Flora, fauna, and food in the Dominican Republic
Four-foot lizards, todies, and great food in the Dominican Republic
You can't go wrong with peanut M&Ms and a cola for breakfast.
Or so I try to convince myself.
Fellow passengers and I have just stepped off the early-bird bus from Santo Domingo to Bavaro. We're taking a 15-minute break at a small open-air grocery store-cum-bus stop about 90 minutes east of the Dominican capital. Cooked meats, vegetables, and potatoes lie in pans behind an open display case. To me, 8:30 in the morning is a bit too early to think of goat and fried plantains for breakfast. So while fellow travelers line up cafeteria-style, I opt for junk food.
In another couple of hours, the bus will drop me off near Punta Cana International Airport for my flight home. As we reboard the bus and move back into traffic, I tote up my experiences during a week's visit to the Dominican Republic.
It began as an exploratory trip to an ecologically progressive resort on the country's east coast. It has ended in the capital with a fondness for the Dominicans I met, a fascination for the country's wildlife and tectonic landscape, and lingering regret that I hadn't paid more attention during Miss Walker's elementary-school introduction to Spanish.
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Gloria Caminotti sits atop a low concrete and coral wall that circles an enclosure where several lizards up to four feet long rest in the shade or munch melon rinds.
"These were the largest land animals on the island when Columbus arrived," says the naturalist, pointing to the rhinoceros iguanas behind us. Today, she adds, only about 10 percent of the island's original population remains.
The few specimens at our backs - unique to the island of Hispanola (the Dominican Republic and Haiti share the island) - represent one attempt to rebuild the population of this threatened species. Their rehab center is the elegant Punta Cana Resort and Club, which boasts, among its other inhabitants (at least part of the year) Julio Iglesias, Oscar De La Renta, and Mikhail Baryshnikov.
The resort takes its environmentalism seriously, for the most part. The golf-course grass is tolerant of drought and salt. The course is irrigated with "gray water" (previously used to wash dishes or laundry, or in showers and sinks). Fruits and vegetables gracing restaurant plates are organically grown on the grounds. And the resort, which includes year-round residences, has adopted something akin to zoning laws (in a country largely bereft of them) to maintain a relatively small human footprint on the land. On the other hand, golf carts run on noisy, fume- spewing gasoline engines.
Punta Cana's environmental flagship is a 2,000-acre ecological reserve that includes a 10-acre biodiversity lab and field station. Built in 2000, the lab draws researchers and graduate students from Harvard, Cornell, Columbia, the Dominican Institute of Agricultural and Forestry Investigations, and the University of Miami in Florida.
Over breakfast in the resort's main dining hall, Andrea Townsend, a Cornell graduate student, describes her work as she stokes up for a day of tracking the elusive broad-billed tody. The bird species is unique to the island's lowlands. Biologists regard it and its upland cousin, the narrow-billed tody, as relic species. Their now-fossilized ancestors have been found as far afield as Wyoming and France. The question at hand: Why is the upland variety, found largely in the Sierra de Baoruco Mountains, vanishing?
