Transporte

Transportation

On Wednesday, we went down to Santiago.  It sounds so simple!  But from Monción, you must

first go down a windy road to Los Quemados (Burnt Ranch would be a good translation), past

the military checkpoint and through the dry forest to the outskirts of the irrigated agriculture

that still defines much of the Mao area.  In Mao you turn left at the signal that works

occasionally in front of the big military fort for the zone.  You continue into increasingly dense

traffic to Esperanza, where you enter town along a big irrigation ditch. With virtually no clues

in the way of signs, you must know when to turn left and follow the main road through town.

You follow more irrigated agriculture until you come to Navarette, a feisty town that is forever

in political upheaval.  Once David had to pay a kid on a motorcycle 30 pesos to show them

through the back streets around a particularly dense political rally with many streets blocked by

burning tires, but Wednesday was peaceful.  Once past Navarette you join the traffic stream

from Puerto Plata and any fun you were having in the drive is over.

From the Puerto Plata junction into Santiago the traffic gets denser and denser, until we are

fender to fender and bumper to bumper with traffic ranging in size from tiny motorcycles to

enormous loaded flatbeds and dump trucks.  The safe distance between vehicles, Dominican

style, runs in centimeters, not feet, regardless of speed or direction, both of which change

frequently and without warning.  There are virtually no signs of any size or placement that

could help you find your way, so your navigation is exclusively by memory and landmarks.

Sometimes people navigate by landmarks that are no longer there.  At Los Quemados, for

example, there stood an old windmill, installed in the early 1940s, that used to pump water for

that community from a well.  The windmill was still turning, though disconnected, when I first

saw it in 1977, but has long since fallen down.  Yet many will tell you to turn up the hill towards

Monción at the old windmill.  So sometimes even landmarks, unless you establish them

yourself, are not necessarily visible.

You worry constantly about the centimeter separations devolving into bumper cars.  You finally

arrive and parking is one wheel up on the sidewalk.  By the time we finished our business and

left Santiago Wednesday night at 7 pm, it was dark and raining, making our way back up to the

hills through the same maze even more challenging.  By the time we reached home at

something near 9 pm, we were not only exhausted but also quite unwilling to drive again the

next day, and what’s worse to drive clear to the capital.

So, we called Pablito.  Pablito drives one of the two 22‐passenger buses that run this gauntlet all

the way to the capital and back at least 5 days a week.  However, it was Pablito’s problem to

negotiate the 4‐hour drive (price each, US$10) from the Monción foothills through the irrigated

lands, the industrial traffic jams, and all of the unsigned intersections.

Our journey with Pablito began at the top of the alley that leads from our house up a steep hill

to the ridge above the house, where the main road into town follows the ridge and where the

local neighborhood landmark, the Texaco station, is located.

We stood in the shade with our bags visible on the sidewalk

at shortly before 9 am.  Now of course Pablito couldn’t load us


all up at exactly 9 am, and the bus was a bit over half full

when he came by at 9:15 am.  By the time we got in, the

gentleman with his three fighting

roosters in a special cage was

already loaded up, as were some

40 boxes of some product or

another, all in beer boxes, that

took up the back two rows of seats

to the ceiling.  There was an older

television riding between driver

and the ‘shotgun’ seat.  There was

a very old lady and her son

already ensconced and perhaps 9 other passengers.  The ‘cobrador’

or fare‐collector rode standing at the door or sitting on a jump‐seat

that folded out from one of the forward benches.  We stopped to

pick up various folks as we toured the tiny town of Monción.  One

gentleman got on, realized we were going to pick up one more, and

jumped off to quickly buy casabe, the bread made from manioc root

that is typical of Monción and a major town product, to take to his

sister in Santiago.  There was a lot of good‐natured griping about

his timing, but they didn’t leave him and loaded up his several dozen packages into some

mysterious cubby behind the many boxes occupying the rear seats and we were off.  

