The road to Santo Domingo

Mary's looking for our next hotel, so I get a few minutes to add to our inland empire stories. From our lazy existance in Las Galeras, we headed to the more popular area of the northern coast. The serious resort towns up here are Cabarete and Puerto Plata, so we tried out a smaller town in between called Sosua. Right. The small towns up here are just sloppy resort areas for foreigners with less money. The beaches are great if you don't mind the shacks along the waterfront selling everything you don't want. Except the bars. They'll send out all the beer and Cuba Libres (rum and coke) you can handle straight to your chair on the beach all day for $20US. Maybe that's not so bad...
The fun thing about towns like this are the crazy foreigners you meet in the hostel areas. Between the crazy wannabe-IT guy who owns the hostel and wants to rip everything Microsoft and Norton off your computer before he lets you on the WiFi, the Louisana guys looking for a good time, the Canadian bartender who just wants a tip so he can down another beer, the old American who came down looking for a good time and apparently found it is cheaper to marry than pay for every visit (yet he still had a noon 'massage' appointment) or the Brit who traveled the world and then founded the seemingly popular and respected Dominican Website www.dr1.com. The last guy actually seemed pretty normal...
Needless to say, the next day we headed out to calmer waters. Literally, it turns out. We wanted to see a bit of the interior now that we'd seen nearly the entire norther coast, so we headed for Jarabacoa which is on the way up the mountains to Pico Duarte, highest point in the Caribbean at 10,500 feet.
Jarabacoa is like Tahoe. Beautiful mountain town with pine trees and near-alpine meadows. No lake, though. Like Mary said, we did the rafting thing. Maybe I expected a bit of white water excitement since we're in the middle of nowhere and our lives are worth nothing here. But it was more like beer floating. 87 adventurous foreigners with neon bracelets that proclaim "One more free mai-tai!" bused in for the day from their comfortable lounge chair on the sands of Puerto Plata resorts accompanied our float down the river. No offense to the parents who may be reading, but once the gray-heads show up to a rafting trip, you know it's going to be Rafting Miss Daisy at best.
OK, I'm being negative. We did get wet and I was able to set my paddle down and take pictures while we went through the "white water" sections. So it was fun. We did meet a couple guys from Minnesota who talk like my Dad and a model from Milan who's here to get a boob job. If only we had video of the gestures Mary and this girl made while trying to get the point across. That 30 seconds was quite a bit more invigorating than the whole raft trip.
Next day of hiking was more our style. We hopped a moto (can't call it a ''motorcycle" in good counscience if it's just 100cc) out a few miles to the waterfall trailhead. We stopped twice and twice I burned my calf on the muffler. The injuries are moving higher...
We walked up to Salto Jimenoa which is claimed to be the waterfall background for the helicopter landing scene in Jurassic Park. Neato. Couldn't find a dinosaur in my swim, though.

Oh - Looks like Mary found a home for us in Martinique, so it's time for dinner. That was the deal.