Pulled Over by the Police in Dominican Republic - DLive video

It's our last day in the Dominican Republic. Why is it over so soon? I would so love to stay in this awesome country longer. Next time I will.

We said goodbye to the staff of our temporary home, the Dominican Treehouse Village, and hopped in our rental car to drive south from Samana to Santo Domingo. It would take 3 to 3.5 hours total. The bast way to get there is via Highway 7 which is a toll road that also goes through Parque Nacional Los Haitises.

Packing out of the Dominican Treehouse Village

We were driving through the national park hoping we could make a stop at a waterfall for a microadventure before getting to the airport. As we drove through the national park, we saw two police officers standing on the opposite side of the road pointing a radar gun at us and then waved at us to pull over. Woops. So, being the good law-abiding chaps with good citizenship that we are, we pulled over to the side of the road. The funny thing was, if we didn't pull over there was probably no way that they could have intercepted us because they didn't even have a car with them. They only had bicycles. Ummm... I wonder if they have a problem with motorists ignoring them because they couldn't catch a car if they tried.

Driving through the national park

Anyway, the cops walked up to us and asked for driver's license and all that. He then told us we were speeding and pointed to his radar gun. Apparently the speed limit is 80 kph and we were going over 100. 80 is really slow for driving out in the country like we were but the cop said it's to help protect the animals in the national park from becoming roadkill. Then he wrote a ticket out and said what the cost was. It was something ridiculous like equivalent to 80 USD or something like that. He also said we could go to court to pay for it or just pay him, which I'm pretty sure is illegal in every country. We knew that the cop was trying to get extra money out of us but we obviously couldn't go to court since we were leaving that day. We figured that NOT paying it could result in an outstanding arrest warrant for Louis, which wouldn't be good if he ever wants to come back to the country. So we decided to give the cop some money. Not the whole amount because we didn't have it, but we didn't give him every Peso we had either. We probably gave him about $40 worth of Dominican Pesos, which is still A LOT, and said it was all we had.

Well, the cop seemed quite happy with this arrangement and he even asked for a selfie with us. Well, if you're going to be a corrupt cop, at least be a cool one.

Moving on, we still had time to visit the waterfall we wanted to see. It was right off the highway we were on. Salto de Socoa is the name of the waterfall. It is maybe a 200 meter "hike" to get to so it's easy. The waterfall was big. And beautiful. It would be a great place to cool off on a hot day, which it usually is in the DR, but we wanted to stay dry for our flights later that day.

Salto de Socoa

What was your worst run-in with the police?

Music used:
Coyote by Vexento
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Canopy by Soul Catalyst
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