My girlfriend and I had planned the perfect vacation. Away from all the christmas stress of present-hunting and family meetings, we booked a vacation in the far-away paradise of the Dominican Republic. The catalogue as well as the travel agency prepared us for the trip of our lifetime. A happy couple in love, we went with high spirits. Boy were we misled.
For it all turned sour pretty soon. After eleven hours of enduring a not-so-forthcoming flight crew and the ridiculously diminished service aboard LTU airways (you now have to pay both for alcohol and even special earphones to be able to enjoy the damn on-board entertainment… we took neither), we arrived at Puerto Plata airport. Once we paid 20 entrance fee into the country (yes, “20″… that’s what they asked for… enquiring about the currency, the woman just said “20 Dollars, 20 Euro”… what a nice exchange rate!… glad we brought US-dollars!), we were directed to a bus that would bring us to our hotel — a four hour drive. However, it was not the drive that bugged us (we knew about that beforehand), but a young Dominican luggage guy who outright demanded that we pay “Trinkgeld” (German for tip), even telling me how much to pay. Frankly, I was so flabbergasted and eager to arrive with our luggage intact, I handed him ten Dollars.
After a rather adventurous drive into the night, we arrived late at our hotel and jumped into bed right away. The next morning looked fine, and we were so hungry we would’ve eaten anything for breakfast. And, thankfully, breakfast turned out to be the least of our problems for the rest of our holiday. But both the lunch and dinner buffets were ridiculous in that they were almost cold; apparently, they had forgotten to put some heating system or even hot water under the buffet tablets. The ice cream on the other hand was quickly turning liquid, as it was not cooled either. And, in retrospect, I think that’s what fragged us both: the food. My girlfriend got sick after a few days, and I followed suit only shortly after.
Another issue was the weather. Ensured by our travel agency that there would be no rain at that time of the year in our area, we were looking forward to two weeks lying on the beach and drinking cocktails out of coconuts. Wrong again. Only the first two days were rain-free, and only so because the downpoor came during the nights. Every day after that saw rain in differing quantity and frequency. And I’m not talking about casual rain as you would experience in Austria or England, but tropical rainstorms (or at least the closest to them I’ve ever seen).
An additional problem relating to the weather was the open-style architecture of the hotel: there were practically no walls. Only one of the two á la carte restaurants featured that luxury. So whenever there was a downpouring, you were hit in the face by water while enjoying your cold meal. And you yourself were cold too, for of course you hadn’t planned to bring a lot of clothes after the nicely accurate forecast by the travel agency.
And that pretty much was our long awaited dream holiday. At least we got most of the money back we planned to spend on trips seeing the countryside. As we were both sick, we couldn’t go anywhere. We were trapped in that “tropical paradise resort” for two weeks. The Caribbean won’t see me again anytime soon…
But maybe we should just be greatful. Because if the holiday resorts hadn’t been booked out, or there would’ve been all-inclusive offers in Thailand, that’s were we would’ve been instead. Which means we would’ve been right in the middle of the Tsunami disaster… and might not have returned at all.
