Cascadas

March 16

If there was one good thing that came out of our turning back on Tuesday night, it was that I had another chance to get to the waterfalls near Luperon. We had been meaning to get there since we arrived in the DR, but we had been too "busy."

Dean had no real interest in sliding down a waterfall, but after a week of not swimming, I was dying to get into the water again. We had heard about trips that were organized for the falls for $35 per person, including transportation, lunch, a guide, and a helmet and life jacket. But since we decided to go at the last minute, we had to find our own way.

We rented motorcycles again--smaller ones this time--for $10 each, and drove ourselves out there. The man in town who rented us the bikes told us we should haggle with the guides at the falls for a price, so we did. Things got a little hot for a minute, but we bargained one guide down to $5 per person, including life jacket and helmet.

Now, you might wonder why one would need a guide and safety gear to go look at a waterfall, but you don't look at it, you climb up it. Rather, you swim up part of it and are dragged up the steep parts by the guides. "Put your left foot here and grab my hand with your right hand," they'd say, but before you got your foot in place to bear any weight, they would have you hauled up to the next level and would have moved on to the next person.

After an hour of climbing, we turned around and slid and jumped down natural slides into deep pools carved out of the rock by the water that has been traveling down this mountain for eons, carving out a step path through the rock. The experience was amazing. The water was a gorgeous blue color, cool but not the ice water one finds in the White Mountains, and the trail itself was gorgeous as it wound up the side of the mountain.

The best part of it all was that, just before we hopped on our bikes at the end of the trip, we found out that the big groups of tourists coming in on buses had paid ther resorts $55 per person to do what we had done for $10! I love the DR!

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