With its endless beaches, offshore excursions and nonstop activities, the Dominican Republic's newest tourist destination has a great beat - and it's easy to dance to.
Early morning, and the southern shore of La Altagracia province looks like Dunkirk. Watercraft of all different shapes and sizes nose up to the beach to meet groups of excited people who quickly splash through the water and climb aboard. There are fiberglass outboard boats in basic white, ''Miami Vice''-like speedboats sporting flashy paint, big-motor catamarans and stately sailing cats.
I jump aboard a small, open lancha with my guide for the day, Francisco. Jose, our driver, spins the wheel and we're off, chasing and racing the other boats.
But this is not some massive evacuation; this waterborne cannonball run is a daily event as guests from all-inclusive resorts all along the palm-fringed southeast coast of the Dominican Republic head for Isla Saona, the country's most popular day trip.
At the center of the morning madness is Bayahibe, an otherwise sleepy little Dominican fishing village. Surrounded by beach resorts fed by the shiny new La Romana airport, Bayahibe has seen some changes in the past couple of years. The peeling, pastel-painted wooden fishing boats tied to the trunks of palm trees are now outnumbered by dozens of bright-white fiberglass numbers made to carry tourists. On the mainland side of town, on freshly blacktopped roads built for buses, caballeros in straw hats ride burros hung with woven baskets brimming with the day's harvest. The burros turn off beside roadside market shacks held up mainly by Pepsi posters, while the buses continue on, delivering fresh guests to the beach resorts.
Bayahibe's resorts six of which have gotten together to enact environmental policies and improvements that qualify the entire area as the D.R.'s first to receive Green Globe certification have been, until recently, overshadowed by the massive Caso de Campo resort complex to the west and Punta Cana to the east. But the opening of La Romana airport, with direct flights from the U.S. and Europe, now gives visitors to Bayahibe much more convenient access to this corner of Hispaniola and its great beaches and exciting excursions.
The resort's tour desks are like candy stores for active travelers as sights here run the gamut from caves decorated with pre-Columbian pictographs to a Mediterranean-style artist's colony. Tours of the surrounding region travel via horseback, ATV, booze bus, dive boat, even amphibious ''duck'' truck. And, of course, boats run daily to the star attraction, Isla Saona.
Set Course For Saona
The morning sun is just high enough to light up the shallows. To our right is nothing but blue ocean; to our left, nothing but a bleached limestone shoreline backed by the solid-green wall of forest that marks the edge of Parque Nacional del Este. The eastern park is 166 square miles of pristine ecosystem. It encompasses the entire tip of the island, as well as Isla Saona, creating a protected playground for hikers, tropical biologists and archaeologists who are exploring caves in the park for clues to the island's earliest inhabitants.
Ahead a dozen boats are stopped dead in the water. Jose picks his way among them, and Francisco explains that this is called the natural pool, a vast area of sand flat where, from the shoreline to a half-mile offshore, the water never gets more than waist deep. The tour boats stop here so people can swim. Some stop for a morning wake-up splash; others stop on the way back after the tourists have had five or six hours in the sun and at least that many rum drinks or cold Presidente beers, giving a whole new meaning to the term ''sand bar.''
The very end of the ''mainland'' is made up of a buffer of spindly legged mangroves. Between the mangroves and Saona is a narrow channel you can cruise through from the Caribbean side of the island to the Atlantic side and, if you keep going, to Puerto Rico just 70 miles away. We bounce across the channel and enter the calm lee of Isla Saona. Jose steers toward shore and glides the boat to an island idler's dream. The beach is broad, the sand soft, palms tall, water clear, sun hot and the tiki bar open. It's a perfect spot for lazing on the beach. But the locals seem incapable of that brand of indolence. There's music coming from a thatched-roof hut, and people are actually dancing. I'm staggering around just trying to ingest enough caffeine to open my eyes and get me to a beach chair, but the Dominicans are already dancing the merengue. Every tourist who wanders by on their way to the bar is given some quick lessons and encouraged to join the dance. There's something different about these people.
At our next stop, we leave our shoes in the boat and walk up the beach and into the center of Mano Juan, a fishing village that serves as the capital of Isla Saona. The town is a cross between the set of a Clint Eastwood Western and an art gallery. Both sides of the sandy main street are lined with one-story wooden buildings with colorful facades, their windows hung with creaky plank shutters. There's a cantina the locals ambitiously call a disco, a restaurant, a general store and wall-to-wall shops each with an outdoor display of brilliantly colored naíve paintings by both Dominican and Haitian artists.
