Ellen in Latin-America: oktober 2008

With a little bit of delay, I finally came back to Santo Domingo. I’ve been here now for 2 weeks and it has been great. This is actually my first night at home and only because I’m having friends coming over in a little while.

Honestly, I didn't like Puerto Rico all that much. San Juan as a city is cleaner and easier to live in. The city is beautiful and so is the island but I didn't quite find my way in it. Santo Domingo is a jungle, there is more poverty, it has no beach but I love it anyway. Not in the least because of the people.

Highlight of my week, as it tends to be in Europe as well, was my weekend. Ale-tours, the very exclusive travel agency run by my friend Ale organized a trip to the mountains, more specific to Valle Nuevo. One of our friends’ family owns a sort of ecolodge that is situated in literally the middle of nowhere. From the last village we saw, it took us 1 hour by SUV to get there. But it was worth the trip. Besides these cute guesthouses, there was nothing up there, including electricity.

This is Pico Duarte, for those who don't remember, the highest mountain in the Carribean. Valle Nuevo itself is located at 2500 metres. This means a completely different climate then the one we see displayed in the Jetair brochures which was a huge relief for me. Believe me, it gets incredibly annoying always having to run around in 35 degrees with a humidity of about 70%. In Valle Nuevo, I finally got the chance to put on a jacket and a scarf! I guess during the day it was about 15-20 degrees. In winter it gets to -5 degrees up here.

Instead of mango's, bananas and coconut, I finally could try my first Dominican strawberry.

At night it was just plain cold... My friends didn't expect me to suffer from any cold since apparently I "should have been used to it by now" but I just shamelessly put on a fleece sweater and sat in front of the fireplace.

With Francis and the man from Ale-tours himself.

Valle Nuevo is very close to a tourist hotspot, namely the exact center of Hispaniola (the island consisting of the Dominican Republic and Haiti). For some reason that I don't quite get, they constructed a sort of Piramid there. I say a hotspot ironically as the road to get there was actually even worse then the one to Valle Nuevo. One of our cars ran out of cooling water so we comfortably squeezed into 1.