Dominican Republic Off The Beaten Path Tips by micas_pt Top 5 Page for this destination

Coffee

This family, as many others, also grows their own coffee. When coffee beans are mature they put them into to oven to toast it and later grate.

The Dominican way of making coffee is: they boil water and put the coffee inside a fabric bag with a stick. They pour the water over the bag and they roll the stick until it presses the coffee. They repeat this operation several times, until they consider coffee is ready to drink. They used to say they made the best coffee in the world. Being from Portugal, I found it very tasteful but weak, as I am used to stronger coffee.

Sugar cane and rum

The sugar cane is used to produce rum, the Dominican Republic's typical drink. Everywhere you go you will find rum, plain or mixed with something. When we visited one of the plantations, the driver took us through the plantation showing worker's way of living. Then we visited the harvest and the warehouse and were, obviously, welcomed with rum (plain or with Coke). Also, they offered us fresh sugar cane pieces to taste.

The cocoa

Cocoa "fruit" grows from the trees. In this photo you can see that they grow in a different way, .. .well, I found it different since I had never seen any of these trees where fruits grow in the log. When fruit is mature, they catch it and then a treatment they make some balls of cocoa and store it that way. When they want to use it (to make chocolate) they grate it in the amount they need and use it. It smelled so good and tasted delicious!

The drivers' family

We soon discovered that the house that we were visiting was the driver's house. He introduced us to his nice family - wife and kids - and showed us around. We had a nice explanation about local fruits grown at their house - papaya, mango, and banana - and where given some to eat. Fabulous, tasty fruit!

We were also shown how they "manually" produced their own coffee and cocoa. That’s an interesting process, although it requires some work. I ended up buying some homemade coffee and cocoa. Delicious!!

Traditional houses in the inner island

While visiting the inner island, we were shown a typical house. Houses are somewhat apart from each other, and made of wood, some of them being very colourful. Usually houses consist of a living-room connected to the kitchen, and one or two bedrooms. Not too big, but all the family fits there and seems to be happy.

Around the house you may find a kind of warehouse/outside kitchen and lots of trees – fruit trees, cocoa and coffee. The fruits, cocoa and coffee grown from those trees are for family's consumption.

The sugar cane harvest

The sugar cane grows in these farms, and occupies huge extensions of land: sometimes it looks like reaching the horizon, as everywhere you look you see sugar cane.

When sugar cane grows, men cut the cane with a proper instrument, a kind of blade, and put it in a "carriage" that is pulled by some kind of cow or ox. When "carriage" is full, the animal pulls that load (guided by worker) to a central warehouse. This warehouse is equipped with machines that help to unload "carriage" and weight the sugar cane, that is then placed inside the warehouse.

Sugar cane plantations

One major economic activity in the inner island is the sugar cane plantations. You can see huge plantations (farms) where the green sugar cane fields extend for kilometres and kilometres.

The owners of these farms have installations for their workers, mainly Haitians. Haitian men come to Dominican Republic in search of work and bring wife and children. These sugar cane farms have all the required infra-structure for families: houses for workers, school for children and basic health care system. Mainly, all their life is there: women take care of house and children, men work in the plantation, children attend farm's school and when someone is ill they go to the farm's doctor. Actually, this is the official version I was told by our guide. Nevertheless, I’ve also heard about Amnesty reports about the exploitation and lack of conditions of these farms.