Vamo' pa' Pico (aka Vamos para Pico/We're going to Pico)

Well.....ok, so it looks like I haven't posted in about a full 2 months. Oops. But in my defense, for a full two weeks of that time period I was in the US for vacation, and you all know what that's like anyway. The rest of the preceding month basically just consisted of me getting excited for being in the US - i.e. hot showers, access to foods that are not rice and beans, etc.

In any case, the weekend I got back here (which was...ok close to a month ago) I had my biggest adventure yet (sure to be my biggest adventure here, period!)I went with Lindsey, Ani (two of my good friends here that are also DREAM volunteers) and Nico, another friend of ours who also works with DREAM at Summer Camp -more on camp later...perhaps I'll save that for another post - to Pico Duarte, which at 10,300 ft is the highest peak in the DR, AND the entire Caribbean. We'd been wanting to do the hike for a while, and finally had found 3 days we had free together. We'd heard the hike takes multiple days, but you could do it in three - including travel to and from La Cienaga, the town where the trail starts - if you hustled.

Our day started when we woke at 4:30am on Friday morning- the trip would require several different legs/bus rides, and we wanted to arrive in La Cienaga by early afternoon in order to start the hike. Here's the thing about the DR. It's impossible to accurately plan ANYTHING. Like, for example....a hiking trip that requires A LOT of planning. Caribe Tours, one of the country's big commercial bus lines (which, I must say, does unexpectedly have some of the nicest buses I've ever seen in my life) is what we would use to ride from nearby Sosua to Santiago, then from Santiago to La Vega, then from La Vega to Jarabacoa, where we would catch a guagua (public bus overflowing with people) to La Cienaga, where we would hopefully find a guide (Pico Duarte is in a National Park, and you can only enter the park to do the hike with an official, certified guide. This is strangely, as we would find, one of few things policed in this country) that would be willing to start the hike with us that afternoon. We were also hoping to find Peter, a Peace Corps volunteer fabled to live near the trail head, who we figured could help us set everything up with a guide, etc.

So when on the side of the road at 10 minutes of 5 in the morning, still not having caught a Carrito (public car) to take to the bus station, we realize we might not make it...which is precisely when a really nice young man in a really not nice/barely functioning rickety pick up truck stops and picks us up. He is going to work at a mechanic shop (ironically enough) in Sosua, and is happy to give us a ride. Ani, Lindsey and I piled into the front seat, where I spent the next 15 minutes just praying we would make it to Sosua in one piece, let alone Pico Duarte. We made it to the bus station with time to spare, and our driver even drove far past his mechanic shop to drop us off right at the station, and then of course refused that we pay him anything. This reminded me what I love about this country, and how kind people can be to total strangers. Things were off to a good start!

It was in Santiago where things started to go downhill...Nico, who was supposed to meet us at the bus station after picking up our tent from a friend nearby, was an hour and a half late, meaning that we would miss the next bus to La Vega and thus the bus from La Vega to Jarabacoa - we would now certainly not get to the trail head by early afternoon as planned...which was problematic because if we didn't start the hike Friday afternoon, we really wouldn't be able to make it to the summit and come back in time to be in Cabarete late Sunday night (we had to work Monday, boo). But we also really had no idea if there was a certain time trips stopped leaving from the office at the trail head, etc. (again, impossible to plan anything - no schedules, etc. - even the Caribe Tours bus schedule online was completely inaccurate). Basically it would be tragic if we spent 6 hours traveling to La Cienaga, only to find out that we couldn't possibly do the hike within our time frame, so we were trying to avoid this situation at all costs.

In any case, Nico comes and we get on the next bus to La Vega (scene of the craziest Carnival in the country, which you may remember from a previous post) where we decide that it will be better to take a carrito into town to catch a shuttle bus to Jarabacoa rather than wait an hour for the next Caribe Tours bus. This was a great idea, but once in the shuttle bus, Lindsey realized she didn't have her wallet, which contains all the money she's brought for the trip, her phone, etc. Trouble. We determine that it must be in the carrito, that someone has probably found and taken it, but that the carrito will eventually go back to the Caribe Tours bus station so we should return to the bus station to look for it, and just get on the Caribe Tours bus afterall.

We do this, find the carrito, but.....no wallet. This is tragic...but not something that we'll let get in the way of us summitting the highest peak in the Caribbean, obviously. We all convince Lindsey that she must come, cheer her up, and soon enough we're headed to Jarabacoa.

Once there, we find that we can't get a guagua to La Cienaga for another hour and a half...at this point we are pretty sure that we won't get there in time to start the hike today, and are resolved to the fact that we will have to just do a portion of the hike on Saturday. However, we run into a guy waiting for the guagua who tells us all about the hike, that his neighbor is a guide, that we can still start it today, etc. He is incredibly helpful and gets on the guagua with us, has it stop at a supermarket, where he helps us get the food we need for the trip. He tells us the name of his neighbor who is a guide in La Cienage, and we are off. Things seem promising at this point! The landscape as we drive to La Cienaga is gorgeous - rolling farmland, hills, valleys - everything a lush green. Very different from other parts of this country I have seen.

As we enter La Cienaga it has started to rain. Our guagua driver stops at the house of the guide that was recommended to us, but he cannot do the trip - we end up picking up another guide that the driver knows along the way, and he takes us all to the park office, from which all the trips leave.

