Hey ho everybody!!!

A lot of things happened, since I had the time AND internet access at the same time therefore this will be kind of a wrap-up of what has happened to me in the meanwhile.

Joelle and I left Cabarete on the 7^th of October heading to San Diego, California via Miami and Dallas/Fort Worth.  The flight to Miami was breathtaking because the sky was clear and we had a perfect view. The Caribbean in this area is scattered with islands surrounded by turquoise water. Miami airport was less a hassle than expected and I even had time to get my first mandatory fast food at the local Burger King. Americanization done! No wonder that the customs didn’t check me. The flight to Dallas offered us the opportunity to get some sleep because we left Cabtown at 5a.m.. When we arrived in Dallas I was stunned by the size of Dallas/Fort Worth Airport. It’s not the amount of passengers passing this airport but the dimensions. The airplane had to drive for at least 10 minutes after landing to get to its gate. The following flight was again breathtaking for me and I was sitting for almost the whole last leg of our personal Odyssey without any movement in front of my tiny little window staring at this vast landscape below. I’ve never seen a landscape like that before.

When we arrived in San Diego, we caught a cab to Justin’s house in Pacific Beach. Justin was so kind to offer us accommodation in his guesthouse. He’s a rising star (at least in Japan ;) ) in the one-man-one-guitar-musicians-sky. This Wednesday night Justin had a gig in a bar and we went there to meet him but that turned out to be a tiny little problem. In California, by law, you have to show your ID when entering a bar unless you look like 45+. As people that are used to “normal” laws, we were unprepared for this case and had to fetch our IDs. The fact that we don’t look at all like under 21 year-olds, doesn’t matter for the doorman at all and he even came to us afterwards (kind of aggressively) after we proved our age to one of his colleagues, with the suspicion that Justin managed somehow to get us in. Hilarious!!! Anyway the evening finally turned out to be nice and I had my burgers #2 and 3 this day. Welcome to California! If you like to, check out Justin’s homepage and music on http://www.justinjamesmusic.com.

During the next days we had to get a lot of things done. Find and buy a van, find cheap surfboards, equip the van and get insurance for the van for Mexico and the US. That was quite a hassle but we took the time and stayed 6 days in San Diego. Big thanks to Justin again!!! So far it seems that we found a good van. It’s a 1987 Ford Econoline 150 V8.

In the meanwhile we drove 1800mi southwards (including circles) and are staying at the moment in La Ventana, Baja California Sur. Our road down here was mainly the MEX 1, which is for pretty much the whole way one ongoing scenic road. Did I already use the word breathtaking??? No honestly this road is special!!! We’ve been driving through gigantic dust clouds, in windy (ironic, but there was no water around) dry deserted areas, through rocky deserts, where it seems that only cactuses can survive, through real forests of cactuses and green hills and mountains, which made us almost forget, that we passed the most lonely and dead area, that both of us ever experienced, only 2 days ago.

On our way down here there were some waves here and there but no wind and as we focused on kiting, not on surfing, we decided to skip a lot of spots and drive directly down to Los Barriles where we met Peter, a friend, who is managing the Vela Windsurfing school down here.

Our plan worked pretty well. We took “one day off” after exhausting 3 days of driving through sometimes 35°C of heat and the next day El Norte, the wind that blow pretty much the whole winter down here until April, started blowing. At the same time hurricane Rick just decided to become weaker and weaker. Originally Rick – expected as the strongest hurricane in more than a decade - was supposed to hit Cabo San Lucas, the southernmost city on Baja California, at exactly this day. Rick changed his course in direction of the mainland of Mexico but was still strong enough to bring an impressive easterly swell. When El Norte kicked in, it brought northerly swell which mixed up with the old swell and created absolutely chaotic conditions. Imagine 2.5m waves in 90° angle!!!

Anyways I had a blast on my 6m KF Hybrid and my “new” used Santa Cruz surfboard. My little black hybrid is a wave monster. I reeeeeaaaaalllly love it. So quick in the turns and easy to fly and anticipate. Joëlle stayed in at first because it was kind of risky to enter the water through a shorebreak of about 2m. You had to wait until a set was done and the sea had to breathe again, run into the water jump over the first waves and bodydrag as fast as possible past the break. A little later Jo gave it a try and mastered her fea…mmmmhhh…. respect. She did great although the conditions were so rough and came back proud and satisfied.

To be continued soon…

Rafael

Heeeeeeeeeeeeeellllllllllooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!

Only 3 more days to go before we gonna leave the DR. The last two days Martha, a good friend, and I were ripping the waves in front of Kiteclub. The wind was quite strong for these days, so that we've been out on 6 and 7.5m^2. Two days ago, the waves were pretty small, but yesterday they grew bigger and it was amazing. Good feeling to have these nice experiences before leaving the country and heading somewhere else. On Monday we are going to have a small farewell BBQ with friends at our place, before the entire Tuesday will be committed to packing.

Tonight`s another small highlight planned, because I will be invited to Blue Moon restaurant.

Today is no wind yet, so that I had some time to get a little bit in touch with this nice crab. Its name is Rafael. What else 'cos after all it's a dominican crab.

Cheers,

Raph

Dear Falko,

we just had our sunset chill-out in La Boca.In the beginning there were some people that didn't respect the quietness of the spot but they they left early and a nameless peace spread over the spot. As the wind dropped a bit and became too less for my 10m^2 Thunderbird, I landed it and a bottle of Presidente was already opened for me. Flo, Charly and some others were still riding right in front of us.

This time in La Boca made me recover and calm down again from the constantly loud and tiring live in Cabarete. I can't wait to get out of the DR to find quietness. The DR is nice for a while for me, but this time is over. It seems that the whole dominican way of live even transferred to the ocean because the water on kitebeach is so choppy and crowded.

I think the pictures give a good idea about the atmosphere...

Raph

Allô à tous,

the plan of having breakfast in Encuentro last Friday turned out to be awesome, but kind of hard to realize, because it was quite hard to eat croissants and have a coffee while being stunned. Anyway after the first big sets that hit the beach I started to realize again, where I was and could have my nice breakfast. It was sunny instead of rainy as the weather forecast announced. The line-up wasn`t too crowded and many of the surfers seemed to be awestruck too, because only a few took waves regularly. Many seemed to hesitate, but it wasn`t a shame on this day. The biggest sets were about 4.5m high!!

After this nice morning, Joelle and I went to Kiteclub to check out what the wind looked like. But the forecast seemed to become reality. It was pretty weak westerly wind, so no chance at all to teach or even go kiting on my own. As it was Joelle`s day off, we decided to spend the day together and go for a trip on my green moto up in the mountains.

Our trip lead us first to Sabaneta, where we took the road to Santiago. Following this road, we went higher and higher in the mountains. This was quite hard work for my tiny little – but green!!! – moto. It was fighting the steep ascents as well as the descents. It must`ve been a funny picture: the two of us on the tiny 30(!!!) year-old Yamaha moto riding up the steep roads barely overtaking pedestrians, especially for the Dominicans sitting everywhere on the side of the road in front of their houses, seeing us passing by; two “tourists”, a white, blond-haired and blue-eyed guy and a chica on this moto.

The trip was fabulous anyways, but yet kind of strange when you see an Audi Q7 passing by typical Dominican wooden houses with no electricity;  houses where people live earning most likely less than 345US$ (BIP/person/month); people that would`ve to work about 30 years without spending any money to be able to buy such a car. If these people were to know how much such a car costs! Strange little world…

Raph