Today was our third day at Alli’s Surf Camp in Cabarete. It is just a little ways off the road and has a small lagoon around it to separate it some from neighboring apartments. The camp is beautifully decorated, fun, and home-y. It seems like every inch is accented with bright colors and little painted details, and you know how Les and I like bright colors! There are several different buildings, all with a few rooms each. Lots of ferns, palms, and other plants, plus wi-fi around the pool, and a great private restaurant with a palm frond roof and picnic table seating. Everyone gets together for meals.

All the campers here are amazingly friendly. Everyone is very mellow, upbeat, and casually conversive. Most are close to our age, too, which is a rare treat. I hadn’t really expected the surfer image to be a reality, but it is, in the best of ways (not the airhead surfer image!). The people here are bright but non-pretentious. We met a guy from Brighton, England who walks around in short pink boardshorts with yellow giraffes on them. He’s about Les’ age. If you looked at him, you would think, “Probably a server at a restaurant who saves up all winter then blows it all on travel.” Nope, he’s a doctor. Has been a general practitioner for 2 years. When he gets back from the Caribbean, he is entering 10 weeks of boot camp the next day because he wants to provide medical care Iraq. He also said he thinks it will be “interesting medicine”!

The camp, which is somewhere in between a hostel and a hotel, seems to be run by one administrator, two maids, and a couple handymen. It seems to attract travelers who are in the DR for 3 weeks or more, some of them at the surf camp for the entire time. So, the people get to know each other well. There is a Norwegian family here who is staying for 3 months at the camp. They have a 4 year old son and an 8 month old daughter. I’ve never seen the kids tantrum or cry. Makes me want to know more about this surfer lifestyle! The dad works with computers like Les. The mom looks like a model but is super down to earth. She said they have traveled quite a lot with the kids and love it. It reminded Les of how he traveled for a year with his grandparents from age 5-6. They took him around in a motorhome to all the cool military bases on the West Coast because they were free to stay at (Les’ grandpa was a POW in WW2 and escaped all 3 times). Les has lots of fond memories from his year of travels and successfully entered first grade, skipping kindergarten, after his  adventure with Grammy and Grampy.

Interestingly enough, almost everyone here at the camp seems to know about Oregon. We met a couple here where the girl is from Israel and the guy is from Colombia. They were in Oregon a couple months ago visiting the gal’s brother and actually stayed in Sunriver. We also happen to be staying below a couple from Eugene. They study Chemistry and Physics at the U of O. They read a lot of the same books as we do, including Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but we got to tell them about Malcolm Gladwell’s talk about Spaghetti on Ted.com. The couple are never seen without two 6-week old puppies on the road. The puppies seem to be the typical Dominican stray breed – somewhat like Italian Greyhounds with a little more fur and mass. The Eugene couple, Leslie and Mason, called the airport and are taking Mata and Plata home with them. The will be giving them to the Mason’s mom, who has acreage in Pendelton. It’s a wonderful thing to do, and I think has added a lot to their vacation, not to mention to the vacations of the kids here at the camp. The puppies hang out by the pool and wrestle all day. Yesterday evening, we watched some Ted Talks by the pool with the puppies sleeping on our laps and I found myself thinking, “Now this is luxury!” Of course to each his own…

This morning we got up again to go surfing. There is a shuttle from the camp to the surf beach. It is basically an elongated pick up truck but they’ve put a few wooden benches in the back to give us all something to sit on. It seems quite risky riding in the back of a truck on the Dominican highway for 10 minutes there and 10 back. There is so much honking and zooming but I think I finally figured out the honking…

If it is a car that honks, it means, “I’m passing you. Don’t do anything stupid.” A longer honk expresses annoyance at another car or moto; a medium length honk is directed at pedestrians and, at a busy time of day, seems to mock them for walking; a short honk says, “This vehicle takes passengers for $.30 cents, you’d be crazy not to go for it!” It was really enlightening to see how ridiculous people can make cues, like honking, by over using them. Because each person honks at you as they go past, all it does is fluster you and teach you to ignore the honk. Back home, people only honk if there is danger… To me, that makes so much sense then honking all the time! I’ll be making some horse training metaphors about the honking later…

