Freedom, Adventure, Education and Bicyclettas…..August 2016- Santo Domingo
From my first blue Schwinn Stingray to the white Raleigh cyclocross bike I ride in Vermont, bicycles mean freedom. The ability to cover real distance with nothing more than a simple machine and some human power is something magical. Since, my wife, 11-year old daughter and I moved to Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic three weeks ago, there have been lots of adventures, a ton of humility but we didn’t have bikes.
So, I made it my mission to get bikes. Santo Domingo is a wonderfully vibrant city with lots of people and sounds. Both are friendly and happy most of the time but it is still a city and after a couple of days I was feeling a bit cramped. Luckily, we have a great group of fellow ex-pat teachers here who have a established several lively social media groups to share information and post questions about life in the D.R.. In one of those posts, a teacher posted a link to Santo Domingo’s crags list-like post for bicycles. There were some pretty pricey mountain and road bikes posted. One poster seemed to have quite a few inexpensive bikes— I clicked on the link and found A.M. imports. The name seemed pretty sketchy to me but I was desperate for a bike that wasn’t a new-cheapo from a local shop.
I noticed A.M. imports was located in the Colonial Zone. This part of Santo Domingo is famous for Christopher Columbus’s son’s actual house and many other old, colonial buildings that look like a movie set. Whit and Kata wanted to see the neighborhood and I wanted bikes so we Ubered up to the zone. When we arrived I stopped by a bike rental shop and asked about A.M imports. After checking out the super cool hand built bike that the owner had designed and assembled, the folks at the shop confirmed that it was kind of legit so I What’sApped Alex at A.M. imports and started wandering over to his house.
It turned out that A.M. imports is really just Alejandro, a guy who sells bikes out of his tight-on-space house. I was a little nervous when he met me in the doorway and unlocked the steel gait guarding the door to his place. Once inside, Alejandro showed off a variety of great used and new bikes. Everything from full on mountain bikes to fat bikes and a few cruisers. After a few minutes of checking things out, I returned to my wife and daughter and hatched a plan to return on the following Tuesday to pick up bicycles and start exploring the city in style.
Although we considered mountain bikes, we both fell for the cool single speed cruisers that you could never get away with in the hills of Vermont. I felt pretty good about my little adventure into the blackmarket bike world and chatted up A.M. imports with some of our fellow teachers. When we returned on Tuesday, we brought six friends with us and had a blast checking out bikes and enjoying the thrill of buying used bikes from a guy who sells bikes in his living room. In the end I picked up a sweet blue cruiser, Whit went with Yellow and the big handle bars. A few days later we grabbed a sweet little teal number for our daughter.
For the last few days we have zipped around the neighborhood and explored. I was pleasantly surprised by how much joy, and thrill an old cruiser bike could bring and that feeling of freedom is still there. I am convinced I can get around the city on a bike almost as fast as our friends with cars…. and it’s a pretty classy ride.
