Down Dominican Republic way

As I mentioned before, the reason for my southern sojourn was to attend the wedding of two dear friends. A group of us, about fifteen in number excluding the blessed couple, decided to join them on this happy venture. Of the guests/wedding party, I knew two people well: one of my very best friends and his girlfriend. We three embarked for the airport together, commencing our journey of a couple of thousand miles with a brief drive. How entertaining it was too! On the radio in my friend's sister's van was a most intriguing programme, one which provided gossip on the lives of the various personages of Toronto's charismatic religious community. One marvels at the sheer insatiability of the public's appetite for this kind of thing...vivat Perez Hilton! In any event, there were juicy tidbits about the pastor who had been smuggling drugs internally and had not availed himself of the chance to make a full breast of things to the authorities. The poor fellow subsequently died when some of the bags ruptured. More excitingly, there was the unnamed female evangelist whose husband delivered a sound beating to her prior to vacating the family home as he requested a divorce. How sad it seemed that the almighty did not spare his leading acolytes from the more tawdry vicissitudes of life in this mortal plane!
With our minds full of these considerations, we arrived at the airport some three hours prior to scheduled departure, as per the instructions on our itineraries. This turned out to be absurdly early and we cleared immigration and were seated at the gate in rapid order. We were alone in the general vicinity of our assigned gate for some time, until we met up with others in the party and began the process of solidifying previously perfunctory contacts that would need to be in place to make the coming week bearable. In short order the star couple arrived, exuding the glow of impending connubial bliss, and we boarded our aircraft. It was on doing so that we gained a valuable insight into the working of the package holiday business. To make the numbers work, the carriers have to convert the aircraft from regular seating configurations into flying sardine cans. If one at all deviates from the most svelte dimensions, a comfortable flight will be largely a dream. Your correspondent is far from svelte, indeed, he borders on the elephantine. With the greatest of difficulty, I crammed myself into my assigned seat, in the process placing the nice African gentleman seated next to me in the greatest discomfort. Perhaps his greatest challenge was the wedging of my shoulder directly into his neck, jeopardising his ability to breathe. Observant cabin staff, perhaps dreading the prospect of a 4 hour flight with a dead corpse in the fuselage, elected to move me into first class. There one encountered seats of typical economy-class size along with the usual felicities of higher class travel: halfway-decent food and the liberal provision of alcohol. I found myself sitting next to an engaging couple who were en route to the Dom Rep for their honeymoon. Neither of them had ever been in first class, and the husband had never even flown before. I could not resist the temptation of playing the sophisticate; unfolding the mysteries of first-class with just the right note of blase resignation. Entirely too pleased with myself, the flight passed rather quickly and we disembarked in Punta Cana in rapid order. The airport itself was breathtaking. Try to conceive of Taino huts writ large and you have an idea of what the buildings look like: wooden structures, largely open to the elements, with coconut leaf roofs. What to make of this? A tribute to the island's original inhabitants, who were the first New World victims of Spanish rapacity? Perhaps so, with the attendant value of being relatively easy to replace in the event of hurricane damage, as well as striking a different note from the range of similar airports in tourist areas across the region. Not for the first time on this trip, I found myself thinking that Jamaica has much to learn from this country.
Much to the delight of sleazy men like me, upon entering into the main terminal, one then was required, or very nearly so, to take pictures with two local lovelies in native costume. The deal was that the picture could be collected, at a cost, on the way out. I summoned up an enormous smile, while straining to keep my hands in respectable places, and took my snapshot. The national costume is very similar to that of Jamaica, with the colours red and blue predominating in the Dominicana case. After retrieving our baggage, which was handled in the roughest possible fashion, we were ushered to our waiting bus for conveyance to our resort, the Sol Melia Caribe.
The drive out to the hotel was very interesting to me as one passed through a region that was clearly in the throes of a huge transition. At present, Punta Cana seems rather underpopulated and undeveloped. To the Jamaican traveller it looked a lot like the region around Hellshire in vegetation and relative sparsity of population, with evidence of grandiose construction projects everywhere. Punta Cana will be booming in the matter of a couple of years, almost unrecognisable to the visitor of 2007. Our resort was beautiful: everything that we were led to expect from the pictures online. The checking-in process was shambolic though, and seemed to take an inordinately long time. Part of the reason for this was that the complex was very large and each party was given a rather detailed explanation of the map of the property, with the relevant places pointed out, the schedule of the local transportation options, etc. Eventually, we all checked in and got to our rooms, which were quite nice and, crucially, were very near the sea!
We arrived on a Sunday and with the main event, the wedding, not occurring until Tuesday, we were left much to our own devices until then.
