PUNTA CANA, Dominican Republic You know how when you book a vacation online you get a confirmation notice admonishing you to read all the documents thoroughly? Yeah, you might want to do that.Last summer, Her Royal Blondness and I were eyeing locales for an exotic getaway and zeroed in on Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic.
We'd had a fine experience a couple of years before at the all-inclusive, kids-excluding (yay!) Excellence Riviera Maya, so I booked us a week at that place's sister property, the Excellence Punta Cana. Amazing beaches, great diving, a restaurant called Lobster House — we're going.
So we travel all day, and it's late and we're bleary tired, waiting for the shuttle to take us and a bunch of other pooped tourists to our resorts, and HRB is looking at our printed documents and keeps calling the resort "Majestic Elegance Punta Cana" and I'm like, "No, no, honey. Excellence Punta Cana."
We finally got there and, uh, where's our warm towel and sparkling wine at the door? What's with the sad-looking finger sandwiches in the "Elegance Club"? It was late, but still.
We were shown to our quarters. All the restaurants were closed, so we ordered room service. The lobster bisque was inedibly fishy, the kitchen messed up HRB's sandwich and you'll likely find a much more agreeable Caesar salad at a Flying J.
Our "ocean view" room appeared rather, at least in the dark, to offer a view of a chain link fence topped with festive barbed wire. The bellman said the ocean was beyond it. (This, upon the arrival of the dawn's early light, proved to be true, so technically we did have an ocean view. Like from inside Alcatraz.)
This is the scene: It's after 1 a.m., HRB's face showing disappointment, fatigue and escalating annoyance, her holding the salad fork as if she can't decide whether to eat with it or plunge it into her carotid artery, me saying "That bisque is rich!," trying to fool her and knowing I'm not, and us both coming to the realization that, in an absolutely unprecedented turn, something has gone wrong and in all likelihood it's my fault. And further realizing that, if our efforts to get to the right place are to no avail, we're stuck there for the entire week.
So my sleep was a bit troubled that night. We later met others who were staying there and pronounced it "really nice." Our experience, admittedly limited, indicated otherwise, at least compared with what we were expecting .
But this trip was kind of a big deal for both of us, so after a couple of phone calls, the dropping of an additional $2,000 or so and a humiliating admission at the front desk ("Uh. This is kind of funny: I booked the wrong hotel! Ha!") we were at the right place. Warm towels. Sparkling wine. Excelente.
All-inclusive resorts like Excellence Punta Cana are massive, like cruise ships. And, like cruise ships, the staff works like crazy to keep you busy or at least diverted with activities, drinks of the day and off-site excursions.
Everybody has at least one story about how profoundly clueless American tourists are. One morning we witnessed an American couple explaining to the concierge that they had booked an excursion to go ziplining, but that the woman had forgotten to pack closed-toed shoes, which were required.
They asked a) if there was a Wal-Mart nearby, and b) if they could walk to it. The poor guy behind the desk didn't even know what a Wal-Mart was, but eventually the answers were no and no. I mean, I might have booked us into the wrong resort, but this was some comedy: The whole property looked like a Travel & Leisure photo shoot, and these two were looking for a Wal-Mart.
During a daylong outing to Saona Island National Park, we rode a speedboat, waded in the impossibly blue ocean with starfish in one hand, rum and Coke in the other, and had a grilled lobster lunch on the beach. Is there anything better than that last? Nope.
We also met a very nice newlywed couple from Austin, and a rather different couple from, if memory serves, somewhere in Illinois: She was perfectly pleasant; he spent the entire day determined to have a ghastly time, complaining about how much everything cost and what great deals he was getting haggling with trinket-peddlers who probably made about eight bucks a month.
Before that, we rode a catamaran back to the mainland, drank more and danced to lots of Bob Marley. Some old loser kept merrily tossing his empty plastic cups into the ocean. In the middle of a national park. Somebody finally told him to stop. Then there was the couple from back east who refused to get in the water all day. That's a long way to go and not get wet.
0 Comments
Posts
