The Jungle

Ah, nothing like striding onto what you assume is a swath of pristine private beach only to be greeted by the absolutely mind-blowing sight of a herd of half-naked, wholly sunburned German tourists lumbering toward you like cows for the trough; but that’s the Dominican Republic, at least in the barbed wire-surrounded resort area of Porto Plata. In the carefully manicured cul-de-sacs outside the elegant five-star refuge where we holed up for a few days before heading south to Santiago, it was truly a post-colonial paradise of garish, all-you-can-drink ‘resorts’ filled with pasty Europeans out to screw and imbibe their way through a broad swath of country.

I was enthused to escape, despite the elegant meals and vigorous massages and six-headed showers and neat little gardens where you could gaze over the mangroves and feed your growing smoke habit. There was something more real, more alive about the grimy streets of Santiago, filled with battered old cars and packs of furtive stray dogs and underage prostitutes in bright tank tops and street vendors hawking pineapple and phone cards on the other side of the car windows. Even then, we never joined the third-world chaos, not completely – always finding ourselves in the comfortable backseat of a Mercedes, or a van. We were there for the new magazine, interviewing el jefes and touring cigar factories where rows of diligent workers busied themselves rolling $30 cigars under the watchful eyes of supervisors; the air filled with blaring radios and the scent of cured tobacco like chocolate.

A cigar seemingly clenched at all times between my teeth; a cup of espresso or rum or wine or beer in my hand. A single perpetually-repeating thought, punctuating the static of chemicals rocketing through my brain: Once I get back, man, it is time for some serious detox. Peeling off brightly colored peso bills for tips, not exactly sure how much you’re spending but expensing it all. The car jostling over unpaved roads, houses on both sides of the road encased in bars and gates, the bee-buzz of motorbikes loaded with people riding pilon, fields of crushed sugar cane blurring by.

Two of the factory-owners took us to dinner our last night there, at a place high in the hills. From our elegant wooden perch we could see the lights of the city spread far beneath in glittering lines, crystal-clear once the evening mist cleared; and we spent hours eating island lamb (re: goat) and smoking thick cigars, protected from afar by guards with pump-action shotguns. On the way back, swooping through the thick blackness in an Audi SUV, there were brown cows in the road, staring at us with seemingly suicidal indifference as we neatly swerved around them. The night was alive, moving to its own voodoo rhythm; from the roadside shacks and gas stations, people watched us pass with wary eyes; dogs’ pupils glimmered as they slinked across the road; roadside churches lit bright, small gated parks dark yet filled with still silhouettes escaping the heat and human sight; the radio crackled with an upbeat tempo.

And then you’re back, dumping the hundreds of cigars you smuggled through customs into the special ‘ghetto humidor’ tucked under your desk – an Igloo cooler with two humidor packs, already filled with boxes of expensive tobacco sticks. Still tingling from the wave of alcohol and caffeine and nicotine that washed through your circulatory system for eight days.