All the honking and traffic noise made Les and I realize how very lucky we are to lead such quiet lives. We can go to the barn when the insidious lawn mowers, leaf blowers, and weed wackers start in the Parks, and come home from the barn when the wind starts. We are also very lucky to get to shop at Whole Foods, which is such a better shopping experience than most stores. Ours is especially quiet, too. We’ve been to a few in Portland and California that are less so. Les and I have decided that future travel should include more places like Cinque Terra in Italy and Jeanene’s finca. Lucky for us, we are forming lots of great connections with horse-lovers over seas and that should enable us to get the local’s recommendations on travel

I suspect the surf beach here is one of the best places available to learn to surf. The water is only waist deep. Yesterday we had perfect conditions. The waves were about 3-4ft high. Today, they were too small – more like 2 feet – but we learned that it actually is possible to surf on a 2 foot wave! I had no idea. My perception of surfing was very far off from reality. I thought it would be very difficult and that you would have to crash hard and often to learn. Nope. We both got up on the first try and rode pretty much all the way in. I also thought there was only one break available to surf at each section of beach. At least at this beach, there can be some people further out surfing huge waves (to me, 8ft is beyond comprehension!) with us about 70ft closer to shore on the same line surfing little tiny waves. To teach us how to catch the wave, the teacher held the board while a wave came, told us to start paddling, then gave us a push, and we stood up. I was glad we had snowboarding experience because I think that helped some. What helped even more, though, was yoga! You basically go from Low Cobra to Warrior 2, but with your legs relaxed and shoulders opened forward. I felt like I had good balance for getting up because of all the Vinyasa flows at Asmi, haha. By the end of today, I rode switch foot once and turned on one wave, and Les did front side and back side body verials, and rode switch. It’s really fun to watch Les learn new things because he’s really creative and uninhibited. It’s nice that surfing was so much less work than I expected. Seems like a hobby we can ride for awhile.

After surfing, we came back to the room, scarfed some raisins and almonds, and zonked out. Then we ate some rice and beans and went into town. Oddly enough, hardly anything here is any cheaper than at home. Lower-end clothes are $20-$40, rice is $1.50/lb, an apple is $.70, cell phone $60/mo, internet $60/mo… Both groceries and goods are average prices. I don’t know how the Dominicans do it…I wonder if housing is less expensive or what? Minimum wage is only $.60 cents per hour, or $200/mo. We were told that the main reason there are many large families is that parents try to have enough kids that at least one will be intelligent enough to go out into the world and make enough money to support the family. Aye yie yie.

In town, we found a gift for Gina to thank her for running our program while we were gone (hope you like it, Gina!) and some awesome candles for my mom. The candle wax sits inside a coconut and the coconut makes a candle and stand in one. Cool recycling! We also dropped some of our clothes off to be washed at a place that does laundry by the pound. They hung up our clothes bag to be weighed and we’ll pick all 11lbs of it up tomorrow freshly washed.

Tonight our friend, Luis, is going to meet us in town. We have no idea what we are doing. Between calling from Skype to a cell phone and trying to communicate in half English, half Spanish, all we could manage was see you at Janet’s Super Market at  7pm. Ha. 7 seems early for dancing and late for dinner.

Did I mention it gets dark here at 7? Yea, totally dark. It’s quite different. The days and nights are almost even. It gets light at about 7am. I asked Luis what the Dominicans do all night with so much dark time and it not really being safe to be out walking or riding a moto… Some Dominicans have only 3 hours of electricity per day and the lucky ones only have 17 hours unless they can afford huge batteries or a generator. There is electricity in the morning, some at noon, then some around 3, some from around 5-8pm, and I’m told some around 1am. In some ways I think it is good! Reduces waste of electricity and exposure to electromagnetic fields. The reason for the on/off thing here, though, is that the area is run on power from an oil-fired powerplant in Puerto Plata, and oil is expensive. Yikes. We saw the plant. Not pretty. Roland said they are doing some with coal now, which is awful too. I hope solar becomes more popular… (If you want to hear my wind power tirade, just ask) Luis says the Dominicans watch tv until 8 then do nothing. He said most sleep about 8 hours, but that would only be 10:30-6:30. There’s a whole 2.5 hours in there every night where there would be no electricity and it would be dark.

Tomorrow morning we are surfing and then begin our 27 hour journey home. Lots of LOOOONG layovers. TGF FB  (thank goodness for Facebook) We’ll also be watching a few movies and reading some more Wayne Dyer and Terry Pratchett.