Luperón
is one hour, two "guaguas" (little buses), and thirty pesos away from
Puerto Plata, another seaside resort town. The harbor itself is a
large industrial port, and it saw a lot more yachtie traffic before
Luperón became a legal port of immigration; now most cruisers
park in smaller, more protected Luperón and visit Puerto Plata
by land.
There are lots of touristy things to do in Puerto Plata, and the groceries and hardware stores are far bigger than those in Luperón, but we were there on a different mission. Behind the city is Loma Isabel de Torres, a steep and lush mountain which tops out at about 2600 feet. There's a gondola (in Spanish, teleférico) to the top, 50 pesos each way, but our guidebook said that it was possible to hike, and we wanted the exercise and the experience of the climb.
We were joined by Aaron and Colleen of the boat Redwings, who were undeterred by our extremely sketchy knowledge of the hike we were planning. They had just arrived in Luperón a few days before, and we'd gotten email from someone who reads both our web pages and theirs, alerting us to be on the lookout for them. This was kind of cool because theirs was one of the web sites we used to read before we went cruising. It's too bad that they are going north and we're going south.
Our driver let us off at an anonymous-looking road, and we began to walk past houses and small stores. Pretty soon the pavement turned to gravel and the gravel to dirt. Every so often the road forked and we asked the nearest person, "which way to the mountain?" A few offered to guide us -- for a fee, of course, so we just smiled and said, "No, gracias" and continued on the most likely route.
As we walked we accumulated a cloud of barefoot boys, the boldest ones clamoring, "Un peso, un peso." They pointed us along the path as it split and narrowed and became a footpath, although some pointed one way and some another, and we weren't actually certain they were directing us the right way. Eventually the youngest ones dropped away and we were left with an escort of four boys in the 8-14 age group. When we came to a gate past an old woman's house (she smiled and waved us on), the oldest boy told us in Spanish that they would guide us to the top for 300 pesos.
Now, 300 pesos is about $20, a lot of money for these kids in a country where 35 pesos gets you a good restaurant meal. And we'd been talking in the bus with another cruiser who had been hiking in a national park, where the guide fee (for an adult guide, presumably!) was 200 pesos a day. So we talked among ourselves and then offered about half the requested amount. He stood fast. We shrugged and told him we'd just have to hike on our own, then.
"Van a perderse," he warned. You're gonna get lost.
"No es importante, " we cheerily told him, and headed off into the jungle. Where we promptly got lost.
The problem wasn't that the trail disappeared. The problem was that there were too many criss-crossing little sort-of-trails, and none of them were particularly good. According to the guidebook, a road ("impassable [by cars] in spots") went to the top, which is what we had thought we were going to climb, until we were "guided" to the trail we were on, and figured there was a foot trail as well as a road. In retrospect, maybe we were deliberately led astray! We kept angling upward, hoping we'd hit a real-honest-to-Pete trail, and every so often we thought we had, but each one eventually turned into a sort-of-trail and then blended into the underbrush.
And there was a lot of underbrush, not to mention overbrush and inbetweenbrush. Some of it was covered in great big thorns, which is not something you want to discover while grabbing frantically at a plant in order to avoid sliding downhill backward in the mud. Even worse was the low broad-leaved plant with tiny fuzzy thorns all over the leaves and stem. I was the first to discover that bare skin brushed against it results in a hornet-like sting! Fifteen minutes later, the pain eased, but my leg had an ugly line of red welts across it. Each of us except for Aaron got stung by this nasty bit of flora sometime during the day; he made up for his luck in avoiding the stingy-plant by using an unstable rock as a handhold on one particularly steep section. The rock pulled loose and landed on his leg, making an impressively bloody but fortunately not too deep gash.
Yep, it was a serious deathmarch, and some of us were on the verge of turning back when we topped a ridge and saw -- the summit! It wasn't too far away from us now, but the terrain between us and the top was clearly too steep to continue straight up. So we contoured around as best as we could, hopping from faint trail to faint trail, hoping to run into the real trail.
The trail we were on vanished right by a dry creek bed, and it was too thick to bash ahead on our contour line, so we headed upstream. "I hear an engine," yelled Aaron, and we all stopped and listened. A little further uphill, we saw obviously piled sandbags...like would be used to support a road...a road! We scrambled up the last little bit and ran out onto the road (except for me, because a vine grabbed one of my ankles from behind just as I was jumping across the ditch, and I landed flat on my face in the road. Some entrance!)
The road was steep in the way that only roads that never know snow can be, and after the pickup truck carrying a satellite dish chugged on up, we put ourselves in low gear and chugged up too. It was only two more switchbacks to the top, where we rested, ate lunch, and enjoyed the awesome view. It had taken us three hours of scrambling and bushwhacking; we were scratched and bruised and covered in sweat, but still, it was a great hike.
But we took the teleférico down.
