As many of you know, we've been spending a lot of time in places that bare no resemblance to home at all and that has been pretty exciting. Jason and Anna dropped me off with some friends in Arizona for 2 weeks so they could go gallivanting around the Caribbean islands. I think they felt a little bad when they said goodbye but I had a great time. They returned to find me 7lbs heavier, and as happy as can be with my two new golden retriever friends Duke and Hanna. Here's what they were up to while I was kickin it Arizona style. I'll let Anna tell the stories:
We'll start in the Dominican Republic. I shared a window with this cutie on the flight from Miami FL to Santiago DR. Upon arrival we were welcomed to the country by a couple of awesome guys who took us out to a delicious and very authentic DR dinner which consisted of meat, fried plantain, beer, meat, fried plantain and beer. The plantain was cooked in 4 different ways as was the meat. It was exceptional and just what we needed after a day in the airport.
We were up bright and early the next morning to explore potential new trails before we taught our first fully translated Trail Building School (Spanish is spoken in the DR). The ride was an adventure starting with a crew of local tobacco farmers and their kids flocking to our trucks to see what was going on as they had never seen mountain bikers in their mountains before. The sight of a girl on a mountain bike was even more of a shock but I had a good disguise with my short hair. The kids were especially impressed with the digital camera and loved seeing themselves in the view finder.
The ride was steep and consisted of trails that had been created by donkeys going from farm to farm along the creek. A few sections also seemed to be used by locals to access the water for washing and drinking. We saw kids with donkeys carrying many gallons of water from the creek up to the farms as we rode and even had one of them tag along on the ride. We weren't going very fast (Jason and I were riding the same size carbon hard-tail bikes with skinny skinny tires) so his flip flops didn't affect his ability to hang with us.
After the "exploratory" ride which was quite the adventure we rushed back to the hotel to get ready to teach a Trail Building School that we were 2 hours late for. The evening went well and it went late leaving us a few hours to sleep and prepare for trail work the next day. The work was fun and we built some sweet single track but those Dominican guys aren't used to letting the ladies swing tools. Every time I was able to trick someone into letting me grab a shovel there was someone else saying "Oh, here, let me get that for you". It was pretty funny so I took a lot of photos of Jason and the dudes working hard and gave up on getting dirty.
After a hard days work we headed back to the city. Don't forget that while we were in the beautiful Caribbean, we were by no means on vacation. We ended up working from 8am until 10pm everyday with out a moment going unscheduled. It was physically and socially exhausting but it was an incredible experience and one that we wouldn't trade for anything. The following morning we got up to go scout out some more trails. The ride was not what we would call and epic mountain biking experience but it was one of the coolest cultural adventures I've been on. While the trails were not the best quality, the scenery was incredible, the company was fun, and the people who lived in the tiny villages and farms we rode through made my day.
For being our first island visit in the Caribbean it was a little odd to spend the whole time in Santiago which is a bustling city in a developing country far from any beaches. The cyclists we got to meet were a lot of fun and we made plenty of friends while we were there. The strangest part is that despite the lack of good mountain bike trails, beaches, and whatever else we were expecting, out of the three islands we visited, the Dominican Republic is the one we are the most eager to see again. Perhaps it's because we only saw such a small part of it, mostly city and we know there's much more to explore.
After another exhausting day of airports we bounced from the DR back to Miami, through customs, a 6 hour lay over in the airport, 4 hour flight to Trinidad, through customs again and there we were. 7 miles off the coast of Venezuela on the southern most piece of Caribbean island. Our hotel was far away from everything up a winding road through the city and suburbs which we were told was not safe to walk on (I later found out that the warning was in-fact justified when I took the risk of walking home from town one afternoon). Once again our very scheduled days began with 8am to 10pm work. This left us little time for wandering so the location of our lodging didn't bother us. Luckily work included some really fun rides through the jungle with a crew of Trinidadians. In Trinidad everyone speaks English with a strong accent very similar to a Jamaican accent. It was nice to know that people understood us but it was not a two way street at first. It takes a while to catch on to the thick island speech but it sure sounds cool.
We taught another Trail Building School in Trinidad and spent two days out in the field building trail. It was so cool to work in the rain forest, use giant bamboo stalks in our construction and learn to swing a machete like a real islander! The people we worked with were awesome and the trail that was built was stocked with fast berms and flowy goodness.
