

    I don’t get paid by them so this is all free advertising, just to say it sounded like a good cause but I had my qualms about whether I would want troops of tourists turning up at my old school once a day, interrupting the class to gawp at us.

    Then I remembered my Art classes…

    Anyway it was a fascinating and enjoyable day out and I learnt a couple of things along the way that I didn’t know before, and hopefully you will now learn something as well.

    First some pictures.

    Observation 1: Cock fighting is still a thing here

    It’s still perfectly legal here, fight nights are at the weekend. Here’s a den.

    Lesson 2: This is how you make cassava.

    You grind the roots of the yuca plant, take the powder and smear it over the hot fire, turn it over, and you have cassava bread, a starchy relative of the poppadom, maybe more like a crisp pitta, a starchy crisp pitta.

    Breadfruit…

    Some more pictures on our way to the homestead.

    The bark of the Royal Palm was once used for house construction in Hispaniola before the government cut out the cutting down. Presumably the practice was not confined to DR, seeing as the tree is native to the Caribbean. Which leads us to something I picked up before the tour.

    Learning 3: The Royal Palm is native to the Caribbean. The Coconut Palm is not!

    What conjures up the Caribbean better than the image of coconut trees, languorously reaching out of a glorious sun-kissed beach to sway gracefully against a deep-blue sky? But you don’t see any coconut trees in the earliest paintings of European arrival, and there are no words for them in the local indigenous languages.

    Wikipedia tells us that it’s most likely that the coconut palm is native to the Pacific. Originally spread by sea currents and Polynesian sailors, Indian Ocean traders took them to India and the African coast, and later on the Portuguese brought them from their new colonies there to the New World.

    Sorry.

    Point 4: Some African populations were happy to jump onto the European slave ships

    There was a lot of misery and death in those ships, which was bad for the African people.

    There was also a lot of wood, which was great for the African termites.

    According to the guide, termites are a menace to agriculture on the island, I could only see one example – this one – on the plantation we visited. I suppose one damaged tree is bad enough.

    By the way, the plantation produces what it produces – banana, cocoa, coffee, breadfruit, etc – purely for the family that live here.

    On the way to our lunch stop now. Here’s a cow.

    Lunch at the tour company’s restaurant, and there’s a poster with an interesting historical tidbit on the dining room wall…

    Learning Opportunity 5: The Dominican Republic once played proper sports

    Baseball is king here. Many of the greats originated from this small country of 10 million souls, and most places will have a baseball diamond here or there. It wasn’t always like that though.

    At the beginning of the 20th century a community of Caribbean people from the neighbouring British-oriented islands appeared in DR as workers were brought in by the sugar plantations. Cricket was their game, of course, but when the Americans invaded in 1916 they put a stop to this source of immigration (the poster suggests a racist motive) and the subsequent Americanisation of the Republic saw baseball supplant cricket.

    But who had the last laugh? According to Outback Adventures’ poster, the majority of the hundred-odd baseball players from DR playing in the world’s big leagues have their roots in this old British West Indian community.

    BTW, I don’t mind baseball at all. It’s not NFL.

    Off now to our final stop, a painful drive down a pot-holed track that’s worth it in the end.

    Number 6 : Any posting about the Caribbean must have some pictures of a beautiful beach at some point

    And here it is, the beach at Boca Nueva, next door to Playa Dorada.

    I think we have all learned something today.

  • Beyond the Resort Walls

    As you’re aware, I am trying to take opportunities to break away from the comfortable self-contained world of the foreign tourist’s gated resort, with its sanitised notions of tropical “paradise”. For today’s authentic experience, I spent the day alongside some of the Dominicans who are employed in the tourism industry, the country’s biggest money earner and source of employment.We would leave Puerto Plata and travel the one-and-a-half hour journey to Punta Rucia, just 100 kilometres from the Haitian border.Passing through La Isabela, the village near where Columbus reached Hispaniola and site of the church that witnessed the first Christian mass in the Americas, the journey revealed many other ways on which the West has impacted the lives of the local population – villages constructed near sugar plantations, the cultivation of tobacco, bananas, and other agriculture, the steady presence of the Roman Catholic church and the growing intrusion of American-funded evangelicalism.

