Dominican Republic for the Resort Phobic

(Originally published in National Geographic Traveler, Latin America)

“Do you wonder where I’m taking you?”

I had to crane in to hear as the wind rushed through me, turning the hot night air cold, and my hair into matted dreadlocks. I was on the back of a motorbike, with a driver I hardly knew, heading through the countryside in search of a side of the Dominican Republic I knew existed but had yet to find.

I’d been promised its beating heart. Looking around, all I could see was darkness. The houses we passed were cloaked in shadow, perhaps without electricity. Of the few places that were open, none seemed promising.

“That’s the local whorehouse,” said Willy, my guide, pointing to a blue weatherboard shack, dimly lit by a single bulb. The air was thick with farm smells, peaty from the earth, and sweet from the cane fields we drove by. We passed a pool hall with bachata music—the DR’s answer to country & western—drifting wistfully from its empty interior, and a car wash. For some reason car washes in the Dominican Republic have bars attached to them, I guess people get thirsty waiting around in the Caribbean heat. Outside, a handful of men in shorts and baseball caps sat on plastic chairs, sipping drinks and slapping down dominoes. We kept going. Into the night.

I’d come to the Dominican Republic determined to remain wrist-band and buffet-food free. In a country as famous for its all-inclusive mega resorts as its white sand beaches and baseball players, I wanted to get a sense of what the real DR was like.

I’d yet to find it. So far, my travels had brought me to Cabarete, a seaside town on the north coast of the island, with arcing white sand beaches and boutique hotels and bars dotted along the water’s edge. It’s a kite-surfing capital and a magnet for independent travelers, where you’re as likely to hear German, French or Norwegian spoken on the sandy streets as Spanish.

There were swish bars with bali-style daybeds on the sand, techno-blaring discos and an Irish bar—only in the Caribbean could an Irish bar be called Jose O’Shea’s, with bunches of bananas hanging next to the Guinness keg—where a German hippie strummed Hotel California in the corner. It was there I asked Willy where Dominicans went to have fun.

“If you want l can show you,” he said, eyes gleaming. “You’ll see the real Dominican Republic.” At the time it’d seemed an opportunity too good to miss. But now, as we sped through the dark night, I wondered what I’d gotten myself into.

Then suddenly we were there.

Out of the shadows it appeared, like a huge, open-air temple, glowing red in the darkness. As we neared, you could hear the hum, a general hubbub that turned into to a huh-huh-huh-huh as the one-two merengue beat punctuated the night air.

If the DR has a heartbeat, it’s the steady, infectious march of merengue. You hear it from the moment you land on the island, blaring from shops and car stereos, hummed by school kids and shoeshiners alike. Former dictator Rafael Trujillo—whose brutal 31-year rule and eventual assassination was fictionalized in Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel The Feast of the Goat—made it the country’s official dance. Its rhythm always beats somewhere in the background, the sound around which all other sounds form: honking horns, clacking dominoes, the thwack of baseball against bat.

At the club there were tables packed around a dance floor set on a concrete slab. But the tables were empty and the floor was heaving with bodies writhing and bopping to a 12-piece band. The women were perfectly made up, groomed and J-Lo-tastic. The men were dressed homeboy-style, with baseball caps at improbable angles, baggy jeans slung lower than their pirate Calvin Klein underpants, and lots of bling – gold chains and diamante stud earrings. Hips sliced and swayed, two-as-one, to the irrepressible beat. Their owners circled in small, side-to-side steps, swirling around each other. It wasn’t hard to see where the dance got its name: were this a sea of egg whites and not bodies, the dance floor would surely have turned into dessert.

Where tango is specialized—amateurs on the dance floor beware—and salsa’s turns and twists can be complicated, merengue is Everyman’s dance. It’s simple, straight-forward and fun. And like the Dominicans who dance it, upbeat, playful and exuberant.

“These people are happy,” said Peter McKenna, an American from Boston who’s lived in the Dominican Republic for five years. “They have nothing, but they have fun. I know rich people, they go out to dinner and if the peas are cold, it’s the end of the night! But Dominicans eat the same thing every day – beans, chicken and rice – and they do the same thing every day – they sit around on the street and they play dominoes and talk – and they couldn’t be happier.”

It might be an idealized version of the truth, one that politely turns a blind eye to the poverty, hunger and hardship of daily life in the DR, where nearly 40 percent of the country’s 9.5 million people live below the poverty line, unemployment is over 15% and the wealthiest 10% of Dominicans control 40% of the total economy. But Peter’s right, there’s definitely a warmth and playfulness about people here.

When Christopher Columbus first landed in 1492 and met the indigenous Tainos (a word which means “friendly people”), he wrote: “I cannot believe that any man has ever met a people so good-hearted and generous, so gentle that they did their utmost to give us everything they had.” The majority of the Taino population today has disappeared, or merged with the Spanish and Africans who arrived, but maybe some of that spirit remains.

Earlier that day I’d caught a gua-gua to La Boca, an idyllic spot on the edge of a sandbank where the river meets the sea. The bus ride was more like a house party, with everyone talking and making jokes, and climbing over each other to squeeze into their seats as the driver stopped to pack more people in. Everyone wanted to know where I was from, and what I doing there. And they all had an opinion on the best way for me to get to my destination. Then a preacher got on. He looked like a Dominican version of Barack Obama, clean cut with an earnest demeanor and a deep voice. “Un applauso para dios!” he cried. The bus exploded with clapping. Though it was hard to tell whether the enthusiasm was for God or for the free CDs he was handing out.