The ceremony itself, once it got underway, was simple but lovely. The presiding magistrate, a local judge, the only one in the Punta Cana region, was late in arriving and further headaches ensued from the fact that the wedding-planner had been replaced late in the game, and the new one seemed not entirely au fait with previous arrangements inter alia. In the end, the wedding was done and scarcely has there ever been a happier, better-looking, couple, more deserving of posterity's blessings.
The other highlight of the trip for me was an excursion that we made into Santo Domingo. This was, literally, a whole-day affair with the drive being about 3.5 hours each way, not allowing for stops on the way and back. We were transported in comfort in two air-conditioned minibuses by two moonlighting policemen. All along the way much of the scenery was redolent of Jamaica for me, with some important differences. Somehow, despite the fact that the D.R. is actually worse-off than Jamaica in terms of income inequality, there seemed to be less abject poverty in evidence, better organised and maintained towns, replete with colourful buildings. Was this merely serendipity? Had we simply been passing through a relatively more prosperous part of the country? Very likely of course, but these were my impressions on this admittedly thin evidence. One interesting difference with Jamaica was in the number of female motorcyclists. Women tend overwhelmingly to be adornments on the backs of motorcycles in the J, in the D.R. many were in evidence as riders, transporting families and goods as they went on their way. We arrived in the old colonial section of Santo Domingo at around 12:30 in the afternoon and were immediately aware of the beauty of the old buildings and the dynamism of the local tourist guides and purveyors of goods to tourists. We had scarcely set foot on the ground before we were besieged by CD merchants, placing headphones on to our heads! We decided to lunch first before doing our walking tour, so we were taken to an excellent local restaurant. The local food was quite good; familiar ingredients for the most part, employed in different ways. One national dish was a goat stew, as distinct from our curry, another was fried chicken with rice and a dish of beans on the side...analagous to chicken and rice and peas. One difference was the prevalence of pork in the local diet, in the form of chops and a variety of sausages. Perhaps this is more evidence of the Spanish legacy.
The tour was breathtaking for me. Not only was the old city beautifully laid out and pedestrian-friendly, but there was much evidence that it remains a vital part of the life of the modern city. Our guide told us that weekly parties and festivals are held in the old plazas. It is striking that the municipal buildings erected in Columbus's lifetime, by his son Diego, remain in daily use five centuries after their construction. Our guide made mention of the fact that there might be as many as two million Haitians in the Dominican Republic. There was some bitterness in the reference as he made the typical lament about the immigrant, that they were suppressing wages, etc. This led me to reflect on the endlessly painful history of that unhappy country. Heroically breaking the chains of bondage, thrusting themselves proudly on to the world stage as the first independent Black republic only to face daunting challenges at every turn. So arduous was this path, so appalling its recent leaders, that Haiti's citizens now look at a country with a per capita income of $2,400 dollars as paradise. In the end the splendour of the buildings and the cobbled streets pulled me out of these depressing reflections. I was also taken by the national Pantheon, where the remains of Dominican heroes are interred, though, pointedly, not those of Trujillo! The idea is rather wonderful, I think, in keeping with French revolutionary principles in their resurrection of classical themes. There was an impressive changing of the guards with suitably statuesque and impassive soldiers. I feel Jamaica could do worse than to emulate this idea. I did think to myself, having seen the pantheon, that there is a new addition to the list of the world's most difficult parlour games: Name a famous Dominican! In the end, I was deeply impressed by the old city of Santo Domingo and wondered again whether the Spaniards had been superior urban planners to the British? Had they been at least as concerned about the livability of their colonial cities as they were with their proximity to the sea? Was the fact that Spain's climate was nearer to that of the tropics relevant in any way? Kudos to the Dominicans for preserving their heritage. In Jamaica too many of the historic parts of Kingston are simply not in any condition to invite visitation, and are in fact in appalling states of disrepair.
Another thing we might well emulate is the Dominican system of little stores selling various mementoes, in which tourists can get free drinks, including the local aphrodisiac mamajuana, and bathroom facilities.They seemed to have a really seamless set-up between the bus operators, tour guides and these shops. So back we went to the resort, laden with various goods and happy memories.
