Our new dog story- Beware of Caribe Tours -No Pets allowed
Part of this post was included in a post about renewing my residency in Santo Domingo, which was actually quickly and easily done:
BUT, then our real adventure started. We went to visit relatives that live quite close to the immigration office. While chatting with our relatives, they asked about our dog,
which had recently been killed when he was accidentally let out and ventured for his first and last time into the main highway. He was a very nice German Shepherd. We mentioned we were looking for another dog and were told there was a veterinarian with a number of
pure bred dogs close to the bust station. So we went to see what he had available. The choices were another German Shepherd with very dark coloring, a female Rottweiler, two Chow Chows, a Shar Pei, what looked like Jack Russell terrier and several Chihuahuas. We were strongly considering a male Rottweiler this time and the Vet knew someone that had two
other puppies for sale. He went to get them and returned quickly. One of them was a male and we decided to purchase that animal and closed the deal. All of the dogs we saw were in good condition and would have been good choices depending upon your desires for a pet.
We got a ride to the Caribe Tours bus station with our new puppy to find out that Caribe Tours does not allow the transport of animals (including birds, by the way I guess they don't want any cockfights on their buses!)
There were no exceptions to this rule, so now we were potentially stuck in Santo Domingo and had to find an alternate way back to Cabarete.
Here is what we ended up having to do after consulting a worker of Caribe Tours:
From Caribe Tours, we took a taxi to the station for Transporte Espinal where we bought a bus ticket to Santiago. Transporte Espinal has similar style buses to Caribe Express and had no problems with us taking the dog. They were even playing a recent DVD in English and when that was done they had local TV. Espinal is more of a short-trip service than Caribe Tours. We were told Espinal also has service from Santiago to Puerto Plata, BUT by the time we arrived in Santiago we missed the last bus. So we had to take a Guagua from Santiago to Puerto Plata with the standard 12 people in vehicle with an 8 seat maximum. We had to wait for about 40 minutes while enough people showed up to make fill the vehicle.
When we arrived in Puerto Plata about an hour later, we took a public car to Sosua with 4 of our new close friends. In Sosua and approached 11:30 PM, we took a regular taxi home and arrived about 15 minutes before midnight. The dog we purchased was amazing good during the trip. He had no "accidents" and hardly a sound came from him. He slept about half the time and when awake he just generally seemed to enjoy the trip more than we did. The overall experience was similar to taking a round trip from NY to California within one day.
A long day it was, and a rare one in the DR that we could actually accomplish
two such major things as residency renewal and finding a dog to purchase in just one day. Those of you who have lived here for any time at all know what I mean.