The Zona Colonia is the ” Old City ” Santo Domingo.
It was established by Bartholomew Columbus in the early 1500’s and is the oldest European settlement in the New World. It became a base of operations for Spain’s conquest of the America’s and was fortified and manned by armies of the King of Spain till Spain lost its political grip on the America’s, but left it’s religion and culture firmly intact.
Now the Zona Colonia is an official UNESCO World Heritage destination for tourists interested in roots, culture, and human history.
My Airbnb guesthouse is within walking distance of the walled, fortified, old city. It is in a working class part of Santo Domingo. The George Washington Highway and waterfront is several blocks to the south of me, the Plaza Independence is several blocks to the north of me, the officIal Zona Colonia is several blocks to the northeast. Instead of turning the pages of a history book, I just have to go out the front door and start walking through a living history book.
Being close to a destination site is a good business model. For twenty dollars a night the price is right for travelers like myself who like basics but would rather put travel dollars towards food and entertainment instead of fancy sheets and designer pillowcases.
On my morning walk through my new neighborhood,there is nothing out of place.
People are making a living, raising kids, doing business, doing soul work and the devil’s work.
The photos speak for the place.
There is plenty of life here to go around.
When life is working right, it sounds just like a properly struck tuning fork.
Visibility is restricted on airplanes.
Looking out through a small porthole, flyers can see parts of their plane, but mostly see clouds. Sometimes the clouds are white as your grandfather’s hair while other times they are puffed up like a boxer’s bruised right eye.
The terra firma of the Dominican Republic fills my porthole as we fly over the island and begin our descent. Instructions for landing are given over a sound system in Spanish and English. We are thanked for our compliance, urged to take all our belongings with us, go through Customs, enjoy our trip and fly United again.
This island is large, with plenty of water, and grows everything, and the surrounding sea has plenty of fish. This island is the size of Georgia and is one of the largest of the Caribbean islands, behind Cuba and Jamaica.
Setting down with a bump, on a wet runway, this ninth Scotttreks trek, has begun.
I’ll be stepping back into history this trip, jumping into the Unesco certified Colonial Zone in Santo Domingo where Spain established its beachhead in the New World.
Landing, my travel notebook is empty, waiting to be filled.
Some of what fills Scotttreks is by choice; but the rest is up to fate and the travel God’s.
Where my attention goes is what I write about and photograph, and what draws my attention usually doesn’t have lots of bells and whistles.
We listen to a lot of talking heads but this guy actually makes sense.
As an employer, you don’t have to pay his wages, retirement, medical benefits or deal with his personal issues that cost you money. Fred stays where you put him and does as he is programmed. He won’t steal from you, misrepresent what your business does, and always dresses appropriately.
As a traveler, Fred gives me information I can use, and, he is easy to walk away from.
As a watcher of trends, Fred seems, to me, to be a harbinger of our coming dystopian future.
When we listen to ” fake people ” we have already been positioned where someone else wants us.
.
Before you get somewhere you have to go somewhere.
The collection of airports this trip will be those in Albuquerque; Denver; Newark, Houston and Santo Domingo. With checking in, security, eating, waiting, layovers, flight time, twenty hours will go by as quick as a Clint Eastwood, Dirty Harry marathon on Saturday afternoon television.
At eleven this evening, waiting for Newerk ticket agents to check in to work and get us boarded, all the familiar sights are in play..
There are transport golf carts picking up stragglers who have trouble walking long distances between terminals and gates. There are security men and women with walkie talkies on their hips, blue ball caps, and whistles dangling around their necks,looking vigilant. There are pilots dressed for work, standing in line for coffee but able to whisk past security easily. An announcement, repeated often, advises us ” not to take luggage from strangers and report such incidents immediately..” Bartenders do inventory and waitresses make sure they have two pens for taking orders.
The Newark air terminal is clean and a United Airlines hub. There is shopping here for those that want it and many travelers, even at this late hour, are plugged into the internet, charging cell phones, playing video games or watching movies.
Some hours later, leaving Newerk, flying at night around eight hours, Scott is coughed up in Santo Domingo feeling like Jonah exiting the damn whale that swallowed him.
Picked up by Berluis at the Santo Domingo airport, whisked down Avenida of the Americas past palm trees with the Caribbean Sea on one side, industrial areas, hotels, restaurants on the other, my Airbnb accommodations are waiting for me.
Escaping snow is one of my main directives.
If I see a penguin, I’m going to check my airplane ticket, call the pilot a drunk, and demand a full refund.
If I wanted to be cold I would have gone north instead of south.
Trips start with me saying the name of a country three times while hopping up and down on my left foot, twice.
There are 195 countries in the world, according to Wikipedia. I can’t see them all, in this lifetime, so I usually choose countries to visit that look warm and friendly, have good pictures from people who have been there, and good reviews by fellow travelers.
Sometimes friends and family give me their dream vacations.
Pat, who keeps Scotttreks.com flying with tech genius, suggested the Dolphin Fountain in Mazatlan, all the five star restaurants in Paris, the Great Barrier Reef for diving. In the Dominican Republic he likes LaRamada, the north side beaches, the grave of Christopher Columbus, Altos de Chavon and Casa de Campo.
To celebrate my ninth travel ring, I buy myself a brand new Dominican Republic guide book at Barnes and Noble, full of places to see, foods to sample, music to tap my foot too, places to hang my hat.