In the end the best aspects of the resort were the weather and the sea. The food, though plentiful, was not that great in the buffets. The a la carte restaurants were better, with the Japanese one and the Dominican one standing out particularly in my mind. The staff were wonderful, skillfully staying on the right side of the divide between maximal hospitality and obsequiousness. No one had anything stolen and in our trips to local nightclubs off the hotel property we felt entirely safe. A word of caution to the conservative traveler. There is a particularly relaxed attitude to homosexuality in Punta Cana. As such, the nightclub I went to, Mangu, had an entire 2nd floor, erroneously described as their 'house music' section, dedicated to gay performers/acts of various types. The women in our group enjoyed this enormously, as we men beat a hasty retreat to the ground floor. Another cultural divide was in evidence on the beaches. European and Latin American tourists, in contrast to their North American fellows, maintain their love affair with the speedo. For a visitor from Canada this created a pervasive impression of having been dropped off in the midst of a gathering of men smuggling bags of marbles. All of these quibbles aside, this was a splendid trip celebrating an event of transcendent importance, two wonderful people committing their lives to each other. On top of it all, one could scarcely have gathered a nicer group of people. I feel confident that my circle of friends-for-life has been expanded following my week in the Dom Rep.
And so, like all good things, the week came to an end and it was back to the lovely Punta Cana Airport. I bought my picture, taken on arrival, with me and the two local beauties. It was rather funny. There I was smiling broadly while both ladies looked as if they had just forcibly imbibed a litre of cod liver oil each. Then it was on to the flying sardine can, which, incredibly, left about 45 minutes early. The flight was uneventful, just as we like them, and we were back in the big smoke. Clearing immigration was a snap and all of our luggage seemed to come off rather quickly. As a final footnote, I saw the African chap who had had the misfortune of sitting next to me briefly on the way down. He assured me that he had suffered no permanent brain damage from the restricted flow of oxygen to his brain while my shoulder was wedged into his throat.

Black Monkey

Well, the verdict of the Jamaican voter has been heard, and it cannot have been received by either party with undiluted pleasure. As things stand, and it has to be pointed out that the PNP has refused to concede and has promised to engage in recounts and to register complaints regarding malpractice by the other side in some constituencies, the JLP has won the popular vote by a margin of about 3,000 and has won 31 of the 50 seats in the House of Representatives. On the face of it though, this seems like a pyrrhic victory, one which flew in the face of the burgeoning optimism which the party had begun to feel in the run-up to the election. With such a razor-thin majority, government will be difficult with the job of managing the house being next to impossible. A single absence could scupper a vital government initiative, this is all the more so given the necessity of selecting a speaker. The ambitious agenda outlined in the JLP's election manifesto looks unattainable in this term. It would not be surprising then if Mr. Golding and his colleagues looked upon this result with some bitterness. They have been given stewardship of the offices of state without being given the ability to wield the attendant powers effectively. In truth, they have achieved a lot. On Mrs. Simpson-Miller's ascension to power, she seemed unbeatable. Indeed, had she called an election at the time, she would now be well into her own mandate. Mr. Golding played an important role in whittling down her image and in frustrating the attempt by the PNP to run away from its legacy and running as the annointed Portia's acolytes.
The PNP will of course be confronting the sting of defeat, the need to vacate offices held for nearly two decades, and the process of re-examination that ought to attend any unsuccessful enterprise. Mrs. Simpson-Miller, the trump card, did not quite pull it off and one imagines that knives will come out for her. In truth, "Mamma P" spared many a Party blush as, following a litany of scandals and generally poor government, the PNP has still managed to hold on to 29 seats, a position of considerable influence, with the likelihood that the JLP government will not be able to last for a full term. The prospect of office is still detectable in the air! Whether she is the right sort of Leader of the Opposition in a context in which manoeuvres in the House of Representatives will be immensely important, will need to be decided quickly. This will have to be undertaken while always bearing in mind that many Jamaicans regard attacks on Mrs. Simpson-Miller as attacks on their social stratum as a whole. The other note of caution for the PNP is that this election result can be interpreted as an entreaty from the populace for the political parties to attempt to work together for the good of the country. Too much politicking, done too soon, could be very off-putting for many voters.
At the end of the day, I am not a democratista. Like Churchill, I can only make a negative case for democracy, as being the worst of all possible systems but for the rest. One heard in the coverage of the Jamaican Election that many people had probably not bothered to turn up to vote because they assumed that their party had things sewn up. Others couldn't rise to casting a ballot because they wished to go in to work early. It seems unfortunate that such vital decisions as those inherent in elections are in the hands of such uninterested persons, but there it is. If both parties rise to the challenge, the next five years could signal a maturation of our politics in which the tenuous balance of parliament required cooperation by both parties in the formulation of policy. One is mindful that this was the forlorn hope in 2002, when the margin was a comparatively large 34-26 for the PNP, I seem to recall. Perhaps things are now so close that there will be no way of avoiding concerted, intelligent, action on the part of the political class, in service of the country as a whole. In closing though, one wonders what is to be done with all of those who talked of Portia as God's choice and brought our politics lower still by talking in terms of 'lucky' numbers and dates inter alia. I sincerely hope that they can be permanently excluded from meaningful future participation in our public life.