Travel Tips

When the Dominican climate turns nasty, the effect is usually one of biblical proportions. It can be violently unpredictable, capable of ripping apart a travel itinerary like it can rip the side off a mountain. It has no respect for you or your plans. I learned this recently while being holed up in Bonao during the Tropical Storm Odette.
Little did I know that the rain I felt on my back Friday afternoon would be the first drops of an incessant downpour that would not let up until Sunday morning. There was to be no trotting along fragrant mountain trails on horseback for me. So I kicked back on the porch of the ranch where I was staying, watched the mountains disappear, and learned the true meaning of rain. Never before has rain physically scared me. In no time at all, all color had been drained from the sky, reducing the view to a murky watercolor. For over a day our lives were set in motion to the violent drumming of the rain upon the tin roof. It came in long symphonic waves, reaching pummeling crescendos then falling to a prolonged rhythmic patter. To confound things, whispers came around of the imminent arrival of Odette, a cyclone gathering in pace across the Caribbean Sea.
This news stirred locals to recall the infamous Hurricane George. The Ranch owner remembered waking his wife and daughter in the early morning after hearing an almighty explosion of a riverbank capsizing, then fleeing on foot for safe land.
With a few hours to go before Odette would reach Bonao, we decided to make a short excursion up into the mountains, if nothing more than to get a glimpse of the remote valleys I wished to explore. Bad idea. Driving along a road corkscrewing up into the clouds, the reverberations of our car were enough to trigger several new landslides. So we continued upwards watching rock and rubble detaching from the cliff face behind us, like in a roadrunner cartoon.
Naturally, the falling debris left us concerned about the return journey. In the company of the veterans of Hurricane George, I tried to keep my hysteria at bay. We reached our destination – a remarkable dam flooding a pristine tropical valley with water of a wonderful pure turquoise - surely one of the Dominican Republics’s best kept secrets.
One of my companions shattered the tranquility by recounting how a dam had burst its banks during hurricane George, destroying an entire village. I thought I detected a touch of relish in his voice. Well, I wanted to be indoors again, and my heart leapt as we descended each corner anticipating more landslides. The muddied car tires lost grip on the deteriorating road, and at one point we had to rebuild the pass in order to continue. I felt massive inward relief on arriving back at the ranch in Bonao, chastising myself for voluntarily entering such an idiotic situation.
The rumour that Odette would turn into a hurricane proved false. Contrary to earlier, I sat out the storm on the porch with a newly found patience and even fair amount of pleasure. Drinking rum and banana juice, we reflected that trying to defy the elements in a country like this is a foolish idea. To see a storm of such magnitude was a humbling experience. I slept with a feeling of contentment that night, my mood in tune with the passing storm. Odette had helped me shake off my fixation with European time, and temporarily I felt the liberation of living by the cycles of nature. I put off my plans to go to the city deciding to hike upstream to the waterfalls. A cloudless morning dawned, and I noticed that the rains had turned the hills an even deeper shade of green. I set off towards them without a second thought.