There are 195 perfect countries on this planet to visit, thousands of cool places to explore, and friendly hospitable people in all of them..
Scott is getting ready to ramble, once again, but hopping three times is getting difficult
I wish I had a magic carpet to make getting there and back home as easy as Mom’s apple pie with a big scoop of ala mode.
The washer and dryer at Ms. Sue’s starts early in the morning and ends late at night.
With forty two kids, clothes get dirty and, even with throw away diapers, there is hardly time to wash, dry,fold, and hang. Some of the clothes are hand washed in buckets in the front yard and the girls are most often saddled with this task, though Peter was scrubbing his white sneakers yesterday morning in a sink in the laundry room..
Ms. Sue wants the outside laundry location changed, because, near the house, the soil gets wet and makes mud that gets tracked into the house by almost a hundred little feet..
The new outside laundry area is in the shade, pebbles bordered by a square perimeter of heavy rocks borrowed from a collapsed retaining wall next to the guest house where I bivouac during my volunteer visit.
The girls are washing in the new place today, but, mostly, they laugh, talk, learn.
Clean clothes are a treasure, especially when you have no treasure chest to put them in.
Making do doesn’t mean you can’t have fun doing,and kids, even in rough times, always find ways to have fun.
One of the kid’s lifts the slow running hose and sprays the others till the hose is wrestled away and staff gets them all quiet again.
Having to do your laundry is a lifetime chore and having a little fun, when you do it, makes you like it more than you should.
In a hallway to the tv room, on a wall in front of the boy’s dorm, is a tree with kid’s photos hanging like fruit.
These photo’s were taken some years back and the children have long since outgrown their photos, each day becoming something new, their emotions taking them on minute by minute roller coasters.
For businessman, kids are future buying customers or part of their future labor force.
For schools, kids are society’s future mom’s and dad’s and bring money from the state.
For politicians, kids are future voters who will have to pay for current policy mistakes.
For Jesus, children are to be nurtured.
At Ms. Sue’s, children give this home its life. They run down halls, swing on swings on the playground, sharpen pencils at school, recite devotionals, watch Disney movies before bedtime, do their chores with only a little complaining.
It takes a long time for human fruit to ripen.
Yesterday’s photo’s don’t do justice to today’s faces.
It is, I’m observing, time for some new portraits.
Haiti Made is a local countryside Cafe and Gift Shop.
If you walk outside the Christianville front gate, past the security man sitting in a chair with an automatic fully loaded weapon by his side, you make a quick right and follow a single winding lane road into the countryside until you get to their front door.
Less than a quarter mile, past the Old Well, you can drop by Haiti Made, grab a smoothie and visit with locals and foreign tourists in the heat of the day.
Displayed on tables,walls and pallets are handmade items made by local men and women who are part of the Haiti Made’s craft co-operative.
Jan is in court today and works the register, takes orders, meets friends who come in with pitches for various community projects. There are Americans living full time in Haiti and many have Christian intentions and charitable goals.
Love and Grace are operative words today and the smoothies are truly smooth. My favorite is banana cherry, but some of the kids like banana peanut butter, or cherry lime. They are all made with real fruit and thick enough you can use a spoon to scoop them out of the glass..
On this hot afternoon, with heat rising and the feel of rain in the air, going to Haiti Made makes a good comma in another long drawn out Faulkner sentence about hope and fear in a desolate Garden of Eden.
If a smoothie isn’t your cup of tea, you can choose a cup of coffee and have a muffin.
On a hot afternoon, it feels good to sit under the shade trees on the patio and swing in an old tire swing that hangs down from a tall sturdy branch above it by a thick thick rope that only a hangman would love.
There are competing perceptions of Haiti.
There is the portrayal, in its art, that Haiti is a rural place of simplicity, order, old ways, peaceful, a collage of beautiful colors, shapes, and sounds. This is the Haiti that Gauguin would have painted had he sailed to Haiti instead of Tahiti.
There is the reality of Haiti, in a drive thru Port Au Prince, of collapsed concrete buildings, lingering fires in the street, pigs eating garbage as people sift through it next to them, street shops made from sheets of tin and plywood, hands shoved in your car window selling bottles of water.
The difference between the imagined Haitian paradise and the real fallen city is stark.
Would we rather accept a sentimental vision, or adjust to gritty reality?
Is our glass half full, or half empty?
Haiti is a pot of spicy soup with ingredients we savor, and ingredients we spit out.
When you travel, you meet reality.
Haiti shares its island with the Dominican Republic. Haiti speaks French and the Dominican Republic speaks Spanish. Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the western hemisphere while the Dominican Republic is a tourist mecca with white beaches, all inclusive resorts, stunning landscapes.
Haiti was discovered by Columbus, claimed for Spain, ceded by Spain to the French, and became an independent country when Toussaint L’Overture, in 1804, led half a million slaves in revolt.
In 2003, Voodoo became an official Haitian religion.
There have been 70 dictators here since their Independence Day.
Unemployment is around 80% .
The 2010 earthquake that hit Haiti was a 7.0 magnitude with over 300,000 Haitians killed and property damage that has never been rectified.
There is too much Africa and Europe here, and not enough opportunity and freedom..
Being kept a slave, by your own countrymen, is hard to fathom.
Where all the money donated to Haiti went, after the earthquake, is in someone else’s Swiss bank account.
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