#533 Bahia Principe at Cayo Levantado, DR

So I've decided to start talking about the vacation with the place we stayed, the Gran Bahia Principe resort at Cayo Levantado. Cayo Levantado is a tiny island right off the north coast of the Dominican Republic near the town of Samana. It's in the bay of Samana, so the water there is very calm.

To get there, we took a flight from SLC to NYC (five hours), then another flight from NYC to Santo Domingo (about four and a half hours). From Santo Domingo, which is on the Caribbean side, we took a taxi across the country to Samana on the Atlantic side, and that was about two and a half hours. From there, we took a seven minute (approx) boat ride to Cayo Levantado.

Here's what you see when you pull up in the boat:

The main building is a beautiful Colonial-style structure. It was unusual for us because it was the first resort that actually had a building with four walls. The other resorts we've been to in the Caribbean aren't enclosed. The restaurants and everything are covered, but don't have walls, so this place was different in that respect. Maybe because of hurricanes?

Like I said, the island is very small and the only thing on it is the resort. There are 30 villas with three or four rooms in each villa, plus there are rooms in the main building. In the main building was the buffet. There were also three a la carte restaurants and a snack bar by the beach pool. There was also a beach bar and another bar at the other swimming pool.

We spent all of our time at the pool by the beach. They have a very nice beach:

In this picture, people are doing water aerobics. The leader is on the beach. The beach is nice and the water is calm, but there are fish in the water, and I don't like to be around the fish. (I have talked about this before and I just don't like to have the fish around me. And sometimes there were lots of fish!

Those little squiggly things are fish. For a few days, there were thousands of them right up close to the shore. They were so thick and plentiful, the pelicans just stayed right by the shore and scooped them up at will.

So I hung out at the pool.

The water was so warm. In the afternoon it was like a bathtub. I never wanted to get out of the water late in the day. It was so comfortable! T and I bought a little softball that we tossed around for hours. I also bought a floatie and we'd take turns using it just to float around and relax. My routine was: get in the water for awhile, get out, get something to drink, read, repeat. It was a good routine. I did it for days. That's my kind of vacation!

I would go over to the beach daily to do what I liked to call "surveying my domain."

It was just beautiful! And the pool was great too:

All the resorts we've been to have beautiful gardens, but I think the gardens at Cayo Levantado were the most beautiful. I mean the place is just GREEN. The whole countryside around there is green and lush, and the island was no different.

There are different kinds of palm trees, and one of my favorites is the fan palm. I think they're pretty. There were lots of fan palms at this resort. I took lots of pictures of them. MT thinks I'm a bit of a freak, but you just don't see these trees here in Utah!

The resort is private, but there is a beach on the island that is open to the public. It didn't happen when we were there, but there are cruise ships that dock at Samana, and an excursion that is available is to go to the beach at Cayo Levantado. The public beach is called Bacardi Beach because it looks like the beach where a Bacardi rum commercial was filmed. I don't know if the commercial was filmed there, but it is nice. The sand is not white, but it's very light and there are lots of palm trees over there. There's also about 1,000 chairs for the cruise ship visitors. The water over there isn't as calm as at the private beach because it's not as sheltered. It's much more open. You can see a lot of Samana Bay from the public beach. We went over there a couple of times in the evening or at sunset. It's the best place to see the sunset on the island.

Before we left for our trip, we were maniacally checking the weather forecast which always said thunderstorms and cloudy. The reality was that it was warm and humid and sunny and gorgeous 90% of the time.

It was raining the evening we arrived, but it was the kindest, gentlest rain ever. And it was over very quickly. It did rain twice during the day when we were there. Both times we were at the pool and we took shelter under our palapa until the rain passed. MT said it rained at night once.

We spent 11 nights on Cayo Levantado. It is a beautiful place and one that I would certainly visit again. The Dominican Republic is the only place we've been to twice, although we stayed in different areas both times. I can see us going back to the DR again. The people are nice and friendly and the country is beautiful. There are not a lot of Americans that go there (part of the appeal for me) so you get to meet people from all over the world. We met people from Canada, Spain, Germany, England and Australia.

I'll leave you with two views that I got to see every day and I didn't tire of them. It was a wonderful place to stay and I enjoyed myself very much!