Adventure Part Three: The Beach

Downtown Cortecito

Getting checked into our hotel was a challenge.  First, we had to find it.  We had reservations in Cortecito, a small village made up mainly of chintzy souvenir shops with thatched roofs in the middle of a huge resort area called Punta Cana.  When we approached a stretch of gigantic all-inclusive resorts with gleaming white limestone gates and fountains surrounded by palm trees, we started looking for signs for Cortecito.  We didn't see any, and after awhile, we asked the bus conductor how much longer it would take to get there.  It turned out that we'd passed it.  It also turned out that conductor was the nicest person we'd encounter that day: He got off the bus with us, brought us across the street to a bus going the other direction, told that bus driver where we needed to go, and paid for our fare out of the money we'd paid him earlier to get on his bus.  We thanked him heartily and drove off.

Our hotel sign

After that, we found the front of our hotel easily enough.  Before we could check in, though, three of us needed cash, so we left our bags in the hotel lobby with the other girls and set out in search of an ATM.  We made the mistake of asking a taxi driver for directions.  He insisted that there were no ATMs near by and tried to charge us $10 to drive us to the closest one.  We stupidly got in his cab but somewhat less stupidly refused to pay anything more than about what we'd pay in Santiago ($3-4).  He drove us to the other side of the block.  It was large block, to be sure, but not that large.  It would have taken us three minutes to walk there.  Angry, we told him of course we didn't need a ride back, and he drove away.  We walked up to the ATM, located at the edge of a resort parking lot....and found ourselves face to face with an out-of-order sign.

We walked up the resort's long cobbled driveway to a place where a valet and a few other workers were standing in the shade, and we asked them where the next closest place to get cash was.  They told us it was down the road a long ways and we'd probably want to take a taxi.  We looked at each other, rolled our eyes, and started walking in the direction they'd pointed us, which brought us back into the center of Cortecito.  We stopped in a cigar store to get a second opinion, just in case the ATM really was that far away, but the man behind the counter told us it was only a kilometer or so.

3 kilometers in...still nothing

We decided a kilometer was nothing and started down the road.  A long, empty, dusty road.  A really long, empty, dusty road.  In fact, we trudged down the road's sandy shoulder under the humid tropical sun, getting honked at by passing tour buses, coming across nothing but a few scattered lottery stands and a patch of tin shacks for at least 20 minutes until, at long last, we came across another little town.  Joyfully, we spotted the ATM and ran towards it....only to discover it didn't work with our cards.  A security guard and a local man who had just withdrawn his own money noticed we were having trouble and tried to help us, but they couldn't figure out what was wrong, either, so we asked them if there was another ATM nearby.  They told us there was another one farther north, but we'd probably want to take a motoconcho (motorcycle taxi).  As reluctant as we were to take another taxi in that town, we were tired and thirsty and sick of walking, so, figuring that the men had been nice to us that far and had nothing to gain from us taking a taxi, we followed their advice.

Success!

Ryshona and I got on the back of one motorcycle, Miranda on another, and we sped off.  After five minutes of feeling the wind whip through our hair as we giggled about how weird it was that we were there, riding a motorcycle for the first time down a gravely road in the middle of nowhere in the Caribbean, we got to the ATM.  We tentatively approached it, crossed our fingers, held our breath, put one of our cards in, pressed the right buttons....and, seconds later, cheered as the machine spit out a wad of the most beautiful Dominican pesos we'd ever seen. 

We took another pair of motoconchos back to the hotel, explained our delay to the girls who'd been waiting for us, and had our hearts break when they told us they'd found a second ATM right there in Cortecito.  About 15 minutes after we'd left.  Just next door to the one that was broken. 

View from our room

The pool!

Seeing the inside of the hotel helped us recover a bit, though.  Even though our hotel was one of the few non-resorts in the area, the decorating schemes of the bigger resorts seemed to have rubbed off on it.  It was gorgeous (from the outside, at least), made up of four 2-story buildings with about 10 rooms each surrounding a courtyard of palm trees, lush grass, an aqua pool, and gazebos with straw roofs.  The rooms were also the only hotel rooms we'd been in that weekend that were decorated, with paintings on the wall and matching bedsheets, and it looked clean, except for the gross rusted-out bathtub floor.  (No bedbugs, though, Dad!)  We changed out of our sweaty and dusty shorts into our swim suits, covered our arms and faces with sunscreen, and set out for the beach.

The beach at last!

Adorable souvenir shacks

 The beach was gorgeous, like a postcard of the Caribbean: white sand, crystal clear water, rainbow-colored parasails, rows of sailboats leaning against each other.  There were no real regulations to separate boating areas from swimming ones, so motorboats kept streaking past, whipping around teams of dads and sons on innertubes as they grabbed the edges and tried to stay on as long as they could.  The water was cold but not freezing - perfectly refreshing - and so salty you could float effortlessly.  I'm sorry to those of you who are in Minnesota right now.  It was just so perfect!

Sunset

Pretending to be models

After taking a walk as the sun set and turned the fluffy clouds all sorts of pretty shades of pink and purple, we looked for a place to eat, and discovered that everything in Cortecito shut down at 8 o'clock sharp, except for two expensive seafood restaurants.  After mulling it over and deciding that, if we were going to have to spend that much money on food anyway, we might as well spend it on something less gross that seafood, a group of us asked the man at the front desk of our hotel for a recommendation of somewhere to go to get dinner and maybe ice cream.  We followed his advice, bit the bullet, and took another taxi to a super touristy shopping mall full of luxury clothing stores, polished stone floors, delicate fountains, and American restaurants.

Even classier than Southdale

We ended up at the Hard Rock Cafe, where we were delighted to have, for the first time in weeks, hamburgers, French fries, and an apple crisp.  We were also, for the first time in weeks, surrounded by other Americans.  When we got there, a football game was in the last quarter and people all around us were wearing their Jetts jerseys and cheering or booing loudly with every play.  When the game ended and they'd cleared out, a small but decently talented Dominican band set up their instruments for a mellow set of songs, half of them in English and half in Spanish.  All in all a very touristy evening, but, honestly, quite relaxing and enjoyable after being away from home for so long, especially for the girls in my group who have been homesick since the first day here.

The pool and, in back, the breakfast area

The next morning, by the time most of us were up and ready, Miranda had already been at breakfast for about an hour and a half.  When we walked up to the open-air patio by the pool where a buffet of juice, cold cereal, rolls, and pineapple slices was laid out, we saw her talking to a middle-aged man, swapping stories of the small towns we'd been to and problems we'd had with buses (very much like Grandma makes friends at the cabin every year).  We didn't think much of it until it was time to go, and I walked up to them to tell Miranda we were getting ready to leave.

When we got back to our room, we asked her about his story, and found out...he was a spy.  Well, at least I firmly believe he was.  It's been a matter of ongoing debate between us, so I'll let you decide for yourselves.  This man told Miranda that he is a retired intelligence agent from Denmark.  Over the course of the conversation, he also revealed that he speaks seven different languages and has been to 25 countries outside of Europe.  As we'd noted the night before when he arrived as we were waiting in the lobby, he had trouble checking into the hotel because the man at the front desk had asked to see his passport, but, as he explained to Miranda, he is legally not allowed to show his passport anywhere but airport security checkpoints.  So, reading between the lines, I believe you'll agree that he had to have been a spy or, at the very least, and ex-spy.

And, on that note, I'll wrap this up.  To come some time this week: an account of this weekend's trip to the rural mountains, including such adventures as mixing cement by hand, drinking coconut milk straight from the coconut, and sharing a river with a cow.  In this place:

Personally, I thought it was even more gorgeous than the beach.