Dominican Republic

We spent very little time in the Dominican Republic, unfortunately.  We only sailed to Samana Bay and Luperòn on the north coast.

Samana Bay is a Humpback Whales Sanctuary.  It’s also close to Los Haitises National Park where part of the movie Jurassic Park was filmed.

Close to Samana, you can also go horseback riding to visit the best Waterfall we’ve seen since Brazil, the Cascada El Limòn!

To get there we hired a MotoChonco, that I call MotoCoño instead because these guy ride stupidly crazy!

The horseback ride was fun, especially for Yuka who had a horse named Diablo (Devil):

We also took the time to drive from Luperòn all the way to Santo Domingo.  What an adventure that was!

We loved Santo Domingo, its cobblestone streets and its monuments.  We also accidentally run into the street Coppola shot a scene in The Godfather II.  In the movie scene takes place in Cuba, but because Cuba was off-limits for any American production back then Coppola decided to shoot it here. 

This is the exact street where Don Corleone (Al Pacino) sees a Cuban revolutionary blow himself up in a police car:

We loved Santo Domingo, it’s a very nice town:

Luperòn was just a technical stop on our way to the Bahamas.  We’d heard so much about this Hurricane Hole that we just wanted to see it in person.  There’s not much to it, other than the fact that it’s supposedly the best hurricane hole in the Caribbean.  There’s a small cruiser’s community who spend their time there (mostly Americans).

Dominican Republic is one of the most cruisers unfriendly countries we’ve visited so far.  The bureaucracy for sailing here is draconian.  Every time you move your boat from one anchorage to another, you need to go to the Navy and get a “despacho”.  The despacho is just a useless piece of paper that says where you’re going and when.

The navy is very disorganized and they will only issue this permit the same day you’re sailing.  They need to send some soldier to deliver the permit to your boat in person and take a picture of himself on your boat.  Go figure why.

So we regrouped with our friends on Plan B in Luperòn, and we set sails to the Bahamas!

Bahamas will come up in our next post.  Stay tuned!