    But what of the interaction between our workers – the tour guide and his driver – and us, the privileged, mostly white (though not all of us) tourists? To understand the social relations at play, I registered my own locus of intersectional experience at the shoreline and joined the guide as he teamed up with two of his colleagues, the speedboat pilots who were going to take us all to one of their places of employment.That place was Paradise Island, a tiny sandy cay a 30-minute hair-raising ride from the beach.

    The sandy cay is uninhabited, only consisting of a dozen shacks for the tour parties that come out here. Like most cays, it rises very gently out of the water and sometimes disappears beneath the waves. On those occasions it is not open for business.The low sea shelf means you can stand up in the ocean a good few metres away from the sandbank, making for easy snorkelling.Our group reached the bank early enough in the morning to see the local fishes before they were driven away by the incoming waves of later tourists. (And by me, waving at them underwater).Environmental protection is of course central to the leisure offering being offered here. The hundred-or-so day-trippers that eventually crowd the bank before flooding the “unspoilt” waters, are not allowed to bring their shoes with them lest they damage the sand.The name Paradise Island is most probably a concoction of the global tourist industry to sell conceived notions – hang on, it actually was paradise!My exploration of the socio-economics of tourism soon drew to its conclusion, and we headed back to the little boats for the bumpy return to shore.As we headed back, I began to be concerned by some internal contradictions within global capitalism and global tourism. Major American soft-drinks corporations were represented on the bay, as were local rum makers, and the journey back to my hotel witnessed an ongoing dialectical struggle between their joint products, the rough sea, the long bendy roads, and my stomach.

    On the way back to land we slowed down and sailed through an impressive mangrove swamp……before hitting the rough open sea again, and arriving back on the beach.Soon it was back on the road, and about two hours later – after the now obligatory stop at a old-time-workshop-cum-souvenir-shop (this time involving tobbaco rolling)……I was back in the hotel.Verdict; the highlight of my trip so far, from start to finish an absolute blast – err I mean a well-aimed blast at the contested power-relations within global tourism, conceived notions, authenticity… err…and stuff…

    Well, that attempt at sociological analysis didn’t go very well did it? But even if your microscope managed to detect the humour, the joke was absolutely not aimed at the people who made this tour possible, the tour guide, the driver, boat pilots, attendants, lifeguards, cooks…and it’s time for a shout out to all of those underpaid people who work in tourism all over the world, sometimes unseen, working incessant hours to make other people’s dreams come true.

    And finally, a mention to those guides who spend so much time explaining where they come from with knowledge, passion and unstinting love for their country and their people. Guys and girls, wherever you are, you are breaking down borders and bringing the world together one roadside stop at a time!

  • Plata patter

    I rushed the guards at the front gate and managed to temporarily escape the resort for an afternoon. And so I joined a half-day tour of the nearby city of Puerto Plata.

    Warning; this tour begins with a visit to the Macorix rum distillery. There were a number of tastings. Please treat the following account of the day with a degree of caution in regards to its veracity and accuracy.

    Our next stop on our trip to the Moon was to one of the many jewellers in DR that polish and sell precious stones to tourists. There are three main stones that the country specialises in – amber, larimar and coral. (They keep telling me the coral’s not endangered).

    Larimar? It’s a variety of blue pectolite that’s unique to the Dominican Republic, and was only officially discovered in 1974. You cut the stone to reveal the marbly blue stuff.

    Here you see our store guide cutting chips of the bare stone. It doesn’t look all that much, until you see what’s on his wrist.

    From the jewellers, to a chocolate factory, and then onto the central plaza. Time for some photos of the old town of Puerto Plata.

    You might be able to see a mountain in the backgrounds. Don’t worry, we’ll be getting even closer later. Much closer…

    It was actually in this neck of the woods that Columbus first encountered the island. The first European settlement in the Americas was created around here in 1494 and Puerto Plata itself created soon after.