We find things at the office miraculously organized and well run (I don't think I've ever used those words before in reference to anything in the DR!) and somehow, within about 45 minutes, we have a guide, sleeping bags, all the food we need, a mule, and are packing up to head out on the trail. It's about 4:30 or so at this point; we will hike for about an hour and a half to the first camp, spend the night there, and then hike for about 9 hours the next day to get to the second camp, or the top of Pico Duarte if it's clear enough/not raining.

The first part of the hike is absolutely gorgeous - it's like hiking through a jungle, and with amazing views of the mountains, valleys, and farms around us. We cross a few streams on rickety wooden footbridges which seem shaky but do the trick.

We get to the first camp -a small building/hut with a few different rooms, and a small, covered outdoor fire pit. Having a roof is great at this point, as it's now steadily raining and fairly chilly (probably in the 60s...but it gets even colder the next day! eek!).

The next morning we are up at 6, and hiking by 7 (after our amazing guide, Yendri, makes us delicious hot chocolate - at this point we officially love him). The weather looks good, but Yendri tells us it's been raining every afternoon (rainy season...maybe not the best time to plan this trip...). We hike for about 8 hours through mostly really difficult (ie VERY uphill) terrain, but on about hour 7 - at which point we seemed to be in a completely different climate, and nearly above the trees -now pines instead of palms - the massive thunderstorm came. Thunder, POURING rain, 40 degree weather...the whole nine yards. We raced through it as fast as we could to get to the camp where we would spend the night and then leave from for the peak in the morning (as at this point there was no way we would make it to the top in the rain/clouds/0 visibility, etc).

The trail was now completely flooded, with water rushing over it at every point; I was also now, despite my raincoat, pretty much completely soaked and worried that the entire contents of my backpack - including half our toilet paper store - were soaking wet as well. When I finally saw the camp we were headed to come into view I could almost feel the hot campfire on my freezing cold hands...

...which is exactly what I felt for about the next 5 hours, as all of us huddled around the fire for the rest of the afternoon. About half of the stuff in my bag was soaking wet, which seemed to be the case for everyone. Luckily though, the rain had spared the tp. Our sleeping bags seemed dry as we laid them out and set up our tent, until we tried to get in them later, and realized that they were cold and damp (at best, a couple very wet in places)...While I am notoriously prone to the use of hyperboles and superlatives, this was definitely one of the coldest and most uncomfortable nights of my life.

Unsure if I had actually slept or not, our guide woke us up at about 5:30 to head to the summit (about 1.5-2 hours hike from our camp). By the time we were ready to go and had some hot chocolate in our systems we came to the realization that we were already more than an hour behind schedule if we wanted to assure that we got back to Cabarete that night (Sunday). We would have to hike the 2 hours to the top, and then hike down the entire trail that took us, cumulatively, about 11 hours to hike on the way up....chances of us getting back to La Cienaga in time to catch a guagua to Jarabacoa, and start the journey back to Cabarete (which had taken us about 5-6 hours, including layover time, on the way there) were slim to none. But we had come so far! Everyone had mixed feelings, and we almost turned back...buuuuuuuut finally came to the rational decision that there was absolutely no way we could have hiked for 8 hours the day before, traveled so far to do this hike, and NOT even see the top of Pico Duarte.

So we were off. We would see how quickly we could get down, and try our best to do everything possible to get back to Cabarete that night...if not, we would deal with that when it happened.

It was a beautiful, crisp and clear morning. We would have great visibility from the top. After about an hour and a half of tough hiking......we finally saw the summit! A pile of large rocks with a wind-torn Dominican flag and a bust statue of Juan Pablo Duarte (instrumental in establishing Dominican independence) himself. It was an unbelievable view from the top - we were above the clouds, above all the other peaks around us that had seemed so enormous as we hiked through them. It's rumored that on the clearest of days you can see both oceans from the top, though we were unable to...next time! It was such a strange feeling to know that no one in an entire region of the world was at that moment higher than we were. This was definitely the highest I had ever hiked, and the view sparked in me a familiar re-alignment of perspective and priorities which I always tend to feel when looking at a view from a dramatically high point.

We were so glad we had decided to make it to the summit, and couldn't believe we had almost turned around.

But then....we turned around. We BOOKED it back down the trail. Our guide had said that if we got back down by 4pm, we should be able to call a guagua to take us to La Cienega and we could get back to Cabarete that night. This gave us about 7 hours to get down. Which we did! It was a miracle that it didn't rain on us - even as we descended from the summit we saw dark clouds fast approaching. It seemed the entire way down that we were racing against the rain - hearing thunder, feeling a few drops - it seemed constantly about to pour for the entire trip down, and I was dreading being wet and cold for our multi-leg/multi-hour trip home.

As we rolled up to the office at the base of the trail, it was 4pm, we were somehow completely dry, and there was somehow (well, thanks to Peter, our new Peace Corps friend) a guagua waiting there for us to take us back to Jarabacoa. Thrilled that it seemed as though we could get back to Cabarete and sleep in our own beds at last, we temporarily forgot about our insane hunger (we had run out of food after breakfast, and hadn't eaten all day...I was feeling borderline delusional at this point, and had been fantasizing about a snickers bar for the last 2 hours of the hike down).

Just as it had seemed to on the way there, everything somehow fell into place on our way back. We caught each bus in succession, and arrived...still hungry for a real meal but having downed some snacks...back in Cabarete by about 10:45pm. I think that Sunday was officially the longest day of my life! But more than worth it.