How I get to work in the mornings: The joys of Santo Domingo traffic.

As I am sitting in the house, drinking the day's first cup of fine Dominican coffee, I make sure that I have enough small change to get me to wherever I am going. I live very close to the old colonial zone, about 40 yards from the square that is a bit of a transport hub, but I have been working in the periphery, about 7 or so miles away.

There are two types of public transport in Santo Domingo: Carros publicos are cars (for some unknown reason 90% of them appear to be 15 year old Toyota Carollas), with a driver licensed to run a particular route. These travel up and down the main arterial routes of the city, and will take you any distance for 10 pesos (about 20p). To stop one, you need to give the right hand signal - waving a finger means that you want one going straight on, pointing sideways means that you want one turning right, and a thumb means one turning left. Confusingly, different hand signals are used in different routes, so I always check by asking the driver if he is going my direction. This sorts out any potential problems, apart from the time when I confused the cemetary (cementerio) with the cement factory (cementera) - unless I wanted to get buried in concrete. Be warned, the official capacity of these nominally 5 seaters is in fact 7 full grown adults and any luggage that they may have. Two people share the front passanger seat (if the person on the door side is rather large, the person on the inside might find the gear stick curiously uncomfortable), and four squash on the back seat, plus driver. Not confortable in hot weather on terrible roads, especially when there are small children, who sit across people's knees. Once I was in one of these publicos with maximum adult capactiy of seven, as well as two children, one of whom had a live chicken in a cage on their lap. Today was less interesting, just someone's four foot artificial christmas tree stretched across our laps.

It should be mentioned that these generally have the windows wound down to allow the breeze to circulate, along with dust, pollutants and anything else in the air. They almost always have a cracked windscreen, held together with tape, and so many dents and scrapes they look like they have been made from scrunched up tinfoil. I was once in one of these when the bonnet was blown off by an explosion in the engine, which emitted vast plumes of acrid grey smoke. The driver charmingly apoligised for the inconvenience, and promptly refunded us as we were pushing the flaming wreck to the side of the 6 lane motorway.

Despite the discomfort endured in these journeys, I rather like them. Firstly, the people are always in a good mood, never complaining about being squashed up to a 16 stone man with bad body odour and a live chicken. They greet everyone as they get in, and chat or sing along to the radio. They even tolerate envangelical preachers, who try and save their soul on their way home from work. Secondly, the drivers manage to get some wonderful performance out of these old bangers, weaving in and out of traffic, squeezing at 40 miles per hour through gaps that leave and inch on either side, just to be as efficient as possible and process as many passengers as possible. Dominicans use the horn rather liberally, as no one ever indicates with flashing lights - they just beep to tell people they are manouvering, and then move. There are subtle differences in beeps, a dialect almost, telling people that they are turning left or right, that they are impatient in traffic jams, or they are trying to attract the attention of the attractive girl walking past.

The other type are guaguas, equally beat up minibuses, usually with the doors taken off for easy access. They work in teams of two, a driver and a cobrador, who deals with passangers. They hang out of the moving vehicle shouting out their route. Sometimes I look for shouting "feriadoceferiadoceferiadoce", meaning that they are going to the Feria, the district with government offices, before heading to Kilometro Doce, another transport hub. Other times I look for "chuchichuchichuchi" meaning that they are travelling up Avenida Winston Churchill, a collection of anglosyllables unmanagable for the hispanophone. Again these have liberal attitudes towards maximum capacities and seating arrangements. At busy intersections and areas of slow traffic, people will grab hold of the outside of the bus, standing on the wheel arches, trying to sell biscuits, water or fruit to the occupants as the bus drives along.

The great thing about this system is that with certain knowledge and suspension of ideas of personal space, one can travel from one side of the city to the other cheaply and quickly. The traffic is very bad at the moment on my main route, as there are whacking great holes in the road and closed sections, forcing drivers to take detours down side routes. These holes are tunnel excavations for the Santo Domingo metro, part of the government's drive for a Developed, Modern, Progressive Nation. Although there are many cases of egotistic grand projects in the Dominican Republic's history, this one seems like a good idea. Whether it will work, given life and electricity supply here, will have to be seen, but it should do wonders for the massive polllution on the roads. The guaguas and publicos will probably survive, and people will just squash up and socialise in the metro just as they currently do on the roads.