From December 27th until January 3rd I was fortunate enough to have gone on a vacation with the family to the Dominican Republic. This was no small trip (22 of us) and because we were going during a very busy time of the year,  it was definitely no small expense to organize. Punta Cana is where we stayed at the Majestic Colonial Resort. A 4 1/2 star resort, so they say.

Now, for me this was pretty exciting because it was my first time to a different country than the US. In fact, it was only the 3rd time I’ve been out of Canada… so needless to say I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect. The internet is full of horror stories, enough to instill enough fear in me that I essentially packed an entire pharmacy with me… I wish that was a joke. It’s a damn good thing I trust people more than the internet, because if I did, I would never leave my house. Quite frankly, starring at the wall is actually enjoyable for me. You see, every time I travel I seem to get sick. Vancouver, got a cold. New York, flu that nearly killed me (not literally, but I was with my dad’s asshole bitch ex-girlfriend and her bitch daughter at the time which made it feel like death). Quebec, fevers and debilitating migraines. I’d survive a nuclear war well, my body clearly loves being locked in a bunker.

(Apologies in advance, this post is image heavy. Live vicariously!  I’m going to split the trip up into 3 blog posts.) OH! And PS… All the images below were taken with my new Motorola RAZR which I received for being Canada’s Social BLAZR. Truly an incredible camera if you ask me. 8MP photos and 1080P HD video! Click the images to see them in better quality!

Our flight was at 8AM, which meant we had to be up at 4:30AM. Brutal… But after the four hour flight we walk into this…

29C. Sunny and humid. (While there is water on the ground, the only time it rained over the 8 days was at night time on 3 occasions.)

Now… I know that island lifestyle is a little more relaxed than it is in Canada or the US… but we had to wait about an 90 minutes for our bags. Here’s my little brother exhausted from waiting.

Finally they arrived though and we were on our way to the bus and then to the resort where *I* could finally change out of my long sleeve shirt and jeans.

Release the Kraken?

Then we finally arrived at the resort, which was very underwhelming to look at the exterior… but once we stepped inside…

Now at this point it’s about 3PM… our rooms won’t be ready for another 1-2 hours. Brutal. So me and my brother did the only common sense thing, we had our first beer of the day – Presidente is the local beer and it’s actually quite good!

Now, here’s the reality of the Dominican – They don’t care. Everything is very whatever. It doesn’t matter that our group of 22 had spent tens of thousands of dollars, they didn’t care if we had a problem. Here’s what the problem was – when we booked the vacation, we were very specific about a few things. Considering we were travelling with kids, elderly, wheelchairs and our family we needed some of the rooms to be ground floor, close proximity, next door etc. While I didn’t book it, my parents travel agent did and the instructions were very clear on what we needed – we got none of it. Our rooms were all over the place. 4 rooms were in a separate building, our rooms were on different floors and it was just a mess.

Trying to talk to Staff, They Don't Seem to Care

The family spent a couple hours with the front desk trying to remedy this nightmare, to no avail. They didn’t care. They had given our rooms away to others. I’ve learned that in the Dominican, it’s first come first serve.

So, my brother and I get our room key and we go to our room (a 15 minute walk from front desk). Keys don’t work. So we go back to the front desk (another 15 minute walk) and get new keys. We walk back to our room, (15 minutes) still don’t work. So we go back to front desk and tell them… ‘Oh it must be a problem with the door. I’ll send someone.’ How long? ‘Oh, 10 minutes.’ So we go back to our room, double time to meet the person to fix our door (7 minutes)…. 40 minutes later still no one. So walk back to the front desk, furious (15 minutes + exhausted/sweaty). Ask them what’s up, this time they actually radio someone… ‘It will be about 50 minutes.’ WHAT! Ugh. Grab a Cerveza, and 15 minutes back to the room to wait. Finally the guy comes and recodes the door.

“Just need to get new keys from the door and it will open.”

“Okay great. How long will that be till you’re back with the keys?”

“Oh, 15 or 20 minutes.”

“Gracias.”

20 minutes later, no keys… so another 15 minute walk to the front desk to get keys… and finally we’re in our room. At this point it’s about 8PM. We’ve been waiting 3.5 hours to get into our room. No one cares there. You can tip and they still didn’t seem to care. There’s more nightmare stories to tell about the rooms, but I’ll save it for the next blog post. In the meantime, here was the one great part of our room – the view.

Oh and morning Sunrises were incredible. Very different from the yellow, orange, red sunrises we get in Canada. I believe it has something to do with the equator and not having the curve of the earth affecting the sun? Probably also the ocean. Who knows… But morning sunrises were always very dark, and then very suddenly a light blueish colour, followed by this.

Again, this is the first day here… well, actually the first 18 hours. The remaining 7 days I’ll cover in the next two blog posts. So stay tuned!

Also, any similar experiences with All Inclusives not seeming to care?