None of Santo Domingo’s real adventure trips start inside Santo Domingo. Every one of them is a departure, by road, into the surrounding countryside, and the honest first step is knowing which ones are worth a full day and which ones need two. Los Haitises National Park The closest genuine wilderness trip, roughly 2.5 hours north via the Autopista Juan Pablo II to Sabana de la Mar. Speedboats cut through San Lorenzo Bay’s mangrove channels, weaving between karst mogotes that look lifted from a different geologic era, before stopping at Taíno caves like Cueva de la Línea, where pre-Columbian pictographs still cover the rock.