Adventures in the Caribbean: The Hispaniola Plan

Many Canadians love all-inclusive beach vacations down south—low cost, little hassle, high heat, and all the food and alcohol you want. 

But if you’re like me, you can only do so much lying on the beach while drinking tall cool drinks—as lovely as that can be.  If you’re like me, you want some adventure mixed in with your relaxation.

Last week, stuck in piles of snow and way-too-cold weather, my girlfriend Andrea and I scooped up a last-minute, heavily discounted, all-inclusive, one-week Air Transat vacation to the Dominican Republic that left January 3, 2014.  Once we booked the trip, I immediately began scheming ways to get off the resort and see other parts of the island.  Our flight was to Punta Cana, where we would be transferred to our resort a couple of hours west to Boca Chica, a town thirty or so kilometers east of the capital of Santo Domingo. 

The proximity to Santo Domingo made that an obvious place to visit.  I had trouble finding reliable information in English on how to do things like visit Santo Domingo’s old town on our own, but I did find this helpful blog that explained the bus system well. 

Boca Chica is infamous for its prostitutes, but also happens to be a popular beach destination for Dominicans trying to escape the big city, so there is fairly efficient and (by Canadian standards) very cheap transportation between Boca Chica and Santo Domingo. 

Beyond Santo Domingo’s old town, the best idea for Dominican adventure came from a guide book: béisbol.  I am a huge baseball fan, so I persuaded Andrea that we should catch a Dominican winter league game while in Santo Domingo.

So my pre-trip plan was this: once in Santo Domingo we would tour the old town on foot, then taxi to the Estadio Quisqueya, where we would buy our tickets and watch the ball game—one in a playoff round-robin between Santo Domingo’s two teams, the Tigres del Licey and the Leones del Escogido, on Monday, January 6. 

After the game I was less confident about how to get back to Boca Chica, but I read somewhere that a taxi would only set us back $40 or so, which did not seem like the end of the world.

. . . 

On January 2, the night before we left, with my alarm set for 5:00 the next morning, and the taxi scheduled to pick us up at 5:30, I couldn’t sleep and got obsessed with another idea for adventure: visiting Haiti.  Santo Domingo and Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince are less than 350 kilometers apart, after all.

I had already looked into this cursorily, but had given up, deciding it was too much trouble.  I had found out the following: 

·        rental cars are not allowed across the border, so that was out of the question;

·        buses do run between Santo Domingo and Port-au-Prince, but somehow the trip takes at least 8 hours, involves significant hassle at the border, and all arrive in Port-au-Prince after dark—not a situation we as white, Anglo tourists wanted to put ourselves in;

·        kayak.com showed that the fastest, cheapest flight option involved going through Miami, and was exorbitantly priced;

·        commercial ferries run between Santo Domingo and San Juan, Puerto Rico, but not between Dominican Republic and Haiti.

That night, however, as the hours of potential sleep dwindled, I wanted to look again.  I hated the thought of being so close and not getting to see Haiti.  “We can go some other time,” I tried to advise myself; but I was too taken with the idea of seeing Port-au-Prince just four years after the devastating earthquake to allow myself to be dissuaded.

I fired up my laptop and began researching again.  I happened to find the website of a hotel in Jacmel, Haiti that happened to mention flights from Santo Domingo to Port-au-Prince (PAP) on an airline called Aerolineas Mas, a local Dominican airline operating out of Santo Domingo’s secondary airport, La Isabela International Airport (JBQ). 

The link was broken, but I managed to find the airline’s website on Google.  It was entirely in Spanish, but I was able to figure it out enough to realize we could fly roundtrip JBQ-PAP, leaving the morning of January 7, and returning the morning of January 8: the cost, about $300 each  Not cheap, certainly, but not unaffordable either. 

“Maybe this is a crazy thought,” I told myself, “spending that kind of money for a 24 hour visit.”  

But I booked a room for the night of 7^th at the Plaza Hotel, directly across from Port-au-Prince’s famous Champs De Mars, in Port-au-Prince, and one in Santo Domingo for the night of the 6^th, just in case.  I would be able to cancel them at no cost if necessary, and even if we didn’t go, staying over in Santo Domingo after the baseball game seemed to make middle-of-the-night sense.

The next morning en route to the airport, I pitched the idea to Andrea. 

“I really want to go to Haiti,” she said, much to my surprise.

. . .

So it was that the next day, Saturday the 4^th, we were in our hotel’s lobby attempting to buy flights to Port-au-Prince.  This was far more difficult than we expected, because the Aerolineas Mas website’s reservation system seemed to be missing a crucial field for credit card information.  Emails and phone calls to the company went unresponded, so we began assuming that the airline was defunct.  

But now Andrea was almost as motivated as I was, and this morning she managed to discover a second airline—Tortug’ Air—that flew the JBQ-PAP route with roughly the same schedule, and for exactly the same price.  Moreover, their website was nearly identical, except it had the one key field necessary to complete the reservation.

With tickets bought, I emailed the Plaza Hotel in Port-au-Prince to arrange airport transfer for the hefty fee of $50 US. 

Then I spoke to the Boca Chica resort concierge to confirm my plans for getting from Boca Chica to Santo Domingo, and I spoke to the Air Transat representative to ensure it would be okay to abandon our hotel room for two nights.  We were, more or less, all set.