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Third hike, perhaps the most unusual; our friend, Gabriele the Tuscan, the one who organizes our excursions nicknamed it Safari.
What awaits us at eight in the morning outside our resort? An off-road bus in perfect Safari style is a very nice guide with very long hair who looks like an old Indian of America, polyglot and singing.
Our visit begins with the immense sugar cane plantations that cover Santo Domingo; they are cut with a machete and opened so that we can taste the true taste of sugar.
Sugar cane is very sweet, a sugary and crackling juice that, as usual, is accompanied by a glass of rum.
We find that, to work sugar cane plantations are actually the people of Haiti who after the 2010 earthquake of are transferred to the Dominican Republic.
The state in exchange for labor provides them with home and education for children. However the houses provided are but slums near the sugar cane fields. The people here are very poor but they greet us and do not ask and do not want anything, just exchange a few words to have blessings and smiles in return.
Speaking of children, we also visit a school. Children wear uniforms with blue polo shirts and beige skirts for girls, shorts for boys. They are looking forward to us and we look forward to giving them candy and notebooks.
]We actually expected a much more dramatic situation; the school in which we are located between several buildings and very clean but as often happens, maybe there is a bit of business that takes advantage of the tenderness that children arouse. Strangely, at the entrance to the school there is a candy stall waiting for tourists, which surprises us and leaves us a little forebound.
However, children are as tender as that of every place in the world; they look at us, they study our clothes, cell phones and cameras, someone is attentive to dollar movements almost as much as they wanted a banknote rather than a cookie and maybe that would be what they really need at home. We play and talk to the children, wrongly we take some photos with them.. but that’s another reflection.
Second stop of our Safari is in riding school; if you want to live as a Dominican you also have to know how to ride or at least try.. I try but I think I’d better walk. On the other hand, the owner’s son of about ten years, rides his stallion, amused and confident.
In this place it is also possible to observe the tobacco plantations and the even more interesting thing is to observe the processing of cigars made in front of our eyes by a very nice Dominican who gives some, poses for photos and invites us to do some with him.
Local products such as cigars, RonBarcelo, dominican rum, and Mamajuana are sold at this place’s shop.
Mamajuana is a typical product, a concoction of rum, honey and 17 different roots macerated; dominicans believe it aphrodisiac, we find it very heavy and yummy.
The Safari continues and this time takes us to the casa de Maria a small family business with interesting productions: from fruit to cocoa, from sugar to coffee.
Every product is made to taste us and it is delicious, the coffee is very dark but not particularly bitter, the chocolate is divine as well as the fruit.
The Safari continues and if we had not satiated enough with tastings now there is a lunch with typical Dominican dishes in a very characteristic restaurant, where the waitresses wear typical, beautiful clothes, with the colors of the Dominican flag.
The guide decides to take us to a place not far from the restaurant to show us one of the real problems of the Dominican Republic. Nearby, there is the bed of a river that was supposed to be quite large but which unfortunately due to drought is completely dried up. Environmental changes have become the crucible of the Caribbean countries, which live on tourism and agriculture, but the latter, due to drought, is practically on its knees.
In the last stop of our Safari we find ourselves in the city, at the church de nuestra señora of Altagracia, one of the most crowded places of worship on the island and let’s not forget that Dominicans are mainly Catholics and also very practicing.
The basilica that was erected during the papacy of Pope Paul John XXIII is the largest on the island. The church is very modern and avant-garde, with a large percentage of concrete in its architecture, but the light filtering through the windows manages to make the church very warm. Inside there is a case with the image of the virgin and in addition to tourists there are many Dominicans in line to pray a few seconds before it.
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