Travel for Love

In Part 2 of my DR trip report I will discuss our activities and review the resort. You can find Part 1 here where I describe planning and arrival.

Activities

After arriving late on Saturday night, we spent Sunday lounging around on the beach. We were approached by girls from the resort spa and from the activities office to partake in their stuff, but that was the only day they came up to us. We did play a game of bocce with two Spaniards who didn’t speak any English. In the evening after dinner we went to attend the show, where we got roped in to participating in the “Best Couple” contest with two drunk French couples and a drunk Dominican couple. The contest consisted of making complete asses of ourselves onstage.

Backstage

Monday we explored the beach around the resort. The beach in this area is pretty wide, and the waves are very flat. Just next to the resort as we walked up the beach is a public area with about 20 different booths of souvenir shops. The shop guys tried pretty hard to get us to buy their stuff, but we weren’t interested. We walked over to the Iberostar resort and checked it out a bit – it looked really nice. Staying there would have been twice the price of the Oasis though and it didn’t look THAT nice.

We also checked out the Viva Wyndham resort, and thought it looked really nice too. The price on CheapCaribbean was the same as our resort and we think we will try staying there if we go back to the area. They also had a beautiful infinity pool right there on the beach and a lovely pond with turtles. I was jealous cause we didn’t see any turtles in the lagoon in our resort.

We had reservations for Monday evening at the Japanese steakhouse, so we got (relatively) dressed up and took a few pics in the lobby. As we sat down at our hibachi table we noticed a couple we had talked to earlier in the day, because they were the first Americans we had met so far. We had a great dinner and some nice wine, and then went and relaxed together with a couple drinks in the buffet. Then we took a walk and stopped on a bridge over the lagoon to feed the fish and the little birds.

And we got engaged!!! I’ll leave out all the gory details but one thing I’ll note: right after it happened a turtle swam up under the bridge. We thought that was a really special sign since earlier in the day we had been disappointed that we didn’t see any turtles at our resort.

Our lucky turtle

The next day we took a catamaran tour to Saona Island. We found the dive shop on the beach was cheaper than the tour companies in the lobby. We got picked up on the beach and taken to the marina in Bayahibe to hop aboard the catamaran and wait for other passengers to be dropped off. I did notice that this was the beach of the Dreams La Romana resort, and it didn’t look too nice – right in the marina and right adjacent to a crowded public beach.

The other passengers aboard our “booze cruise” were mostly French and they were drunk and not all that friendly. But we had lots of fun relaxing on the trampoline for the ~2 hours it took to get to Saona. There they had a nice buffet and dance floor and massage tables on the beautiful white sand beach. The water was very shallow and calm for a long ways out and we enjoyed the trip thoroughly. On the way back they took us in a motor boat and we also stopped at the “natural pool,” a waist deep sandbar way out from the shore.

Saona Island

We also tried a free hobie cat lesson and paid the dive shop guys $20 to take us snorkeling at a nearby reef. Both were pretty fun. Also, even though it’s just a manmade reef, the snorkeling off the resort beach was really good too. Tons of fish and calm water.

Resort Review

Over all I found that for under $100 per night for BOTH of us all-inclusive, this place was an incredible value. I found the buildings, grounds, and decor to be very nice and always clean. I was quite satisfied with the room, which have apparently been recently renovated. There was some construction as they finish up the rest of the room block renovations, but it was not disturbing at all.

Lagoons

Mini-golf and walkways

I found the food to be about average. There was always plenty of variety at the main buffet and the ala carte restaurants were pretty good. We definitely enjoyed the hibachi steakhouse and ate there twice. The Italian place was good too but I was not a big fan of the Mexican restaurant. There was supposed to be a seafood restaurant as well (in the same area as the Mexican restaurant) but we didn’t really see it. The drinks were exactly what I expected and the bartenders were typically very fun.

Mexican Restaurant

We enjoyed the entertainment as well and the team was definitely hard working. They coordinated games and activities all day on the beach, worked the dinner crowds, and put on the big show on stage each night. The entertainment crew was really sweet and lots of fun. I don’t know how they manage to work so hard, all day long, in the heat.

One strange thing about the resort was the Veraclub. Apparently this is some kind of Italian/Spanish travel agency or vacation club. Many many of the guests were there with this organization, and they had some of their own amenities, including stage and restaurant, at the resort. We felt like there was a portion of the resort that we were left out of. While we mostly did our own thing, we also did not really make friends with any of the guests. It seemed to be most Europeans and on holiday with this Veraclub, with their own friends already built in.

