Home ::  Newsletter

If you've been to Luperon, you know it as a charming rural town of tiny wood or concrete houses and shops, where life happens on the street. Doorways stand open and family laundry dries on barbed wire fences along sidewalks, where people sit during the day or evening working, dozing, playing with the children or chatting with neighbors over a lively game of dominoes.

So, walking down main street is a weaving in and out, with a few steps on the sidewalk and a few in the street, dodging dogs, goats or motoconchos, the lightweight motorcycles used in the D.R. for taxis or for transporting anyone or anything imaginable. We've seen as many as five thin teenage girls on one motoconcho. We've also seem a man balancing egg cartons totaling 240 eggs, several riders with five-foot-long propane tanks, and women riding side-saddle behind their husbands with a child or two in between.

Yet the only person I've seen in the country with a crash helmet is Stephanie, the tiny daughter of Captain Steve. She's learning to walk on the concrete floor of her daddy's restaurant, which has been our home away from home. There one can enjoy such gringo treats as a baked potato or a milkshake or a coca cola in a relaxed setting of thatched roof and banana trees.

I park my husband there while I run errands. One day I found him sitting in a rocking chair next to another boater, fast asleep. "How long has he been like that?" I asked.

"About fifteen minutes." Just like home...

There are a few bona-fide chefs around Luperon from Belgium and the Netherlands, who are masters at transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary. One such chef serves his six-course meals on the pool terrace of his Hotel Miamar, which has a grand panorama of river valley and ocean.

With all that chewing, I was bound to need the services of a dentist! I harbored some serious trepidation concerning cleanliness and sterilization methods in a foreign land. But I marched myself and my broken molar to Gigi, the young Dominican dentist. The tiny waiting room was open to a side street Luperon-style, with one chair on the sidewalk occupied by a well-groomed young lad sitting quietly with a chicken under his arm. I didn't give him or the chicken much thought until the door the the inner sanctum opened and Gigi stepped out.

The smiling boy handed her the chicken, which she graciously accepted and took inside with her. I then felt like a chicken on the verge of flying the coop, so to speak! But I willed myself to remain in my seat until I was called.

After expressing my concerns in Spanish to Gigi and being shown the sterilization oven, the sealed needle, the mask and the gloves, I allowed myself to be treated to a new cap for my broken tooth. She didn't hurt me and she did a great job.

Chickens are one thing. Cows are another—big black immovable creatures staring at me as I tiptoed amongst them, mumbling niceties while hoping they'd stay put and keep their hooves on the ground. They loved the narrow shady farm paths as much as we did for early-morning walks to the beach. The setting was so perfectly pastoral—dewy green fields, great mature trees, cows mooing, roosters crowing, ocean and mountains beyond. The sweet smell of earth and hay and animals grazing and night fires could be detected on the night breeze ten miles out at sea.

Where we lived on our boats was the perfect anchorage, being almost landlocked and protected by hills and tall mountains. But life there was not without drama! Aside from the occasional draggings, two incidents come to mind. The first occurred late in the day with a sizable steel fishing boat returning to harbor with its catch. It stopped to sell fish to a sailor and, upon reversing, the engine caught fire, whereupon the boat drifted unfettered through the anchored boats, the crew to busy with their yelling and water buckets to tend to the runaway vessel. One call from me on the radio produced 6 or 7 inflatables, which guided the smoking hulk to its berth.

The second event occurred during preparations for the first tropical storm of the season. My husband and I were among the first to flee to a preplanned spot near the mangroves. Others followed, leaving the center of the harbor nearly deserted. The first inkling of trouble came with a general announcement on the VHF radio by an anonymous voice. "Luperon, hide your daughters! Here comes the fleet!," which heralded the arrival of the large Dominican fishing vessels from the Silver Bank.

They plowed their bows into the mangroves along the south shore, leaving one helpless yacht wedged between two of them, with a four-foot section of teak toerail split in two. A call for help conjured up some rescue dinghies, which plucked the yacht from the mangroves and ushered it to a mooring, where it sat peacefully throughout the storm, which bought nary a puff of wind nor drop of water. The dry run left its damage on our fingers and limbs, bruised and cut from climbing about the mangrove roots with our lines.

After a season tied to and anchored near those mangroves, our lines are overgrown with the juiciest, most colorful plant life and the hardest barnacles and clams. Cleaning them off is back-breaking work, but we are finally free and have left Luperon in our wake. No matter how far the miles, we are still connected to that lovely place.