Day 11: Thursday, June 16, 2005
September 21, 2005
 We left around nine a.m. for Boca Chica but we had to make one last stop at Los Clavellinas to get elevation of the sampled cervicornis layers. It turns out the local children had used our rock hammers to chisel out the marker pin we used as a base line. This didn’t turn out to be too much of a problem as we knew roughly where it was located.
We stopped to eat our lunch at a small beachside hotel. This was the first time we got to really see the ocean this whole trip and it was a beautiful sunny day. The sun was intensely bright, but the breeze off the ocean kept us comfortable. Soon we got back into the vans and finished our 6 hour drive to Boca Chica. Driving to Santo Domingo the ocean water looked brown and got worse the closer we got to the river that runs through the city. The river itself looked filthy, but was really just carrying a lot of sediment washed into it by recent heavy rains. When we got past the river the ocean looked clean again, as the current was coming from this direction.
We arrived in Boca Chica around 4pm and it turned out our hotel was really an all inclusive beach front Hilton resort. After spending so long working in the island interior this place seemed like paradise. We pretty much had the beach ourselves and we swam before going for supper. After eating dry cereal for breakfast, crackers for lunch, and rice with chicken for supper for so long it wouldn’t take much to impress us but the Italian restaurant we went to was fantastic. I had red wine, calamari as an appetizer, and salmon as a main course.
We went back to the beach and stayed up late into the night enjoying the tropical atmosphere and the warm ocean. |
