Wednesday- Santa Domingo, Dominican Republic
Today, we arrived in Santa Domingo in the Dominican Republic, and we were escorting a tour again.
Surprise surprise! It was to see another botanical garden…
It perhaps should be said at this point that there is a reason why there may seem to be are a large number of gardens featured in the excursions list. One of our lectures on board is John Jughes, from the Royal Horticultural Society, and the cruise was advertised (apparently) as having a strong RHS flavour. As a consequence, as well as giving a few horticultural talks, John has been accompanying most of the ‘garden’ tours.
Today, however, before the gardens, our first stop was to see a cave system in Three Eyes Park.
A narrow set of winding stone steps led the way down into the cave, where three small, blue lagoons awaited us. It was all rather good; it was just pity that it was so busy. As well as the three coachloads of our passengers, with approximately 45 people on each bus, there was a large group of school children. The guides did a good job of keeping everyone together, and the queuing was well worth the wait. It was a large cave, part of which is open to the daylight, which helped to bring out the colours of the pools and enhance the contours of the rocks, and the stalagtites.
After a thirty-minute drive through busy traffic, our next destination was the Botanical Gardens, which are quite extensive to say the least. The guides made a poor job of explaining that we had ninety minutes of free time here, with which passengers could spend it how they liked. A small road-train was available for passengers who wished to be taken around the park, for a small fee. The information that had been imparted to the ship was that the fee would be $2 each. However, when people tried to purchase tickets, they were being charged $5 each. It was all an administration error, of course, but passengers soon started losing their patience. Not only were they confused with the free time concept (mostly because of the not-so-communicative guides), but they were being sent from one part of the park to the other to try and obtain train tickets, then to a different part, where the train would pick them up every 30 minutes. Add to this the fact that there weren’t many freely-available maps of the park, meaning that folks didn’t know in which direction they should be heading if they were on foot, and the result was nothing short of chaos.
Everything did get sorted out in the end, with regards to the train, but by then, 20 minutes had been wasted… something else for folks to moan about…
Tracey and I had an enjoyable walk through the gardens, finishing up at an area labelled as ‘Japanese Garden’. We found it mostly by asking others who were roaming about, since the maps weren’t much cop and all the signs in the park were in Spanish; no English to be found at all.
Even though botanical gardens are not really my thing, I must admit that the Japanese Garden was rather wonderful, with lots of ‘Japanese-ey’ plants, an ornate lake and a little wooden oriental-looking footbridge. I’d like to be able to tell you more about what was growing there, but as I’m horticulturally illiterate, that would be rather diificult. A very pleasant experience, however.
Our final stop of the tour was to a resaurant built into another rock and cave system, for lunch.
Naturally, some people managed to find things to have a good old gripe about, but I have to say that the food was really rather lovely. The timing of the tour was all out of kilter with what the itinerary should have been, which meant that we were over an hour late getting back to the ship, leaving folks with very little time to take an independent look around Santa Dominica.