We were starting to feel the affects of our schedule so Jason talked our host into giving us the evening off after our last day of trail work. I don't think our host realized that even going out to dinner with a group was feeling like work as neither of us had had a moment of solitude let alone a moment together in close to two weeks. I headed out of the hotel with my camera and went on an adventure of my own in the hills above Port of Spain and for the first time since we had been in Trinidad I got a glimpse of the ocean! Later that night Jason and I enjoyed a quiet dinner in the deserted hotel restaurant and enjoyed an evening to ourselves.
Now it was time for our 3 days of freedom in the Caribbean. We had decided to head over to the neighboring island of Tobago which is the ideal example of a classic Caribbean island. We had befriended a Tobago local while we were in Trinidad and he had hooked us up with a room and bikes far from the ugliness that was the Hilton. We met him on the 6am ferry and headed to the laid back, slow pace, mellow village near Boccu Bay where we enjoyed a few days of incredible company, ridiculously fun rides, painfully beautiful beaches and cute puppies.
Moxy almost ended up with a new sister. This is Tea Cup who kept us company in Tobago and helped me through a nasty case of food poisoning that kept me off the trails for a day.
Jason is riding a curb and while it's wider than most curbs, it drops 25' onto a metal shack on his left. The locals loved riding these things and they are all over the place on the roads that connect the single track in Tobago.
The bikes that live in Tobago are hard core. These things don't get to see a mechanic or new parts. Most of the bikes and parts are second hand and hammered. There is no real bike shop on Tobago and even getting your hands on a patch kit is a challenge. It took Jason and I the better half of a day to find a handful of patches. One of the tubes rollin on our rides had 27 patches on it! That should give you an idea of how tough it is to come by supplies. That said, the trails the company and the experience of riding in Tobago are so amazing that we didn't care what we were riding, we didn't care about the bald tires the broken components, or the size of the bikes we were on. I can't even explain how much fun we had rolling around Tobago with Rich, Gervais, and Eamon. Of course Jason paid for the good times as he was the best mechanic that had visited these guys and he gave all the bikes more love than they had seen in many years.
One of the coolest trails I've seen is in Tobago. After a steep road climb you roll to the top of a hill to find single track winding it's way from the end of the road through the tight pile of houses on top of the hill. This ribbon of single track continues to bob and weave through a small village between houses, shacks, and a small creek. It's complete with slick-rock, stone stairs, chunky drops and vicious dogs that will draw blood if you don't pin it. As we rolled past the yellow house in the photos below, a man came out onto his porch and invited us in for a taste of his homemade cashew wine. He'd seen the local guys riding out there before and loved the fact that we were having fun in his back yard. He hurried into his house and popped back out with an arm full of glasses, a bowl of ice cubes and a bottle of yellow wine. The wine was great and the man who's name I have forgotten shared stories of his younger days when he used to ride a bike in the military and build his own wheels. He even brought out a photo to share and behind the dusty broken glass was a much younger, taller, and more serious version of him in a Trinidadian military uniform.
We hadn't planned for the steep steep climb right after a glass of wine all of which, coupled with my already sick state made for a painful last half of the ride. I must add that along with all the incredible riding we also had some incredible beach time but, for fear of being stuck with the rest of the Caribbean tourists, I never took my camera to the beach. If you want to know what it was like, just find the most picturesque photo of a Caribbean island, add a hammock, a small surf break, replace all the crispy tourists with a handful of really good people from all over the world, some tasty beers, a few deadly jelly fish which washed up on the shore and you'd have the beach that we had the pleasure of being only a 2 minute walk away from. It was also at the end of every ride. Not so bad!
It was hard to leave Tobago but we were looking forward to our own bikes, seeing Moxy, and beginning the drive north to see our family and friends. We spent one last day on Trinidad before leaving and went for a ride with our host who had begged us to come look at one last Trinidad trail in hopes of deeming it an "IMBA Epic" at some point in the future. The trail was amazing and I wished that I had been able to eat more than a banana and a glass of cashew wine in the two days prior but despite the lack of energy, Jason helped keep me on my bike and smiling. He rocks! The trail took us past leaves bigger than us, big tarantula webs, some of the craziest sounding birds we've heard and through an old growth jungle which ended at a view of the north coast of Trinidad.
Now we're back in bundled up, cold as winter, no more shorts land! It's freaking cold here! But it's good to be home, wherever that is.