I hear music coming from the cantina, and inside people are dancing. Locals are once again teaching visitors the merengue. I turn and see Francisco dancing in the middle of the street and have to ask. He has many answers for why Dominicans are always dancing: the population's mix of African, Spanish and Taíno musical heritages; the legacy of a dictator who attempted to make dancing an elitist activity but finally he boils it down: ''Us Dominicans, we're usually happy, and we dance.''
Bon Jour, Amigo
Bayahibe's resorts are big, all-inclusive complexes the six hotels have a combined 3,000 rooms and I'm staying at the Viva compound, sister resorts joined at the hip along a gorgeous half-mile stretch of beach. The D.R. has long been a popular destination for Europeans and has only recently begun attracting numbers of Americans. There is still a strong Euro flavor at most of the resorts: the sound of many languages (it's refreshing to try to pick up on the nuances between Paris and Provence instead of Brooklyn and Queens), the smell of cigarettes (many Europeans have yet to fall for all that ''smoking-is-bad-for-you'' propaganda) and the mixed blessings of seeing a lot of a lot of people who have never met a bathing suit that was too small.
Many of the women here have also never met a bikini top that was too optional, and, as I make my way over the warm sand through a good crowd of late-afternoon sun worshippers, I somehow forget to watch where I'm walking and blunder right into a group of people. They look like standard young Euros tan, fit, with mod haircuts and none is wearing any cliché accoutrements that would help me identify their nationalities: no jaunty berets, no lederhosen, no silk suits. So
I try a buffet of apologies. My ''pardone scusa por favor pardoname entschuldigen bitte si vous plait oops'' works only to totally confuse them. I can torture just enough phrases in enough languages to get me into trouble nearly anywhere in the world, but I also excel in the Inspector Clouseau school of fake accents, unintentionally making it sound like there's no way English is my first language. They all start answering me in every language they know, trying to hit on whatever might be the mother tongue of the distracted guy with the big camera bag. Eventually we all shrug and smile. At least, I think they were smiling.
Up on the pool deck there is, surprise, dancing going on. Speakers are pumping out merengue, and a whole class of tourists is taking lessons in spinning and swaying Dominican style. When they get to the double spins, many couples look like they're playing vertical Twister, but the instructors are patient, and everyone is laughing and having a great time.
Taking The Plongez
I am impressed with the Europeans. With all the smoking, drinking, cheese-eating and discoing at 2 a.m. they were still murdering the Macarena in the resort's nightclub they look surprisingly good on the early-morning dive boat.
We motor out to the St. George, a shipwreck just a few minutes' ride from the beach. Isla Catalina, farther offshore, has some of the D.R.'s very best reef diving, but the wreck site is blissfully convenient and a low-impact effort for those of us on the boat who haven't handled the all-inclusive excesses quite as well. (It must have been the cheese.)
Descending the anchor line, our small group is swallowed by the eerie light of depth. The St. George is over 250 feet long, and settling to the sandy bottom beside its man-sized propeller and looking up through the misty clear water all the way to the bridge, I'm awed by the simple, spectacular bulk of the freighter.
After a tour through the cargo holds, we emerge amid several thousand creole wrasse, a cloud of fish that mushrooms then tightens as big predatory jacks spin and slash through the school in an underwater dance of life and death.
Fact-Finding Mission
Second in popularity to the Isla Saona day trip is a land tour of the local sights. My guide today is Juan Antonio Peguero Pimentel, a 37-year-old born in a small mountain village near Santo Domingo, who has had even more careers than he has names. Antonio has been a welder, an English teacher, a track coach, a calligrapher and a goldfish breeder. He has also passed the bar and plans to hang his shingle as a real estate lawyer once he's done with guiding visitors.
Like all the D.R.'s certified tour guides, Antonio has gone through a rigorous nine months of courses to ensure he's mastered the history, geography, culture, botany, zoology and geology of the country, and knows a minimum of two languages other than Spanish. It's obvious that Antonio did well in his classes, and he keeps me under a withering barrage of facts. Within 10 minutes of setting out, I find a little-known reason why the D.R. is such a popular spot for weddings. ''If you get married here,'' says Antonio, ''you can get divorced simply by writing a letter that the other party doesn't even need to know about.''
