Santo Domingo by www.born2travel.it

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26. 06. 2006 Bayahibe (DOMINICAN REP.)

During the journey to Fiumicino airport we were accompanied by the commentary of the Italy-Australia match (round of 16 of the World Cup) and Totti takes the penalty (in the 93rd minute) just as we are leaving the motorway, and in our jubilation we take the wrong road; our Caribbean adventure begins this way, nearly missing the flight already! After 11 hours of flight, the first encounter as we got off the plane was with the humidity, so strong that it barely let you breathe (as much as 94%). We go straight to bed to avoid, as in Cuba, that because of jet lag, at 5 in the morning, in the first days, we were fresh and lively and in the afternoon like zombies...

27. 06. 2006 Bayahibe (DOMINICAN REP.)

After about two months, here I am again under the coconut palms that shield my skin, so sensitive, from this strong sun. Well, it really is time for a good swim in the famous Caribbean Sea, the sea of corsairs, of pirates... Hmm, whether it's that a few days ago Alberto (a hurricane that hit Cuba) also brushed this island or the bad weather that stirred up the seabed so much, but the water was full of seaweed and disappointed us a lot! Here, unlike all the other places I have been to so far, there are no umbrellas, only palms! On the first little reconnaissance trip outside the resort we met an Italian: Bob Roy, 43, from Treviso, covered in tattoos, who at a certain point in his life got fed up with, as he says: the system, and moved here with his wife.

He opened a little tattoo studio and slipped into the calm, quiet Caribbean life, where everything flows slowly, where the word hurry does not exist. He told us thousands of things about this land; here walking around armed is the order of the day and strolling with a pistol dangling from your belt is normal. Are we in the Wild West or what? Carlo would have fallen in love and would have increasingly confirmed his theory about leaving everything and moving to Brazil. But careful! The wise Bob also added that one should not plunge headlong into these projects, also because in these places or in any other not very democratic country, you never know how things will turn out.

Maybe today it's all roses and flowers, tomorrow, instead, the local Fidel Castro with a coup takes everything and you are forced to flee and at 50 you cannot risk being left out on the street (as happened to his brother in Polynesia, a family of madmen!) His ace in the hole is the house he left in Italy and now rents out. in the worst case, he closes everything here and returns to the Italian fold! The funniest thing about when I was chatting with Bob was that every now and then some deeply tanned Italian would pass by, greet him and tell him all their stories. In those moments I felt a bit like Patrizio Roversi in Turisti per caso when he interviewed our fellow countrymen who had moved abroad.

In the afternoon, in a football match we meet Orazio, a colleague of ours from the Air Force, on holiday there for the second time, and a friend of an entertainer: Juanito, who now works on his own and organises do-it-yourself tours and who could be the turning point of our trip! Between one swim and another in this sea that becomes more and more beautiful we witness a pitiful scene of the classic stupid Italians, soaked drunk, sitting at the bar or worse, collapsed on the waterline... with the fact that it's all inclusive (alcoholic cocktails included and the legendary rhum, the so-called vitamin R), these guys sit behind the bar and drink, incredulous, from morning to night.

How disgusting! Yesterday I thought that, in my opinion, in another life I must have had some trauma with some drunkard, because there is no other explanation for this hatred of mine towards them! In the evening: appointment with Juanito, we finally meet him. He arrives in a tiny Japanese car, with tinted windows and a pretty mulatto girl. He introduces himself and says: Relax, she is not my girlfriend, you can do whatever you want with her! He takes us to his little place a few kilometres from our resort, in the village of Bayahibe.

There were few houses, the classic little Caribbean houses where everyone sat outside their door resting, the photographer, the little guesthouse open (for hourly clients) and Juanito's little bar, a small room with four half-broken pool tables, an old-fashioned bar counter with a beautiful big-breasted mulatto woman serving cerveza and Dominican music blaring! The Aventura first and foremost (they're local...!) We meet some people and, as in the most classic scenes of small villages, all the key characters are there: the neighbourhood bully, the village idiot, the pretty girl who plays hard to get and turns everyone's head, the more open one... Juanito tells me he has three girls who work for him... they conquer the guy in his bar and then cook him in the little guesthouse across the street open 24/7! All in one day! 28. 06.

2006 Bayahibe (DOMINICAN REP.) Entire morning devoted to exploring the island. We walked for about an hour and a half like two Robinson Crusoes, enchanted and amazed at every encounter we made. We remain alone with the sea, the sun, the sand, the waves, the palms standing straight up to the sky or lying sunbathing on the waterline and the many little animals that watched us, curious. Little lizards, geckos, many little crabs and even a strange crustacean: a snail, or rather, a crab with a snail's shell! I was enchanted by nature and the vegetation and I thought that 500 years ago, when the Spanish Conquistadors landed here, who knows what the island was like, who knows the population.

Who knows if the flora was so different from what we admired this morning! Certainly there were no muscular entertainers and hostesses of these tourist resorts waiting for us! At this point the question arises spontaneously, as someone used to say:...but if you always complain about holidays and tourists why didn't you book an unknown hotel far from any tourist route? Quite right, I'd say, but unfortunately, when you book at the last moment and above all when up to the end you still don't know where to go, it's easier the way we did it! We stop in a little fishing village. There were two people sitting in the shade on a veranda. I go up to them, greet them and cordially we start chatting. They are very kind; one of them, Feliz, had a sawn-off shotgun and said he was a coast guard; the other, Jesus, a sort of caretaker.

They showed me where they lived and I was struck to see that they had nothing! They were so sweet and stayed in my heart when, saying goodbye, they told us: Vaya con Dios, mi hermano! and when we thanked them for their kindness they repeated. Thank you for coming and come back again tomorrow! In the evening, by taxi, we returned to Juanito's place. Between one game of billiards and another we spent some time immersed in the Dominican pueblo. Every now and then I looked around and felt one of them, I imagined myself a local inhabitant.

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