Day 6: School of Forestry and Environmental Minister

6.4.12. a.k.a. A very Dominican July 4th!!

We got up early once again, and got a tour of a tree nursery/farm that the school of forestry had growing. We made our way through a the nursery, housing thousands of different saplings and down a dirt path to the rivers edge, where we admired the misty green-blue waters we would soon be splashing in. We ate the staple lunch in addition to a delicious dessert of coconut fudge of some sort - whatever it was it was goood - and some strong Dominican espresso (the deprived coffee addicts were ecstatic).

All of us planters with our trees babies!

Beautiful waterfall

We then hopped on the bus and drove to a little river side area, where we planted 100 of the 10,000 tree sproutlings we had donated. Afterwards we hopped back onto the bus, arrived at the hostiles once again, and quickly slipped on our swimsuits so we could make our way to the waterfalls just a short stroll away. After crossing many a rickety bridge (only 5 allowed on at once, or it might collapse...), we arrived at a viewing point to the beautiful flowing falls. I swear, it was the misty blue color you'd see on a birthday cake or in some pirate fantasy movie, it was brilliant!


After snapping a few photos, we waddled back along the swaying wooden bridges, and raced along the trail leading to the swimmable area of the river. It was numbing but refreshing, and we spent a good few hours of our independence day exploring this birthday cake colored oasis. Leonard ended up loosing his glasses, some of the boys built a dam with pebbles in the shallow area, and we girls experimented with underwater photos and floating down the rapids. We were sad to leave this breath taking view of distant, misty mountains to nearby, blue-as-blue-can-be rapids giving way to the circular waterhole we'd spent our last hours in.

Veggie girls and our salsaaaa

We had a dinner of boiled plantains (...yum?), followed by a sustainability discussion drowned out by the deafening noise of the monsoon-like downpour that echoed against the tin roof. Afterwards we enjoyed a second dinner of hot dogs and hamburgers cooked  (burned?) by our very own chefs-for-the-night Daniel and Ben.  Since the DR supermarkets don't really sell fake meat burgers, Juliana and I (the only two veggies in our group) enjoyed a large bag of chips and jar of salsa to ourselves for dinner. We all engaged in a very intense game of ratslap afterwards, and slowly drifted off to bed.

Apparently, most of our group is deathly afraid of spiders, as I was woken up soon after I fell asleep to the sound of petrified screams and shrieks over a "freakin huge spider!!!!" in the bathroom. So huge in fact that we had to have Rachel (the counselor) come in and exterminate it herself. The boys weren't any better - one spider sighting and a whole bottle of bug spray was expelled to ward off any other 'dangerous creatures of the liking'. It worked - it also warded off any feeling in James' arm the next day. Yay chemicals!

All in all? Hella Gnarly Tight July 4th (I picked up regional slang while I was there. Am I using it right??).