Story: The 10 Day Dominican Republic Motorcycle Tour - Day 1

"I have to leave for Canada for a month", my wife told me one beautiful sunny morning. "But we cant both go, it wont make sense spending our money on 2 tickets if only I need to go. What are you going to do while I'm gone?". The first thing that sprang to my mind was avoiding being alone in my house for that long. I have to get out and away to escape the dreadful loneliness! So, how about a 10 day bike trip around the Dominican Republic on my trusty Yamaha XT225? Yes, that should do quite right. I hopped over to the phone, called my brother and my best friend and the deal was made. Here is the story.

Day 1

I poked my head out of the window this morning, at about 5 AM and it had been raining all night. As the sun rose at about 6:30 I saw that some mist had settled down and made it all look so gloomy, not exactly perfect bike riding weather. But we had decided the day before that if it did rain, we would still head out no matter what. Forecast said there was a tropical depression forming over the DR and it was slow moving north north-east, so it would linger around for a while. But, it wasn’t really raining, so I got up and started packing up the last few things I needed to take with me. Tent was already packed away in watertight duffel bags; clothes were individually packed into plastic bags and zip lock bags. It was all good to go. Jared arrived early with Alec close behind. We started packing our stuff on the bikes, noticing we were missing a few bungee cords. We had had no time or money to buy some fancy bike bags or stuff like that, so we had to go with whatever we would be able to carry on the racks; travel bags, duffel bags and camera bags. I strapped my big bike bag on the back rack, with the tent and duffel bags on top of it, like a pyramid... like I always do on bike trips. Worked for me then, works for me now. Alec had a similar square bike bag he used and strapped it on the rear, with the camera tripod, sleeping bag and other small stuff on top of it. His camera gear was strapped on to the gas tank to keep it close, most of it nicely covered with plastic and watertight bags. Jared had only one big travel bag, it wasn’t really meant for biking, but neither was the rack of the bike. There wasn’t really one. But with some bungee cords he got that tightened down pretty well. He was carrying most of the tools.

It took us about 1-2 hours to get everything ready and prepped. Departure ended up being at around 7:30. Final hugs and goodbyes later, we drove off. It was starting to drizzle a little, with lots of fog. We headed towards La Vega, a 20 minute ride. All the way down the hill it was just fog. Once we got to La Vega, the fog and drizzle started to turn into rain. We didn’t gas up the day before since we wanted to do it on the road, but the La Vega gas station was closed when we arrived. So we headed towards our next stop on our track, the city of Santiago, hoping to get some there. It really started coming down after a few miles and it discouraged me a little bit. Was it going to be like that the whole time? Did the TS have to form just when we were leaving?

Both Alec and Jared were trailing behind me, I could see their lights in my rear view mirror tearing through the rain on the major highway towards Santiago. Big trucks would pass us at high speeds; no one bothers to slow down around here. Good thing only a small part of our trip we would stay on the highway. The rest was off-roading. About 15 minutes outside of Santiago I lost sight of Jared, only Alec was behind me. We both stopped and drove back down the road to find him. I saw him in the distance almost sitting on top of his gas tank, coming towards us. His back tire had blown. This was about 30 minutes into the trip. Naturally, we had all the gear to fix it. However, there was a small shop just down the road where they fix tires. You'll find those shops everywhere here, small holes in the walls where people offer to patch your tire. We chose that over fixing ourselves, since they would do a more thorough job in less time. We had a schedule to meet today. It took about 20 minutes and they patched the TTR all up, found a big rusty nail inside the tire. If this was what was coming, hold on.

We headed back out towards Santiago and rain started to come down pretty hard. We had everything packed up pretty good; even our clothes were individually packed in plastic bags, so we didn’t mind the rain too much. My feet were starting to get wet, however. My boots weren’t much insulated; I have had them for a long time. Jared was the only one with good riding style boots; he had no problem at all.