Our first stop is Altos de Chavon, a picturesque ersatz 16th-century Med-iterranean village complete with museum, church and Roman amphitheater set on the lip of a deep gorge carved by the Rio Chavon. The village was built (''at a cost of $36 million dollars and completed between 1976 and 1982,'' says Antonio) to attract tourists to the area, but it hasn't done too badly attracting luminaries as well. Both the Chairman of the Board and God's CEO have been to Altos de Chavon: Sinatra to break in the amphitheater and Pope John Paul II to consecrate St. Stanislaus Church. The village is a working artist's colony and is fulfilling its mission of attracting visitors to its jewelry stores, craft shops and restaurants that offer stunning views of the gorge.
Walking down Altos' artificially worn stone streets, past a profusion of flowers including one building totally bearded in vines reminds Antonio to tell me how many species of flowers, birds, lizards, mammals and insects call the D.R. home. I won't retain any of it, although I do think I'll remember the thing about divorce.
Near the fishing village of Boca de Yuma on the edge of Parque del Este, we hike up a short trail to the mouth of Cuevo de Verna. After a few facts about Dominican bats and dripstones (''It takes 100 years for dripping sulfur to make a stalagmite grow a centimeter'') we enter the vast mouth of the cave. Inside, amid towering formations, Antonio points out prehistoric pictographs and petroglyphs adorning the cave walls. There is an owl and a bat, but the third is an anthropomorphic stick figure. ''This is a Taíno,'' says Antonio. ''They were the indigenous people, the first Dominicans.'' The figure is, naturally, shown dancing.
We stop just outside of Boca de Yuma for lunch. The open-air restaurant called Number 28 local slang for the loony bin is owned by an ex-pat Italian who recommends the calamari. Antonio suggests I go with a local fried-fish dish, but the chef seems confident in his squid. And it is excellent. The fish are small reef fish fried in their entirety, which Antonio and our driver relish from the crackly, crunchy tail fins all the way up to the lips. ''Well, you must at least try our special drink,'' they insist. And since I'd rather drink mud than eat fish fins, I say sure. And out comes a bottle of mud. It's not actually mud, but it does bear an extraordinary likeness to what the bottom of the Mississippi must look like. The gallon jug is filled with sticks, leaves, bits of bark and who-knows-what-else that are supposed to imbue the concoction with all the powers of Ginseng, Gingko Biloba, Pepto Bismol, Ipecac, Rogaine and Viagra all in one shot. ''Only a few old people in each village know the correct kind of leaves and trees and spices to put in,'' says Antonio. ''Drink up.'' I lift the glass and think of some of the old people I know and how much trouble they have remembering what goes into a gin and tonic.
The Mississippi cocktail is actually not bad. The most important ingredients, aside from the forest floor, are rum and honey. And you can take anything if it's mixed with enough rum and honey.
Day Trips, Night Falls
Something has changed at the resort. There's a different energy level. As I walk past the pool after my last day trip, there are not just a few tourists taking dance lessons, there are people dancing everywhere, including actually in the pool. It's my waiter at the Mexican specialty restaurant later that night who finally explains that the Bayahibe resorts have filled up with Dominicans on weekenders from Santo Domingo. The crowd at the theater for the nightly show different each day, ranging from Aladdin done ballet style to tonight's colorful homage to Caribbean music and dance - is loud and lively. The bars are several deep, and it takes a moment to learn that having faith in orderly lines and waiting your turn could now mean total dehydration and that good-natured yelling and waving are the only ways to get a drink.
The outdoor dance floor is monopolized by Dominicans in full hip-grinding, sacroiliac-swaying merengue mode. The Europeans and Americans stand around watching, stunned and a little intimidated, trying to figure out how the locals' backbones seem to bend in at least three more places than theirs do. Then one and then another Dominican dancing couple breaks apart and grabs new dance partners from the crowd. Soon almost everyone is dancing and laughing. The locals are happy to share the love of their music and pride in their national pastime with an international crowd - and accept a chorus of ''mercis,'' ''danke scheins,'' ''graciases,'' ''thank yous'' and more than a few ''oops!''
Posted online 12/20/01.
