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Adventure travel is big business for aging baby boomers. Nothing excites the
imagination better than leafing through magazines like Outside and Men’s
Journal and seeing all those ads for travel outfitters luring us to the far
corners of the globe. The temptations are endless. You can live in a Mongolian
yurt for six weeks or raft down the Picuare River in Costa Rica; you can play
cowboy on a dude ranch on the Argentinean pampas, or trek the Inca Trail to
the ruins of Machu Picchu.
So which trophy vacation will it be this summer? Which hemisphere do you want
to visit? Which new sport do you want to attempt? Which mountain do you want
to summit? In which cave do you want to go spelunking?
For the most part, I have eschewed group travel for solo expeditions. I might
not have much musical rhythm, but I prefer to pound the pavement to my own
particular drummer. (Little did I know when I read Thoreau in 11th grade that
I would later adopt him as my saint of wilderness appreciation and solo travel;
fondness for Edward Abbey came afterwards.)
I embarked on the adventure travel road long before that term became popular,
but many, many years after the Age of Heroic Exploration, when guys like
Shackleton and Scott traipsed around Antarctica at the beginning of the 20th
century. It is difficult to imagine living on seal blubber for months at a time,
and smoking penguin feathers when tobacco supplies ran low. These explorers were
just that—explorers, aiming to be the first at doing something noble, grand,
often life-threatening.
So what if our adventures these days are sanitized versions of yesterday’s
exploits? I have never lamented a warm shower or clean bed after a day of mountain
biking in hot, steamy Costa Rica.
In a recent issue of National Geographic Adventure magazine, which caters to
fun-seeking global travelers, there was an article about Dominican Republic’s
status as a multisport playground. One passage in particular stopped me in
my tracks: “Although the majority of tourists are working-class Europeans
who arrive on package tours and stay at all-inclusive resorts a growing number
of independent visitors are exploring the countryside, often on bicycles.”
Thank you very much. I explored the Dominican Republic countryside on a mountain
bike in 1986. I visited with a photographer friend who was the marketing director
of Ross Bicycles. It was a spur of the moment weeklong trip. Our planning was
simple: We agreed to fly from Miami to Santo Domingo with our bikes, and take
it from there. We didn’t call ahead for hotel reservations. Nor did we
have any idea where we going to bike. The goal was spontaneity, which we got.
Our airport taxi driver first took us to a questionable hotel on the outskirts of
the capital. Groups of men were loitering out front. It reeked of menace and theft
of our bikes if we left them unattended in the room. We told the driver to take
us to the Hilton. We assumed there was a Hilton in the capital.
The Hilton, with all its plush four-star amenities, was our home base as we spent
each day riding deserted country roads leading from Santo Domingo. We even decided
to rent a car that would act as our sag wagon. The only problem was we didn’t
have a driver. That was soon rectified. We ran into a guy in his early 20s in the
central marketplace. He spoke English, a result of living in New York City for 18
months. He left, according to his murky account, because someone was trying to
kill him, so he got himself deported. “I’ve been back several times to
New York,” he bragged. “You screw up, Immigration just sends you back
to the Dominican. It’s a free, one-way airline ticket!”
We asked him if he’d like to be our driver for $20 a day. He jumped at the
opportunity. We soon discovered that he didn’t know how to drive, so we had
to give him a quick lesson before we allowed him to follow us in the car.
We rode hard during the day, mainly along the southern coast, past endless
stretches of beaches and farmland. One afternoon we stopped for lunch at an
exclusive golf resort. We drank pina coladas while watching golfers tee off
on the 10th hole. When we continued, we biked to the end of a sandy road that
led to an unfinished building site for another resort. Funding had disappeared,
and the half-completed resort looked more like semi-excavated modern ruins. I
ended the day by swimming in the surf, watching closely for sharks.
It was a splendid trip. But the irony of adventure travel in the Dominican Republic
is this: There’s a pecking order for transportation. The rich drive cars, the
not-so-rich ride bikes, the poor walk. We were stopped several times by locals who
asked why we were riding bikes. They couldn’t understand why “rich
Americans” would want to bike. These Dominicans could understand such touristy
pastimes as golf, windsurfung, fishing, sunbathing. But riding a bike?
Years later, when I was in Costa Rica for a three-day mountain bike race, two
American competitors rode a tandem. No one had ever seen a two-wheel vehicle like
that. Local newspapers called the two-person Cannondale a “limousine.”
Travel is like that—it introduces you to cultural idiosyncrasies that you take for
granted. (How many Americans now order “Le Big Mac” at McDonald’s
in Paris, courtesy of the movie Pulp Fiction?)
The moral of the story: It is difficult to leave all of your cultural baggage
behind when you hit the road, so travel light and with an open
mind.
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