Its at times like these that a middle-aged man's thoughts turn to a recent weekend spent in heat, humidity and mud. It was on a hot humid day in the not-too-distant past (Sunday) that I found myself having a conversation with a man on a mule while standing up to my knees in quite possibly fecally-impacted waters.
It was at this point in our drive through the back country from Luperon to Puerto Plata that I felt a burning desire to turn back and take the main road. However the truck was perched at an awkward angle, I could see no way to safely reverse or, God forbid, actually turn so we were committed to what was to come. The man on the mule was not reassuring. "No," he said shaking his head. "It's not much better up ahead. Less water perhaps. More mud." He laughed hollowly when I asked, joking, where the nearest tow truck was. "No hay grua!" he grinned toothlessly. He told me with pride that they had electricity these days, even if the road was a tad old fashioned."Stay on the high side," was his advice as I climbed wordlessly back into the truck with a hollow feeling where my chest used to be. Oh dear, I thought to myself, what have I got myself into?When we got up before dawn in our splendid five star hotel room in Santa Domingo the idea was to hurry out of the city and head north to Santiago 200 kilometers up the four lane Highway One across the mountains, Then we would visit the sailor's haven of Luperon, cruise through Puerto Plata, visit Scott's refuge of Sosua where he lived 15 years ago, and buzz back to room service and a bottle of wine at the Hotel Intercontinental.
Aside from a little rain, which made the industrial city of Santiago look worse than it did in the sunshine we executed the first part of the plan flawlessly.
I knocked off a quick picture of Santiago's only claim to tourist interest, the monument to the nation's heroes, and we turned onto Highway Five, greasy in the rain, towards Puerto Plata on the north coast.
At Imbert, in the sunshine beyond the rainy mountains, we turned off towards Luperon 20 miles away, in time for a 9:30am breakfast. Luperon was our morning's goal because it is a sailing cruiser's destination. I have been reading about the delights of Luperon for 20 years, a secure anchorage surrounded by mangroves, a nice little town with easy bus access to the facilities of Puerto Plata, the end of a long bash south through the islands of the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos. Luperon is said to be well adapted to its place along a sailor's migratory path to the Caribbean. As former cruisers my wife and I enjoy the company of maritime travelers.
Well, suffice it to say, Luperon was a major disappointment. It did have a nice bay to anchor in, filled with boats and muddy waters entirely unsuitable for swimming, our major recreation while cruising, and the town itself was somewhat run down, to our eyes. Just to prove how small a world it is, on the pier we met Pablo, the owner of a marina in Panama where our cruising friends Ian and Anna keep Gecko, their catamaran. We also found the cruiser hangout, an American-run restaurant now called Capt Steve's offering laundry, internet, food and swimming pool, as the best cruiser haunts do.
But the owner, married to a Dominican woman is tired of the life and is looking to sell. Meanwhile he offers a nice $5 (150 peso) breakfast, American style, decent coffee, pork chops and the fixings:
The main road into town from the jetty was lined with small shabby businesses and blood ran in the gutter, doubtless from some porker sacrificed for the New year's holiday to come. 
It was a picture of a small industrious town in a very impoverished economy. Which is fine and dandy, though I couldn't for the life of me imagine spending months here whiling away a tropical winter when there are beaches and islands and incredible reefs not many miles away. I crossed Luperon off my list of places to sail to.
On our way out of town we spotted the entrance to a dirt road marked on our map as a brown dotted line headed along the coast towards Puerto Plata, avoiding the main road at Imbert. We took the plunge. I have never been much of an off road driver, most of my land travels I have taken on two wheels, and when I'm driving a vehicle I can't physically push I tend to be conservative in my choice of paved roads. This one got away from me completely.
It started out with a motoconcho that I simply couldn't keep up with. How he rode, with a passenger and parcel so fast I don't know, and I can only attribute his sure-footed speed to experience. 
Then we forded a couple of streams, a broken bridge or two, some sand, then rocky hills, picked up a couple of field workers looking to get home, and as we slid down a steep incline we came upon a sight froze my blood. 
Another Isuzu, a Trooper, stuck in the mud surrounded by "helpers." 
If they are stuck, I said to myself, what's going to happen to me? The good news was that the Trooper was two wheel drive and with some shoving and digging he got out of the mud leaving me a completely messed up hole to plough through in low-ratio 4-wheel drive. "Schumacher," one of the passengers complimented me as my Isuzu reared up out of the mud and came to a stop on hard ground. Its the car, I thought to myself, not the driver. "If we're going to do much more of this," my impeturbable wife said, "I'm sending you to that off-road driving school in California." She settled her arm in its cast on a pillow and our hitch hikers got in the back for the rest of the drive through glorious scenery,
and on a continuously mashed up roadway, less on the rocky hilltops and more in the muddy valleys.
Further down the road we picked up a couple more hitchhikers, walking out of the fields burdened with packages. They asked us to stop at a roadside collection of huts where they washed off their mud in the stream, ate a coconut, chatted with the neighbors and picked up a pig in a sack for the ride to Puerto Plata in our truck. It made me feel a bit like a plantation owner, driving around with people in the bed of the truck when there were perfectly good seats inside, but when in Rome...
On the paved road the woman howled with laughter as the 50 mile-per-hour wind tore her hair from her headscarf, the pig in the sack seemed less amused but calmed down after I dug a hole in the sack for it to breathe through and we traveled without incident, as bizarre a combination of people as any on the roads that Sunday morning in Puerto Plata. Little did passers-by know where we had been to church. Like they say, God protects drunks and idiots, and we made it through without a scratch, and I was definitely not drunk.