At about 10 AM we rolled into the second largest city of the DR, Santiago, and tanked up. We pretty much rolled straight through it since we were already behind schedule. We crossed the city quickly, weaving through crazy 3-rd world country traffic and got onto the highway towards Monte Cristi, the northern most city of the DR.

On our way, it was interesting to see how the scenery changed. Landscape changed from rice fields to sugar cane fields as far as the eye can see and then changed again to barren fields with cactuses everywhere. Most of the towns we drove through were very poor, some larger. But what was most noticeable was the amount of Haitian immigrants who worked here. This country has seen a major influx of Haitian immigrants in the past months, because of the terrible conditions in their country. Some arrive legal, most don’t. We already thought we had arrived at the northern Haitian border, for the amount of immigrants we saw working in the fields, but we were still miles away.

Finally, around 12 PM we arrived in Monte Cristi, just in time for lunch. Asking in town we found a nice small restaurant in a garden, very typical. The traditional Dominican meal is Rice, Beans, Stewed Chicken and Green Salad. It was to be our fate to eat this meal everyday for our trip. It is the cheapest and actually very tasty. After refreshing ourselves we took towards the National Park in Monte Cristi to see "El Morro" Mountain. It’s a big rock at the coast, ominously sticking out towards the sea. It is so odd looking that Columbus named it the Mount of Christ, hence the town name Monte Cristi. After taking some pictures and happy to have reached the north-coast in good time, we started back down. We noticed some clouds were forming in the west, towards the Haitian border. Since we were travelling east it was time to move on before it caught on with us.

We got back into town and tried to find out where the dirt road that snakes down the north coast of the DR was. There wasn’t one. Or rather, there were many roads, but nothing direct. Our map did indicate certain highways snaking along the coast, but some either didn’t exist or others were rough dirt roads. But was what we came for, so after being directed by a friendly passerby on a scooter, we headed down the right direction. 10 minutes into a dirt road littered with disposed diapers, Jared's chain fell off. We tightened it back on and took the opportunity to grease all our chains properly and ask why the side of the road was littered with used diapers. A friendly person on a Chinese Demco 125cc (Chinese Yamaha rip-off) stopped and explained there was an orphanage close by and the garbage truck drives by daily and diapers keep falling off. Strange, but true.

After many twists and turns, ups and downs trough very rough back road trails we made it to a semi-paved highway and realized we had only gone about 20 km's since Monte Cristi and it was already 4:30. Sundown is at 6:30 so we had 2 hours to make 50-80 more of rough road. With this in mind, we gunned the bikes down the trail a little harder. We pulled into the town of La Isabella around 6 PM. La Isabella is basically the first town/city of the New World. It was founded by Columbus himself. We took some pictures of Columbus’s monument and headed back down the trail, since it was just about to get dark.

Right around Sunday, we came to a major river that was impossible to cross without either a bridge or some sort of boat/ferry. As it were, 3 jimmy-rigged ferries pulled up and signaled to us to drive halfway into the river, where it was still shallow and drive onto their rafts. We did and they pushed us over the deep side of the river all the way to the other side. 2 people powered these rafts, one pulling and one pushing us. We all got across safely without falling into the river. By that time, the sun had started to go down and there was a beautiful red sky as we drove away from the river in the middle of nowhere in the bush of the Dominican Republic.

As soon as we crossed the river, the road got better and finally was completely paved. Since it was dark we weren't able to complete the trail all the way to the city of Puerto Plata since it would have been too dangerous. So we took a short cut back down to a major highway and drove into Puerto Plata around 7:30 PM. By then it was dark and we still had to drive another 20 km's to a neighboring tourist town called Cabarete, famous for Kite and Wind Surfing. Since the road was good, we gassed up in Puerto Plata and headed down to Cabarete within 20 minutes.

Arriving in Cabarete, we called a friend who had a house right on the beach and dropped off our stuff and finally settled for the night. Day 2 would prove even harder since we had to take many trails we knew they existed but didn’t know where they were. Right now, we need all the sleep we can get.

Day 2 follows in the next article...