The hotel didn’t have functioning internet until the day before my birthday, and as an added fillip, the merengue band was playing “Happy Birthday” as I trotted up to the internet salon. I can understand why hardly anybody uses it… they charge more than 3 times what the rate is across the street and the internet is slow as “dominican minutes”.
Yesterday, Santo Domingo. Beautiful architecture, lush vegetation, tourist traps in masses and heaps, and grinding poverty. Lorne, a guy from Edmonton Katie and I have been hanging with on the field trips, saw a guy drinking from a puddle in the street yesterday. I think homeless people in Vancouver do not have to do this, but then maybe I’ve just never seen it.
Today, I went to Paradise for 90 minutes. Saona is exactly as beautiful as advertised, and the vendors were persistent but not up in your face like the guys at the cave yesterday. The Lonely Planet guide said they were the worst in the Republic, and they weren’t just passing the time of day. The cave (Tres Ojos) is beautiful and just about the hottest place in the DR. We were all wringing wet by the time we emerged, dodging hawkers to get to the blessed, blessed a/c tour bus.
Saona was the most glorious coda to a most glorious trip. The entire speedboat ride back there was an immense, brilliant rainbow, and the sun set into 900 kilometres of water, as that’s how much there is between Saona and the Venezuelan coast. Frigate birds wheeled around the harbour. The water was a exalted turquoise. I was so happy I broke down and bought jewellery from a vendor, and I must have been an easy mark, because he gave me a free ‘cucaracha del mar’. Imagine a turquoise and black trilobite and you get the general idea.
I had to run the panhandler gauntlet to get to the gym today. Only one of them was pressing and persistent (both times that he approached me).
Since we all know that in the current BC boom you can walk onto any a job site, spit on the ground and make $15 an hour doing unskilled clean up work, I suspect those individuals have problems that a mere handout won’t fix.
Same all over, worse in the third world.
Excellent point, Kopper…I believe were we to make the inquiry we would find that most of the homeless are so for reasons other than bone idleness and the handouts of the welfare state. The inquiry has indeed been done here, and that was the finding: mental illness and substance abuse were at the root of their homelessness. Handouts perpetuate it without doing anything to fix it. The “answers” proposed here in the letters to the editor are often bizarre. I wonder what jurisdiction has had the problem among its citizens and actually, specifically, solved it.
Hmm…cucaracha del mar is cockroach of the sea. Well, why not. In today’s New Scientist I encountered a creature called a hellbender – a giant fresh-water salamander, known by locals as a “snot otter” and from the picture one can see why. Cockroach of the sea sounds much more charming. I will look forward to seeing it.
It will be interesting to see what public relations bandaid our blessed government will apply to the homeless problem in the GVRD in the run up to the Olympricks.