    It’s not the town you see today though. 17th-century struggles with pirates and 19th-century civil wars saw to that. In the 1800s the town was rebuilt in a Victorian colonial style that wouldn’t be out of place anywhere between Antigua and Adelaide.

    The Dominican Republic is enormously proud of the leaders of its independence struggles. This fine fellow is General Gregorio Luperon.

    Here’s the man regarded as the father of the nation. Jose Duarte led this former Spanish colony in the battle for independence between 1822 – 1844, and to him is given the credit for establishing the Dominican Republic as a result of that liberation from Haiti.

    Haiti? Not Spain?

    Wait a minute…

    …no, definitely sober…it was Haiti.

    I won’t go into any more detail about the successful slave revolt that created Haiti, but it’s a fascinating and complex story and well worth looking up. The Black Jacobins by CLR James would make a good start, rollicking and polemical in equal measure.

    Back to the early days. Puerto Plata was originally known for very profitable trading in exports from the nearby silver mines. Like every self-respecting New World colony at risk from pirates and rival European powers, it needed a fort.

    And here it is, the Fortaleza San Felipe.

    Spectacular views. It was used as a prison by the brutal 20th-century dictator Trujillo.

    Hope that didn’t spoil the fun.

    Now back to the mountain. Isabel de Torres, named after the queen who funded Columbus’s expeditions. Dominating the town at 800 metres above sea level, it takes 2 hours to hike to the top.

    Fortunately there’s a cable car.

    And at the top…

    Christ the Redeemer.

    One of the highlights of my trip to Rio, along with the samba and the beach volleyball on the Copacabana.

    Err…hang on

    Ah.

    Yes.

    It’s a much smaller copy of the real one, erected in the early 70’s a couple of years before the Italians built the cable car.

    Whew. And it was quite the ride up and down, particularity down when it stopped halfway, and started swaying…what with everything I think it’s time for a lie-down!

  • Puerto Plata

    I told you I was going all-inclusive at some point, didn’t I?

    Puerto Plata, on DR’s north coast, is the country’s oldest resort. There is a real town here, with some significant history. But up here, on the sandy but windy Playa Dorada, it’s all about the AI meal plan.

    I hope to show you a bit of the actual town and its surroundings later in the trip. It would be better to look at something of substance than flog to death the tired old cliches of the pure beach holiday, like the whole blue sky, blue sea, white sand thing…

    …the megaresort thing where you eat as much as you want…

    …and drink as much as you want …

    …the sun-kissed palm-fringed beach walk along the deep-blue Caribbean Sea…

    …before indulging in free booze again…

    No, it would be wrong to post all of that. It – just – isn’t – right to say it.

    It’s not right.

    Puerto Plata isn’t on the Caribbean Sea. It’s on the Atlantic side.

  • Some more Santo Domingo

    I’m now on the bus out of Santo Domingo and onto my next stop, so it’s time to go through my gallery and drag out any photos we haven’t seen yet…The old town is separated from the sea by Santo Domingo’s own Malecon, maybe not as famous as Havana’s. Near-impossible to cross during the day – and highly avoidable at night.

    Going underground…The Tres Ojos limestone cave system, around the corner from the lighthouse. Amongst the stalagmites and stalactites can be found carvings from the Taino period. You’ll see the limestone again once you leave……because the hawkers at the exit have carved it into a whole array of trinkets and they’ll ask you to buy some. And ask you again. And again, and…

    (I walked away in the end.)

    Back in town.The last two are the ruins of the oldest monastery in the Americas, the Franciscan.

    “…I heard the mission bell…”

    Well, Santo Domingo could have been heaven, it could have been hell, but it wasn’t either. If you’re on the island it’s worth a day or two here to appreciate its history and its enormous legacy, but in the end it felt a little claustrophobic and there’s a lot of pestering. The Zona Colonial is perfectly safe though – two thousand uniformed and plainclothes tourist police see to that.

    Meanwhile, my bus chunters on through the Dominican countryside…

    See you in the new place!