Luperón House Sitting Adventure

The view from the front porch.

One of our many new friends from the Luperón gringo community asked us if we could house sit for her during the month of October.  We jumped at the chance since the boat projects weren’t done and the house offered such fabulous amenities as satellite television and dial-up internet.  The views from the hilltop location were also spectacular.  The house itself is pretty small:  one bedroom, one bathroom and about 750 square feet of total space.

The house also came with four dogs, a cat and 19 chickens.  There were also extensive gardens with lots of herbs and tropical fruit including papaya, passion fruit (actually a local variant called chinola), bananas (another local variant called rulo) and limes.  Maintaining the house and garden were pretty easy since there was both a housekeeper and a gardener that came twice a week.

Maintaining the animals was a bit more challenging.  The dogs are trained as watch dogs so they bark at any person, donkey, cow, bird, butterfly, etc. that passes by.  Although the house is out of town, up a dirt road on a hill, there is a lot of traffic since local farmers drive their herds (usually a dozen or so cattle) by the house a couple of times a day.  Some locals also commute (on foot) to town on the same road.  It could get quite noisy at peak commuting/cattle driving times!  Fortunately, there is a pen out back to put the dogs in.  The pen is away from the road, so they can’t see as much traffic and away from the house so we don’t hear them as much.  The dogs are also ridiculous scaredy cats.  When it thunders (for example, during the daily summertime afternoon thunderstorms), we had to let them in the house so they could pile into a shivering heap under whatever piece of furniture could accommodate them.  On another occasion, a rat got into the house.  Gray saw it take refuge in one of the lower cabinets and tried to recruit one of the dogs to deal with it.  The dog that saw the rat go in the cabinet cowered in a corner away from it.  Another dog that is usually game for anything, approached the cabinet with great enthusiasm but retreated with her tail between her legs after the first sniff at the cabinet door.

Bananas growing in the backyard.

The cat did not warm up to us.  He would occasionally come in and demand tribute in the form of dry cat food, but spent most of his time outside.  We tried to get him to take care of the rat, but all he did was stare intently at the cabinet for a few minutes and then wander off for a nap.

The chickens stay in their coop and are pretty easy to take care of as chickens go.  Cindy was in charge of their care.  Twice a day, she would feed them vegetable scraps, dry corn and food pellets as well as give them new water.  She would also gather eggs (which were ours to use or sell, CHA-CHING!).  One hen was not sure Cindy was authorized to collect eggs and would try to defend the ones in her nest.  After getting pecked a couple of times, Cindy started bringing a large pot lid to use as a shield when she did battle with the hen.  Eventually they reached an understanding and the pot lid stayed in the cupboard.  If we had a lot of rain (during hurricane Omar, for example, 8 inches fell in the space of a couple of days), the chicken coop was pretty nasty.  Cindy had to walk through a slurry of chicken droppings, old food and mud to feed them and collect the eggs.  Gray fetched her sea boots from the boat and that helped immensely.

The domestic animals and the rat were not the only animals we got to deal with.  We have already posted an entry about the world’s largest spider (or at least the largest we had ever seen).  In addition to the big spiders, there were big toads (like dinner plate size) and lots of bugs at night (mostly moths, some HUGE beetles, a praying mantis and some kind of jurassic grasshopper).  Eventually, we learned some tricks to help with the bugs (turn on outside lights, leave off inside lights) and it got cool enough for us to tuck ourselves under the covers at night.

Cindy collects eggs.

Taking care of the house gave us some insight into the lives of the gringos that live in houses here.  Houses need to have back up water and power systems since the municipal systems are unreliable.  It is difficult to have climate control more sophisticated than fans without a hefty back up generator.  Most houses use a large bank of golf cart batteries for back up.  With the high price of fuel, generators are not a very affordable option.  All the houses have cisterns for water.  The house we took care of had 16000 gallons of cistern space with a roof top rain catchment system and 16 golf cart batteries for back up power.  In addition to the normal house maintenance, the batteries need to be monitored to make sure they are taking a charge (when there is city power available) and that they have plenty of electrolyte in them.  The cisterns need to be kept fairly full so if the water service goes offline for a few days there is plenty of water.  Filling the cisterns from the city water was surprisingly complicated.  The process involved three valves, a big pump and lots of walking all over the yard to make sure the water was flowing evenly.

One day, near the end of our tenure as house sitters, the power was out for so long that the battery backup ran out.  In addition to the normal electrical appliances, the water pressure was also out of order.  The pump that pulls water from the cisterns (under the house) is electric.  We had to haul buckets of water up to the bathroom for washing and flushing the toilet.  Fortunately, the recent rains had filled the cisterns all the way up, so dipping the buckets into the water was easy.  The locals were so annoyed by the extended outages that they showed their feeling in true Dominican style:  with a heap of burning rubble piled on the street in front of the electric company office.  The power service continued to be sporadic for the next few weeks, but we were able to cope with it by carefully monitoring the state of the back up batteries and rationing our TV and internet usage.  We could use the water heater and washing machine during the random intervals where the electrical service was working.

The Land Cruiser parked in front of Burro Pass.

One of the features of Burro Pass was the owner’s awesome red 1986 Toyota Land Cruiser.  Don’t be confused into thinking this is anything like the modern Land Cruisers sold in the US.  This diesel workhorse bears a stronger resemblance to an old fashioned army jeep.  We were allowed to drive it around town, which was great since the unpaved road up the hill from town was a challenge in dry weather and a menace in rain.  Alas, two weeks before the owners were due to return, a short in the ignition switch caused the starter motor to burn out.  (We had to stop the engine by disconnecting the battery!)  On inspection, the interior of the motor housing was filled with a foul smelling black dust and many of the motor’s internal components were either missing or much smaller than they should have been.  In the US, this situation would have been resolved by replacing the part, or replacing the car.  We took the starter to a Dominican mechanic hoping that he would know a source for a replacement.  To our surprise, he looked at it and said he could fix it!  Sure enough, a couple of mañanas later, he had it going again.  He said the parts were very hard to find and required many trips to the big city to locate them all.  He therefore had to charge us the extraordinary sum of 3500 pesos for the whole job.  (That’s $105).  In our opinion, this is the perfect kind of car for the Dominican Republic, where people take a lot of pride in keeping their equipment running.

The view from the back porch.

In addition to managing the house, we had to manage the staff (i.e. the gardener and the housekeeper).  We knew the gardener since he was also the gardener at the apartment we rented for August and September.  He kept the yard in nice shape and brought us any mature produce he came across.  The housekeeper was a bit of a character.  Imagine a five foot tall, sixty year old Tasmanian devil with bright red dyed hair.  It seemed that she thought of us as employees of the owner, just like her.  Since she had worked there longer than we had, she considered herself the senior employee.  She was often sharply critical (judging by her tone of voice anyway, she never slowed down her Spanish enough for us to understand more than a few words) of us on issues we never quite understood.  We got along well enough given the language gap.

Although it has been fun to have television, freely available (although slow) internet and a big oven for a while; we don’t think we are going to settle down in Luperón.  We really missed living on the boat all summer (between the trip to the US, the apartment rental and the house sitting) and hope we can live aboard for a while before anything else major breaks down.  We had plenty of fun and enjoyed the distractions in Luperón (as is evident by the incredibly long time it took Gray to repair the electrical system on the boat), but are anxious to move on.

Onward,
Cindy and Gray

Tags: Dominican Republic, house sitting, Luperón