The beach on the resort was fantastic, and the snorkeling was lots of fun too! Overall, we were happy with our choice and definitely felt like we got good value for our money.

Another thing I want to mention is we found all the people we met to be so nice and friendly. From the helpful folks in the airport to the friendly resort workers, we found the Dominicans to be really sweet. I would like to get out into the country more (off the resort!) and meet more locals. I look forward to visiting to DR again soon!

It’s cold and gray today in Pittsburgh, with snow flurries, so I thought I’d warm up by writing about our recent trip to the Dominican Republic.  We flew into Santo Domingo airport and stayed at the Oasis Canoa Resort near La Romana from October 3-10, 2009. This report is split into two parts.

Planning and Destination Choice

Roberto and I were looking for a trip to see each other between our Europe trip in July and my plans to travel to Brazil over Christmas. Our last several trips together had been busy and active so we thought it would be fun to do something easy and relaxing. The biggest factor was budget, with vicinity to both Brazil and the US and low hassle also being factors. We set our budget at $2000 US and started searching. Due to time constraints (less than one week trip) we narrowed our search down to the Caribbean and Central America. We started by searching for flights from Floripa, since it’s harder to get to these places from Brazil than from Pittsburgh. Here is my short list: Aruba, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Mexico, and Panama.

Mexico would have been a great option with it’s inexpensive all-inclusive resorts and great flight options from both continents, but Brazilians need a visa to enter Mexico so it didn’t have the “no hassle” quality. Costa Rica also had great flight options and hotels were fairly reasonable. We thought we could do CR for this budget but decided we would prefer to go there for more adventure and less relaxation (plus I had been there before). Similarly, Panama was very reasonable, but we thought we would have to do a lot of research and planning so we’d save that trip for later.

As for the Caribbean destinations, there were a wide range of factors there. Flights to Aruba were very reasonable, but the hotels and resorts were not, so it ended up not being in the budget. Jamaica definitely looked like a good option resort wise, but we could not find any reasonable flights from Brazil. But, we found that flights to Punta Cana, and Santo Domingo DR were quite cheap from Floripa (relatively) and it offered some of the cheapest resort prices I’ve seen.

Roberto on the beach

It turns out that, despite the numerous packages available from Pittsburgh to Punta Cana for under $500, finding a cheap flight was not easy. But I did find a great price (~$200) on US Airways’ Saturday to Saturday flight to SDQ. We confirmed that a flight from Floripa was available on those dates, and Roberto got himself a flight on Copa Airlines connecting in Panama City. It was around $1200 US. Our flights even got in around the same time, around 10 pm on Saturday night.

After some research we decided to book a resort on one of the beautiful beaches in La Romana, about 2 hours east of the SDQ airport. Through TripAdvisor reviews and prices on CheapCaribbean.com, we decided on the Oasis Canoa. For one week all-inclusive I think the price was like $745 for the two of us, including transfers from the airport. So, all said and done, we came in pretty close to the original budget! And for a whole week!

Getting There

We should be used to meeting in airports by now, but it’s always an adventure to try and land in a new country and arrange to meet without cell phones. My flight arrived early (and I got upgraded to first class both legs!) so I had about an hour to wait before Roberto’s flight was scheduled to arrive. I parked myself on my suitcase in baggage claim and hung around as the passengers on my flight trickled out. Now I must confess I was pretty nervous about arriving in the airport by myself after reading about how chaotic and dangerous it was while killing time on my layover. But I was pleasantly surprised by how kind the people were and they even helped me out greatly by noting that I was waiting in the wrong baggage claim area for the arriving Copa flight and taking me to the right one. Who knew the Santo Domingo airport had more than one international terminal?

Our driver from Turinter Tours (booked on CheapCaribbean) was waiting for us at the chaotic exit to the terminal. It was just the two of us in his van and we set off to the resort in the hot, humid night. His driving was pretty crazy and Roberto was getting pretty annoyed, but I was perfectly happy to be on vacation and didn’t care at all about the driver! We arrived sometime after midnight and were pleasantly surprised by how nice the lobby and grounds were as we were escorted to our room. We had a quick snack in the 24 hour buffet before going to sleep.

In Part 2 I will describe the activities and provide a review of the resort.