It is good to be back in Samana, Dominican Republic. This is my favourite season here. Not too hot. In fact, sometimes I even need a sheet to keep warm in bed at night. It is like this, here in the hills, until April. This also means it is a good time for doing stuff outdoors without suffering from overheating.
I have a met a bunch of mountain bikers in Las Terrenas. The group meets at the the Real Bike shop, a bike shop run by a friendly ebullient Swiss bloke called Luis. He is in his mid fifties and as tough as nails. He is joined by a mixed bunch of blokes, mainly expats from Spain, France, Italy, Slovenia, and Dominicans, of all ages, although old farts like me are over-represented. Is this the new demographic? Old a lot of them might be, but they make up for that with tenacity, willpower , hard-earned stamina and endurance, and the love of the challenge.
So I no longer have to venture out into the hills on my jack jones (in case you don't know, that is Cockney rhyming slang for on your own), but can get lost in company. Only last Saturday we seemed to be well lost -- not quite, we could have gone back the way we came, but as there was only one hour of daylight left, that option was no longer open -- trying to connect up with a trail we knew had to be relatively close as the crow flies, but impossible to get to in view of the apparently impenetrable wall of cliffs on three sides. Despite incessant rainfall and a badly timed flat tyre we found a mule trail leading up and over. We then had to race the clock in the mud, mainly downhill along water-logged trails. That is what I call fun, even though the next day I had to dismantle my axles and ball races to clean out the mud.
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