The Presence.

The Presence.

The very first time I went through that piece of road inside the Caribbean forest (it looks like a canal carved into the forest) I thought that my car had some problem. Some new noise. Since I drive a 20-year-old Japanese sedan with plenty of little noises, I swear that –again- I would ended in one of the uh, primitive, Veron workshops. (Veron is a 40,000-people poor town near of Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic.)

That little noise sounded like zillions of crickets watching us passing by. But, oddly enough, as soon I stopped to check the car’s noise: absolute silent!

Why?

In the tropics, you are familiar with cricket noises all around. They are annoying. Worst if someone get into your house. They do sound!

You can approach them, and they hardly stop singing (their sounds are the last love call after dying…) only when you are very close, they give up. Now think in millions of crickets sitting along a mile-long road. Just sitting there. Watching.

Open your window and you can hear them. They sound like a one-tone orchestra. It doesn’t matter if you are doing 3 MPH or 50 MPH… it’s the same sound! Feet after feet in perfect harmony. All from the edge of the barber-wire front fence, up to the last fence north. Then, nothing. Even with more forest in all directions. The noise only last for that only mile…

That first road to today’s Barcelo 5,000-room tourist complex was built by Spaniard engineers in 1982 hired by the late legendary Spaniard hotel mogul Sebastian Barcelo. Barcelo’s first hotel in Punta Cana -a 500-room, 2-story-high apartment-style complex- astonished the world in the mid 80s and started the mass-tourism phenomena up to these days. Tourists walking along a desert tropical beach became the ultimate winter vacation dream for millions!

The long stretch of 30+ miles of sandy beach has a 60-million Acres coastal plain the other side. When Mr. Barcelo started his first hotel, a couple of years after buying thousands of Acres measured by… coconut trees! Mr. Barcelo barbed wires his property and puts forest guards to avoid deforestation by local farmers. Thus, his part of the tropical forest reborn. You could see it from the distance: a long ‘green wall’ marking precisely his property border. Before? Just little trees and bushes over the tropical savanna.

The Barcelo family also builds the 3-mile road to the Veron crossing coming from the south. The cross road –then a simple, empty, “T” cross… with only a Police Headquarter made of concrete blocks and metal roof, head either east, to the then ‘airport’ –a simple stretch of asphalt for lighter airplanes- or right, to Higuey. In those times, Barcelo’s big buses used to come from Las Americas International Airport… 120 miles westbound!

They used to run wild parties –with plenty of Dominican rum and beautiful Dominican attendants- among bus passengers to avoid complains after those 8-hour flights from Europe. Needless to say, after another six hours to stop in front of the counter, all tourists were sleeping, drunk or having the best of times…

Next morning: an emerald and empty incredible piece of Caribbean Sea in front of you. You just put a bathing suit and walk forward. Free towels were in your way after breakfast…all included.

Paradise! It was for real! Two years of saving every penny: fourteen days in Barcelo Beach Resort.


2


Counting from the sea border, Barcelo’s property should measure half a mile by another mile to the main gated-entrance. Then, it’s another third of a mile up to the property’s north limit. The main gate has a rotund the size of a basketball court with a fountain and flags all around. This is the new one. The first main road was cut –with machetes- some 300 feet before, but you can hardly notice it.

Nobody was watching then, but millions of trees went down.

Crickets included.

So now, they are watching. You cannot hear them, though. They commute you from the airport inside big air-conditioned running metal boxes since hour number one.

But they are there.

The second time I realized that nothing was wrong with my car…yet that noise was, still, there; I stop again alone in the bushes.

“What possibly could be this? Why they stop singing? Were my thoughts. I was there, letting my imagination running wild. “They are millions… I’m only one human being”.

I asked once to a friend that has been working in that resort since the very first day: “Why there’s no one single guard along that fist mile? Why there’s no one single light? Why temperatures even drop a couple of degrees along that road flanked by the Caribbean forest?”

“I cannot talk about it”.

“What? Hey, it’s me… What are you talking about?”

“I could be fired for this. They are… afraid of… bugs”…

“And I suppose… crickets. Am I right?”

“Cannot talk no more”…

“Got it, man. No problem”…


3


There’s another road from the airport built by another Spanish hoteliers. It started some couple of miles before the Barcelo road, in a cross with a funny name: Coco Loco (crazy coconut…). The place was named after a whorehouse, not some gardener that had lost his mind…

This second road runs parallel for 15 miles northbound to reach another part of the beach, now with another funny Caribbean name: Arena Gorda or… Fat Sand. Some 20 big beach resorts lie building-by-building for 30 miles along the sand. From there, you can reach Macao Beach within 5 miles, a frontier for the pool-alike, coral reef area that runs also for miles protecting the beaches.

But that is a different scenario…

There’s no tropical forest, yet normal –depredated- simple vegetation and small trees. Plus, the impoverish slums packed with illegal aliens, mostly Haitians, known as “the Friusa Hole”. A former construction workers town turned into a ghetto. With live by itself. It’s a… catalog of whatever you could even hear about the underdeveloped –supposedly- this third world of ours.

Yeah, right.

In 1969, when young Punta Cana pioneers arrived to then Drunk Point (the actual geographical name…), Bavaro town was… nothing. Just savanna and cows. And, yes. Millions of crickets, spiders, turtles, birds and crabs.

Eighty thousands human beings later…

Bavaro.- “An abandoned car was found again in the road to Barcelo Hotel by construction workers yesterday. No signs of passengers, driver, violence or nothing. Police said they found hundreds of dead crickets all around the car”...

“Police has no suspects or leads at this moment...”


Yes, it has started…