Dominican Republic Chapter 8

11. – 12th day

We have the last day left in the Dominican Republic. The departure is in the evening, so before the trip to the clouds we set out to soak up the last sips of the atmosphere of the famous Dominican beaches. This time at Boca Chica beach, popular with tourists. From Santo Domingo, we get to the beach in half an hour by local bus. Rather than a beach, we find the sea dotted with bars and restaurants. They are as close to the sea as you can get. We see people sitting at a table, tanning their pale faces in the relentless sun, sipping through straws, filling their stomachs with chilled cocktails and letting their feet melt in the sea bath. Nothing for us…

However, there is nothing left for us but to weave through the tourist clusters and restaurant alleys of plastic tables and armchairs. A swim in the clear azure sea is refreshing, a few jumps from the concrete jetty will add a feeling of the authenticity of the Dominican Republic. You know those footage from documentaries of little black-eared fish jumping off the pier into the water. Well, that’s it, only you have 1000 German tourists behind your ass.

Smaller lunch and coffee in a beach restaurant, after looking at the bill, it doesn’t detract from the tourist score even a bit. We’re packing, no one will see us here. We can only get to the airport on two motorbikes (this time they won’t take us on one or two) for 2×300 or by taxi for 1000 pesos. Tourist trap. While a taxi driver will drive you around the city for an hour and a half for 200, the price to the airport, which is 20 minutes away, is 5 times that. We negotiate a taxi driver who knows a few Czech words for 800,- and we set off for Cuba.

Check in! We are checking in. We manage all kinds of checks and queues at the left rear. Now all that’s left is to wait at the gate for our plane for an hour and we’re out of this horror land 😀

“FLIGHT CANCELED”

Um… Dominican Republic she obviously likes us and wants to keep us for a while longer. There are various rumors coming from different quarters, one of them is that the Cuban airline company has no idea where our plane that is supposed to arrive from Cuba is. A little after five in the afternoon, exactly at the moment when we are supposed to leave, representatives of Cubana Aviacion (another piece of gossip: said to be one of the worst airlines in the world) arrive and, without further information about the flight, direct us to a bus that will take us to a hostel near a popular beach . Boca Chica Beaches…

One last document check before leaving the airport. The first group went to the bus. We are the first of the next group.

“You have to go outside and wait for the next bus”.

“What kind of bus? What does it look like? How do we recognize it?”

“Hmm… then wait here…”

They are already waiting for us in Cuba with accommodation and we still don’t know when we will actually fly there. I am sending an SMS that we will not fly today. We don’t find out when we leave until the following day, a few hours in advance. What at first glance seems like an unpleasant situation is actually an event full of positives. We have free accommodation for the next day, including dinner and food for the whole next day. We are finally staying in a hotel and right next to the beach.

Thanks to a common fate, we meet a French couple. It calms me and at the same time fascinates me with how clearly they absorb the given situation. The French lady checked into her book after 2 hours of waiting doesn’t bat an eyebrow. The husband occasionally throws in a humorous snarky note. They spend their retirement traveling and their experiences, stories and prickly humor have come in handy. An evening walk in the moonlight accompanied by two cheerful French pensioners is an interesting change and a pleasant time spent.

The next day, while waiting to be taken to the airport, we watch a minor Dominican romance of a young man with a shotgun:

Getting to know each other on the way to the airport also proves to be another positive. This time with an Italian who was so fascinated by the events surrounding Che Guevara and Fidel Castro that he decided to move to Cuba years ago because of them. And like a true Italian, he began to fulfill his southern instincts, which mother nature had put directly in his mouth. I’ve already met a couple of Italians, so I’m putting them in a box. Talkative, always trying to help, but they tend to put you in an even worse situation, not everything they say is true, even if it doesn’t mean they want to lie to you. Everything is possible, just until it turns out that not everything is possible, etc. However, his determination to help us prepare for Cuba is admirable. She shares with us all kinds of information that might be useful and invites us to her jewelry shop. It mainly discourages us from the accommodation we have secured. They say it is expensive and far from the center.

Our flight is scheduled for ten in the evening. The accommodation didn’t respond to my SMS either the day before or on the day we were actually leaving. We show up in Cuba in the middle of the night, we have to find the mentioned accommodation and pray that they count on us, that they read my SMS and just didn’t answer, because SMSes from Cuba to a Czech number are expensive. Or risk the fact that the Italian is not a mass murderer and take advantage of his offer of accommodation from his friends. But the first look at Italian screams: “I’m a mass murderer and I have a nice hand saw at home and a funky new kettle…”. Before we land in Santiago de Domingo, Cuba, we have to decide what to do next.

Cubana Aviacion does not want to give up the gossip of “the worst airline in the world”.

It’s one o’clock in the morning and our steel hovercraft has peeled its rear off the asphalt carpet of the Dominican Republic…

Note: When I was a little boy, I had an airplane made of iron. Such a small Boing. I put my hand on my heart, my palm on my Bible, I swear with two tense fingers, and if I had a fourth hand, I would probably salute with it, that no matter how hard I threw the plane, it never flew any better than an ordinary shot. There is no such thing as aerodynamics, I can easily prove that. And for things that have no logical explanation, people invented god. And why on earth would he bother levitating steel carriers? That could just make teleportation work, which is just as inexplicable, but certainly easier than letting nonsense fly through the sky, eroding children’s belief that god lives in the clouds. Noooo… convoluted crap to think about for us who live in the abyss.