Today we drove a couple of hours east of Santo Domingo on Highway 3 and tooled around an interesting place known as Altos de Chavon which is a kitchy 17th century, Tuscan-styled village that a guy built for his daughter many years ago (http://www.altosdechavon.com/fs_village.htm). Altos de Chavon borders the largest all-inclusive resort on the island known as Casa de Campo and serves as its "high culture" alternative to body shots and golf. All the limestone that was used for the faux-Tuscan village project was imported, and the location, at least when it was built, was in the middle of nowhere, so the logistics and cost must have been a monumental challenge. For lunch, we had some wonderful pizza pie and enjoyed the stunning view of the Rio Chavon while a feral cat tried to attack Salvador (and it may have been just flirting, who knows?). Ailing and I missed our 15 minutes of fame by about, well, 15 minutes, as we were approached by a French documentarian who was working for the Discovery Channel to make a show about Altos de Chavon. She was going to buy us lunch and interview us, but the bill was just being delivered and her camerman declared that the clouds were creating imperfect light. We tried to convince her that our inner radiance would correct any lighting problems, but her Gallic reasoning won out.
We then drove down to a former fishing village called Bayahibe and got to experience the local vs. gringo beach division (see last foto). For the hour we were relaxing on the tiny, crowded beach, there was one white guy hanging out on the loooong stretch on the other side of the rope. As with much of the island, the weathly resort developers leave a little strip of the land for the Dominicans to enjoy and rent the rest out at nightly rates to the tourists -- ahhh, what an industry! Technically, it is illegal to "ban" anyone from a stretch of Dominican beach but given that the resort security guards wield very tough-looking shotguns, I doubt the casual beach-going local is going to raise much of a fuss.
