The Rainforest--emphasis on the "rain".

 First off, let's talk about these Corn Flakes.  If you can't read the top, it says "GRRRIQUÍSIMAS"! (riquísimo means super rich, or delicious).  How hilarious is that? I started laughing right there in the store. Also, he is called Tigre Toño. Que chulo.

Oh and fun fact. Speaking of corn flakes, here, instead of using the word "cereales" which is the technical term I learned for cereal, most people say "conflés" (that's corn flakes in Spanish...) to refer to all kinds of cereal.  (As in, "Necesitas algo para desayuno? Quieres conflés?")

Okay, enough about cereal.  Yesterday I went with a group from work to Los Haitises National Park, which is on the northeast coast of the DR. It's a protected virgen forest with little road access.
One of the girls at Save the Children also works for an organization in the park, and she was supposed to give a tour to a group of eco-something masters students from Germany, so we went along. I couldn't help but laugh. How often do you get to start sentences with "When I was in the rainforest with the germans..."?



We took a boat through the mangrove swamps, while the guide told the Germans all about the biology behind different types of mangrove trees and how the ecosystem works. The roof on the boat had broken and been taken off the weekend before so we got to sit in the blazing sun, which seemed awful at the time...

After making our way through the swamps we docked at a couple different caves and walked around. These caves were ones that Los Taínos (the natives in the DR before the Europeans arrived) used for religious purposes.

The caves are filled with pictographs and petroglyphs. The petroglyph are located in "Cueva de la Línea," which has over a thousand petroglyphs on its walls. The figure in the center is thought to be a shaman. It was super super interesting getting to walk inside all of the caves and see the history carved into the walls. There were a ton of bats flying around everyone though, so I'm not sure I would've wanted to stay there forever.

More mangroves



Local shrimp fishermen. (Shrimpermen?)



So all was fine and dandy (albeit a tad sweaty) until about three hours into our trip. We'd been to two caves and seen a lot of cool birds and tiny islands off the coast, when I looked up at said, "Hmm... those clouds don't look so good..." and about three minutes later it started sprinkling.  Which really was pretty nice, considering how hot it'd been. But then it started raining. And remember how I said they'd taken the cover off the boat?  So there we are in a little bay in the Caribbean getting rained on, when we arrive at another dock.  Then I started laughing again, becaues I realized they wanted us to trek through the rainforest to get back to where we started.  We spent about ten minutes walking through the heart of the rainforest, before we stopped and they decided it'd be better to travel by boat. So we turned around (keep in mind I have a t-shirt, jeans, and tennis shoes... without umbrella or jacket of any kind :[ ).  Back on the boat, we head through the rain. What they had said would be a 10 minute ride was about 25 minutes, and the raining soon turned into pouring. POURING. Thunder kept cracking right over our heads and the boat rocked in the waves. There was a good two inches of water in our seats, but it didn't matter because everything was soaked already.  I would not have gotten any wetter if I had jumped into the bay itself. Luckily Miriam had an umbrella that we used to keep the rain from stinging our faces but that's about all it did. So we spent about twenty minutes huddled under our umbrella shield, riding through the torrential downpour.  It would've been really awful if it wasn't so hilarious... I just couldn't stop laughing!

But we made it back alive. Drenched, but alive!  Luckily I'd brought clothes to change into, so we stopped at a nearby hotel for lunch (they had pasta!!), and changed for the ride home. The ride home was over three houses and I was exhausted, sunburned, covered in bug-bites, and in great need of a shower when I got there. But happy :] It was such an adventurous day! That is definitely an experience I'm not going to forget anytime soon.

Besos,

Abby

The beautiful Hotel Paraiso Caño Hono in the middle of the rainforest.