La Romana - Bayahibe

This past weekend was a 3-day holiday weekend for us here in the DR, since today (8/16) the country celebrated their Restoration Day ( something like a "We want to be independent from Spain now day).   My friends and I took this opportunity to spend a(nother) weekend at the beach, getting our scuba course finished up. Nicki, Robert and I spent the greater part of the weekend on or under water in the south east part of the country - La Romana-Bayahibe.  Since it was a holiday weekend (and Alejandro Sanz was playing a concert nearby), we had a heck of a time finding a hotel, and ended up staying at some little budget place on a road to the pueblo's playa....in what seemed like the middle of a sugar cane field.  The hotel was clean, though, and fairly quite, and at $26/night...well, you can't really complain.

We did 3 dives off the coast of Bayahibe, which is full of coral reefs and recreated shipwrecks.  Each dive of ours was for approximately 40mins at a depth of 40ft (average over the 3 dives). The visibility this weekend was AMAZING (see the photo - which is taken from the internet, but exactly what my weekend looked like).  I'm obsessed with the color of the water here. It goes from looking bright turquoise from the surface to being the most stunning cerulean when you are below.  There were bits of sea plants floating around, with tiny, nearly invisible jellyfish appearing out of nowhere (these ones don't sting). It reminded of a scene from Avatar - so beautiful!  I found huge conch shells (left them) and the biggest sand dollar I have ever seen (took it, since it was already dead).  Now that all we need to do is the final exam, I am ready to  move on to the next step - getting enough experience for night diving, shipwrecks and maybe caverns as well.

One nice this about this island is that in our circles, most people tend to know each other.  Our scuba guy, Mark, sent us to a guy he taught years ago, who now has a dive shop in Bayahibe. Turns out the guy, John, was at La Isabela with me last month, and knows the IU people whom I wrote about. In fact, some of the cannons and the anchor that we dove around this weekend were discovered then placed there by the IU crew.  John was kind enough to offer to give us discounts any time we come back to Bayahibe. I'm sure we'll be taking him up on that offer.

La Romana-Bayahibe was such a different vibe from Samana in so many ways. For one, It is much more of an obvious vacation spot. When we were on the dive boats, I could hear the activities director from the resort calling out things to do on the loudspeaker (flashback to Dirty Dancing, anyone?)  The little town of Bayahibe feeds off of the tour buses that shuttle the foreigners from their resort to the dive center and the marina-front restaurants (owned by foreigners) and souvenir shacks. Another difference - there isn't all that much public beach. The all-inclusive hotels and other exclusive resort/living compounds that have taken over the coast do not let the non-paying public onto their beaches - even though technically, the beaches are all public land and cannot be owned. The hotels pay security guards to patrol the perimeter and keep people out.  It can be rather frustrating to see the color barrier that exists between the nice, clean white-sand beaches with their foreign tourists, and the small, garbage-strewn public beaches, full of Dominicans. Every time a little kid's ball crossed the line from public to "private", we saw the guards spring into action.  We end up being torn between the principle of the matter, and wanting a reasonably clean and nice place to hang out. Today we split the difference - scuba diving with the tourists, then hanging out on the public beach.

It was a nice weekend, full of good food and good people. And, lucky me, now I get a short work week!