CD in hand (evangelical merengue—of course) and waving to my new friends, I got off the bus and took a moto taxi along a bumpy track to La Boca. Locals gather here on weekends to sip icy Presidente beers and coco locos (rum juice in a coconut), and eat slabs of fresh fried fish and crab. It was late afternoon and I watched three beautiful Dominican women with jaunty hats and short shorts silhouetted in the shin-deep water, laughing and drinking. Small children paddled at the water’s edge and young boys lay on surfboards on its calm surface. It was a magical, idyllic afternoon – and not a mega-resort in sight.

The Dominican Republic is the Caribbean’s second-biggest island, after Cuba, and its number one tourist destination, with more than three million visitors arriving each year. It used to be a mostly agricultural economy, but since the 1990s, when the government built the most extensive resort infrastructure in the region, it’s been a magnet for the package tourist, drawn by its luxe accomodations and year-round golf courses.

But the half-island nation that shares its home with neighbouring Haiti has a lot more to offer than cocktails in the pool bar and waiters who bachata your drinks to the table. The DR was home to the first colony in the Americas settled by Columbus, and embodies the full sweep of Caribbean history: five centuries of invasions (French, Spanish, British and American), rum and slave trades, pirate battles, nationalist and socialist revolts and dictatorships.

Columbus described the fertile island as a beautiful paradise, with high, forested mountains and large river valleys. It remains true today. The DR’s natural wonders are largely intact, and well worth taking time to explore. Driving from Cabarete to Santo Domingo I saw more shades of green than I knew existed: glistening cane fields, towering palm fronds, unripe mangos, and deep-shaded coffee and tobacco plantations. The roadside was dotted with brightly painted weatherboard huts with corrugated tin roofs, coconut stalls, and fruit stands with rows of oranges hanging from strings.

I stopped in the noisy, vibrant capital for a day to see one of the oldest churches in the New World, the Catedral Primada de America, before losing myself in the 500-year-old streets in the Zona Colonial, a UNESCO World Heritage site. While the sense of history was strong—the city also boasts the oldest street and the oldest fort in the Americas—what I liked most was the vital life in the streets, humid and full of Caribbean colour, lycra and merengue and bachata music. People sat around in doorways and chairs pulled out onto the street, sipping clove-scented coffee, or leaning out of balconies, watching the world go by.

In the Parque Colon there was a hip-hop concert for disabled people. The main performer was on crutches, with dancers on stage doing wheelies in their wheelchairs. Schoolgirls gathered around practicing their dance moves. The light was soft and gentle and seemed to sit low in the sky as if it were perpetually setting, bathing the stone and pastel-colored buildings in a forgiving glow.

From Santo Domingo I headed east to Punta Cana, a place my guidebook described as, “ground zero of DR tourism… where buffet items seem to outnumber grains of sand.” Luckily I had a friend who lived there, who had promised to show me around.

She picked me up from the bus station and we drove out past the landscaped grounds of the luxury developments, some of them like city-states in themselves. Within a few kilometers we were driving past palm plantations and through small villages where motorbikes swarmed the streets. There were chicken stands and lottery stalls, open-air butchers with ropes of sausages, schoolchildren in crisp blue and brown uniforms and sugarcane workers on the backs of open trucks, sucking on cane. Many of them Haitians, who live on the bateyes, onsite communities within the grounds of the vast plantations.

The Dominican Republic has received international criticism over its treatment of the nearly one million Haitians in the DR, many of whom come as economic migrants to work on the sugar plantations, where the average income in the DR is six times that of Haiti’s. Many poor Dominicans accuse Haitians of stealing jobs, and Haitian workers often work illegally – foregoing legal and civil rights. In 2006 the government pledged to improve living conditions on the bateyes, and to provide labor contracts and a guaranteed minimum wage.

We visited Punta Cana Ecological Park, with its large areas of pristine coastal plain and mangrove forest, and the Parque Ojos Indigenas, where we dived into crystal clear, ice cold freshwater lagoons, fed by an underground river that flows into the ocean. We swam with turtles and felt prawns nibble our toes.

Then we drove to Boca de Yuma, a ramshackle town with rough, unpaved roads and half-finished buildings, and a seaside promontory where waves crash into the rocky shore. From there we hired a local fishing boat to take us from the mouth of the Rio Yuma to Playa Blanca, a pretty, mostly deserted beach 2km east of town.

Then it was back to Punta Cana, where we stopped at friend’s house for dinner. Alix Puntiel is from Santo Domingo, and works as a manager at the local Hard Rock Café. It was his night off and he promised us a traditional Dominican meal. We arrived at his house to find him in the kitchen, sweating over a hot stove with five different dishes cooking.

We start with mangu— platano mashed with milk and butter. “My mother fed us this when we were kids,” Alix said of the creamy, salty mixture. “You eat this and you don’t need to eat anything else.”

Next he served the typical meal, known as “la bandera”, white rice, fried chicken and habichuela, red beans. On the side we had fried cheese and salami with onions cooked in vinegar, followed by strong black coffee.

As we drank our coffee on the balcony, sitting in the breeze as the hot night began to cool, I could hear the beat of a merengue band, like the soft ticking of a clock, throbbing in the distance.