Once we had collected our last passenger, we were off down the hill towards Los Quemados

and the music was cranked up.  But this music wasn’t too bad, mostly laments and love songs

and not at much above 80 dB.  As the 22‐passenger bus moved along its chosen path, avoiding

well‐known potholes, dodging nutty motorcyclists launching themselves into traffic, and

swerving to avoid the big trucks that took the middle of the road whenever they felt like it,

David said “Same dance, different music, different day”.  And indeed, Pablito’s skillful

maneuvering through all the traffic challenges did seem like a very well‐executed dance.  It was

a long and rather cramped two hours until we cleared Santiago, but to my delight the guy with

the roosters got off in Santiago and we could spread out a bit.  After clearing Santiago we

stopped at a ‘parada’ which probably fed the driver for free in return for the extra business he

brought.  It was early yet for lunch but we shared a couple of pork chops and some water.

The highway from Santiago to Santo Domingo once made its way through three small towns—

La Vega, Bonao, and Villa Altagracia—before approaching the outskirts of the sprawling Santo

Domingo.  Now the highway goes past each of these, with real off‐ramps and on‐ramps (and a

few other informal intersections) so that you can really get up quite a head of steam if it weren’t

for the traffic cops stationed periodically along the road.  However, Pablito had business in both

Bonao and Villa Altagracia, so we got to drive down part of the older parts of those towns

rather than just blast past.  This isn’t necessarily a good thing if you had a schedule, but we

didn’t mind because we only had to make it to the Capital by late afternoon some time.

Santo Domingo has sprawled across many square miles of what were once fertile agricultural

fields.  Grim slums with tiny shacks made of flattened 5‐gallon oil cans and whatever else

appeared on the side of the road are just a block or two from huge industrial areas and pleasant

communities with nicely clipped lawns and hedges.  Starting in 1493 with a small settlement on

the banks of the Osama River (now the Colonial Zone with its limestone walls four feet thick), it

has grown in fits and starts to a metropolitan area of several million souls.  Coming south from

Bonao, we come in from the west and cross many miles of sprawl before crossing the river and

entering the older part of Santo Domingo.  Because we were headed to a neighborhood on the

west side of the river, we were deposited with minimal ceremony at “Kilometer 9”, a major

crossroads and taxi stand.  We caught a taxi who eventually found his way through the

residential maze to the office.

That was Thursday.  On Friday, after the meeting

to which I had been summoned and after a

wonderful lunch with Don Luis, we were driven

over to the offices of Linea Gladys.  We dutifully

climbed on the bus at 2:30 pm, as we had been

instructed.  Shortly before 3 pm the bus departed

its home ‘office’ and started to circle the city.  We

drove around and around, going through one

major intersection four different ways in search of what turned out to be a very loud softball

team.  We found them around 4 pm.  Ha!  We thought that a whole team worth of fares was

probably worth the circling, but that now we would head straight for Monción.  Not so!

The rules among the bus drivers are unwritten but appear to be very clear.  From Monción

down to the capital, the bus driver is NOT free to pick up any passengers.  Those passengers

belong to the buses from the other towns—Mao, Santiago, Bonao, etc.  But on the way back, it is

first come, first serve.  So we drove past all the known bus stops all the way out of the capital,

the cobrador pounding on the roof, hanging out of the bus and shouting, Cibao! Cibao! (the

north region of valley and mountains to which Monción pertains).  We loaded up miscellaneous

folks at these stops, and made at least two deliberate stops to pick up people headed for

Monción who had called ahead.  They were burning tires to block the streets in Navarette on

Friday, but we got there at suppertime when most had gone home, so we got through.  Our

hopes for a quiet ride with lots of room evaporated with the softball team, and our later hopes

for at least some extra space from Mao on up the hill evaporated once again as a dozen

university students got lucky with our late arrival and got a ride for a buck from Mao all the

way home to Monción.

It was dark when we finally dragged our gear back down the alley and across the mud puddle

to our gate.  We were so grateful to be back!  In spite of the delays and adventures, we still

found the minor inconveniences of the public bus far less than the stress and strain of driving.  I

announced we were going NOWHERE for a couple of days, and so it has been!