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