California doesn't hold a candle to this heat, believe me.
...
Took the Puerto Plata / Sosua tour today, which started at 8:30 and went until 4 pm. It was a long day.
The first stop was the rum factory. I won't mention much about this, since we weren't allowed to take pictures of the factory interior, and without that it's not particularly interesting. 3rd largest rum company in the world. Here's some museum-piece rum-making equipment on display outside the factory.
Second stop was the Amber museum. This guy greets you on the way in.
Sadly, I didn't get many pics worth sharing there, because the tour guide moved a bit quickly for me, and the photos I did take had problems with the glare off the display cases. This one turned out kinda-sorta okay, though:
A statue of a god (cemi) by the name of Taino, apparently.
While there, I learned how to tell the difference between real and fake amber, since (apparetly) a lot of people try to sell fake stuff to the gullible. Amber, being petrified tree sap, should be quite light - much lighter than glass. Plastic is of similar weight, but if you drop plastic and amber in salt water, the plastic will sink while the amber floats.
I didn't buy anything here. I really drooled over this amber chessboard...
...but it was a wee bit out of my price range.
(Actually, despite the fact this was a shopping tour, I only bought one thing all day... A small mask at the cost of a little over $10 CND. I guess nothing else really grabbed me.)
While there, I also encountered Mama Juana, which is the national drink of the DomRep.
When a local pronounces it, it comes out very similar to "marajuana," and I'm sure tour guides get awfully tired at laughing at tourists' oh-so-clever observations to this fact since EVERYONE makes the joke. Anyway, this drink seems like kind of an alcoholic snake-oil, in that it's hailed as a cure all. Headaches? Cures it. Stomach problems? Drink up. Dizziness, heat exhaustion? Mama to the rescue. Seriously, the list of stuff it's supposed to cure is as long as my arm.
Apparently, there *is* medicine in it - at least enough that customs considers it medicine rather than alcohol, despite the fact that it's 1/3 wine and 1/3 rum - but I just found the whole thing a little hard to swallow, pun intended. I tried a glass of the stuff - tasted kinda like vermouthe, that is to say, not good at all.
From there, we travelled to the Puerto Plata fort, which was a 400-plus year old structure that held some importance in DomRep gaining independence from the Spanish. Some guy by the name of General Gregorio Luperon also had something to do with the place, I guess.
(Yes, I'm only feigning ignorance - I actually paid attention to our tour guide.) Note the paintings laid out on the grass outside the fort - those were goods sales folk tried to sell us as we walked from the bus to the fort proper. About eight salespeople, in total. Plus a salesdonkey.
The interior was pretty interesting, in no small part because of this...
That door's only a little over a metre tall. Why make it so short? Well, invaders would have to crouch to get through, allowing fort defenders to take a swipe at their heads/necks with one of these...
Nasty.
But it's not all gruesome death and memories thereof at the fort. Love lives here, too!
Also stopped at the Puerto Plata central plaza...
The Puerto Plata cathedral is here - got some nice shots, though one came out disappointingly fuzzy. Here's two of the better ones, one exterior and one interior:
The tour bus took us through a jewellery factory (which wasn't much of a "factory," exactly, but I'm sure is normal for the jewellery industry), past some houses of the rich - including one of the Mets, but I'm not a baseball fan so the name's forgotten now...
...through the middle class shopping districts..
.
...and into the poor section of town.
I actually took a lot more photos of the poor areas, but I had to discard most of them because I'm not so good at taking pics from a moving bus, it turns out.
The minimum wage in the country amounts to about $200 USD per month, so as you can imagine there's plenty of poverty. It was remarkable, though, to see how cheerful and friendly these people were - they had next to nothing, but they smiled and waved at us as we drove by. They weren't selling anything, and even if they were we weren't buying, but that didn't matter - they seemed genuinely happy to see us in their neighbourhood. Not the sort of reaction you'd expect. Or maybe it's just not the sort of reaction I'd expect.
Finally, we went to the Sosua beach market.
Just like it sounds, this is a market on a public beach - a bunch of stores all lined up just inside the tree cover. The stores are numbered - most of them anyway - starting at 1 and going until well over 200.
Walking the length of the market, you get a lot of hard sells. Make eye contact, and they're trying their darnedest to sell you something, or at least get you to sit down at their table, or failing that at least step into their store for a moment (so they can proceed to sell you something.) All very eager to give you a special deal just for you because you're such a good friend, etc.
The store order tends toward bar, gift shop, gift shop, bar. There's some variation to this - sometimes instead of a gift shop, you'll get a (temporary) tattoo parlor, or a manicurist, or something, and sometimes instead of a bar you'll find an actual restaurant (that also serves booze). Most shops claim to be the "best on the beach" at something or other. As for the gift shops, they're all pretty generic - not a whole lot of variety in what they carry. Here's a pretty typical example:
Note the paintings. Each store has its own bunch of paintings - a pretty popular souvenir, I guess - and they're all hand-painted. Some are quite good, and some shops only deal with art, or even specialize in a particular type of art, like the contemporary (post-modern-ish) art store I saw, or the surrealist gift shop (though that guy did portraits, too).
I noticed something while walking along...
Interesting, though I. But then I started noticing a lot of Canadian flags outside some of the stores. Granted, I didn't think too much about it at first. I mean, there were clearly some Canadians here, that's not too outlandish, right?
But then I started noticing these...
Not the only example of these flags on the beach, I assure you. This is noteworthy because in my tour bus, we were all either 1) Canadian, 2) French-Canadian, or 3) from Switzerland(only two couples, but they were there.) So, when I saw that, I started to get suspicious that somebody'd warned them about us ahead of time.
Then I saw this...
(Forgive the grainy resolution, but I did my best.) At that point, my suspension of disbelief broke and I began laughing. Really? A Habs fan in the Dominican? *Really*? The country never gets snow, for crying out loud - they barely care about baseball, much less hockey.
They'll not just sell you stuff here. They also sell services. Using the bathroom costs 10 or 12 pesos (depending on which bathroom, about 33 cents CND), and they'll even sell you a place to sit next to the beach if you bite.
One of the other fellows on the tour told me about his previous trip here, where a local came up to him and asked, "Want to have a drink at my bar?"
Put on the spot, the tourist assented, and was led to a solitary green plastic lawn table with a single green lawn chair. The local then ran off to the nearest bar (about 30 feet away), bought a beer, and came running back. Sold the beer for twice the price it would have cost to have bought it directly.
Gotta admire that kind of gumption, I suppose, but the storyteller felt kind of grumbly about the whole thing.
Well, if the market's a bit on the disappointing side, the beach isn't.
What's that? Dogs on the beach? SURE WHY NOT!
Hell, why stop at dogs? Throw in some roosters, too!
The resort beach is nicer if you just take the beach into account, but honestly the public beach has a "vigorously alive" factor that gives it its own appeal. I had a lot of fun just watching all the people out enjoying themselves.
One last thing... An example of one of those local politicos with a name that seems oddly WASPY-y:
Walter Sindico. I expect he's going to win whatever it is he's running for, given that his posters are plastered practically all over the place.
DAILY DRINK TALLY:
-3 Rum and Coke
-1 shot Rum (straight)
-1 shot Mama Juana
-1 Noche de Acapulco
-1 Passion Tropical
-1 Blue Margarita
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