Sunday is Funday!

This morning our driver kept going down the road, past the Mariposa Foundation, past the right turn for La Escuela Coral, past the now familiar shops and restaurants that line the beaches and main drag of Cabarete.  "Sunday is Funday!" our itinerary told us, and there would be no work for us at all.

Diving east along the coast, we found ourselves about a quarter mile from the Atlantic Ocean on our left, and another quarter mile from steep, high cliffs on the right.  The cliffs, it turns out, were once an under water reef some tens of thousands of years ago.  If we were to walk across the fields to it, we'd find ourselves picking at seashells and aquatic fossils.  Pretty cool, huh?

For our first stop of the day, we donned the always sexy bright orange, over-your-head, pillow-in-front lifejackets that we all thought we had outgrown and boarded a bright blue wooden boat that just fit us all on its plank seats.  After casting off, our pilot cruised the mangroves and took us to a crystal clear lagoon just inside the breakers of the ocean.  We watched barracuda, puffer fish, and red snapper swim underneath us while egrets and sea birds flew overhead.

After a short bus ride, we spent a few minutes watching kids about the same age as our Winteriming students leap off a seventy-five foot waterfall to splash in the seven foot pool at the bottom.  Perhaps even more impressive was how quickly these divers climbed the rock face back to the top for another plunge.  Awed and somewhat shaken, we moved on to a lunch of chicken, mahi-mahi, rice, beans, and pineapple.

Following three hours of swimming, sunning, and eating at the unbelievably gorgeous Playa Grande beach, we began our drive back to Santiago, where we'd be getting our plane back home on Monday. What a drive that turned out to be!  Instead of taking the main roads back over well-worn territory, we climbed the mountain highway up into the clouds, passing scattered small towns—little more than houses and tiendas lining this one street, really—where families sat out front enjoying the Sunday evening air.  We looked over rich green valleys, down plunging mountainsides, and back to the azure ocean in the distance.  We saw new schools that marked better things to come for Dominican children, and we saw wooden shack homes that reminded us of the poverty that plagues the DR.  The majesty of our trip was captured on our drive back to the central part of the island.

And now here I am, at 10:55 on Sunday night, writing the last lines of the Domincan Republic Winterim Blog, thankful to have been a part of this fantastic trip.  I need to be ready to leave for the airport in under six hours, so it's time to sign off.

From Santiago, buenos noches.