Back in Punta Cana after 8 days of traveling through the country...

We just got back yesterday from our longest field trip that we'll take this semester. Our professor right now is Lisa Kennedy and the course is Physical Geography. We got to see every type of terrain there is in the DR. We travelled from Punta Cana at about sea level up into the mountains at around 7000 ft above sea level and then back down the other side of the mountains to another coastal region near Haiti. I think I can say those 8 days will be my favorite part of the trip. We just got to see so many things.
We left last Tuesday and travelled along the southern coast through La Romana and Santo Domingo and stopped in La Constanza. On the way we stopped at a market and bought 4, freshly killed chickens to take to the high mountains. We stayed at a hotel there called Rancho Constanza. We took a 14km hike up into the cloud forest areas while we were here. From Constanza we drove up to Valle Nuevo. This is the high, high mountains where we stayed in a cabin.
The bus we took was one from the PuntaCana Resort. It was a nice 30 passenger bus; big enough for 17 people (11 students, 3 grad students that came for this course, along with Lisa, Heyddy and Junior our bus driver) plus all of our food and luggage. I know the people that lived on the roads that we were passing on thought we were crazy trying to take a bus that size up into these mountains...I kinda thought we were too. You have to understand the roads are far, far from paved and not very well maintained. Moreno, who's cabin we stayed at, let Lisa know if there were any really bad spots in the road a couple days before we left. Everything was fine. However, in those couple days there was a small landslide that occurred in one part of the road. We were stuck in the same spot for 3 hours trying to get the bus out of the mud. It was a time to learn patience and teamwork for sure. We were all pushing, taking out rocks and putting rocks back in. It was an adventure to say the least. We finally got it out after a truck came and tied a rope to the bus and pulled it out. I've posted some pictures so you can see what I'm talking about. After that there wasn't too much trouble. We stayed in the mountains for 3 nights. It was cold, but it was nice to have a break from the hot weather for a little while. But 3 nights was just enough, and I was ready to get back to a hot shower and the beach.
We went on the southern coast near Haiti to a resort called Coral Sol and we traveled one day to a region called Cabo Rojo. Everything was beautiful! Cabo Rojo was like paradise, there's no other way to describe it. The water was perfectly clear and warm. It couldn't have gotten any better. We ate at a little bar there. The lady cooked us fresh shrimp, octopus, and conch. It was soo good. They also played "Pasame la Botella" 20 times because we knew the words. It's a popular song around here and it's become our theme song I guess you could say. Again, you can look at the pics, that's better than me trying to describe it.
One thing I've missed alot is ice cream! The food everywhere is very good, but like anywhere other than the US, dessert is not a big deal like it is for a lot of us. But sometimes you can find ice cream in little stores on the street. So, when we were at Coral Sol we walked to the next town to find some ice cream. It was a good walk there, probably about 20 minutes. On the way there we saw probably 5 ice cream wrappers on the ground so we thought that was a good sign. However, when we got there, no one had ice cream. We settled for Cokes and 7-Up's instead, which was fine after walking a mile in that heat. But that's one thing I appreciate more now, because from experience they don't have ice cream everywhere.
We haven't had class per say, because is all the time. For example, when we were on our field trip our assignment was to concentrate on observing things and take pictures of what we saw. For this class we have to make a photo journal of our trip: selecting 40 photos to put into PowerPoint and describe why they're important, basically explaining what we learned.
The experience so far has definitely been one of I guess I would say just that- experiencing. We are learning factual things as we go, but more than that we are seeing things for ourselves. Instead of sitting in a classroom and listening to Lisa tell us that the southwestern part of the country is a desert terrain, we got to go there ourselves, feel the climate, see the plants, and document everything we observed. It was great! See the pics :)