Dominican Dichotomy An Excursion To Colonial Puerto Plata And The Neighboring Resort Of Playa Dorada Reveals Two Very Different Locales
A grand white Victorian gazebo sits in the center of Puerto Plata’s main square, where men peddle oranges and 7-Up from pushcarts under shade trees, boys shine shoes and women sell wildly painted carnival masks. In this small city in the Dominican Republic, cars, scooters and clattering trucks honk their way around the square, accelerating, braking, dodging, nearly colliding, then roaring off in a cloud of blue exhaust.
Rest on a park bench for just one minute, and without fail a young man will saunter over to sell you inexpensive jewelry that he claims to be amber, but is more likely plastic. Guidebooks advise you to say “No” politely but firmly to make the vendor leave.
You do, but it doesn’t work. He shrugs and sits down beside you to chat, sale forgotten. He’d rather find out what you think of his town, how long you’re here, where you’re from. (“Boston? I know a guy in Boston.”)
It’s the friendliness that makes Puerto Plata special — it, and the beaches, the warm winters, and the palm-covered hills.
Few foreign visitors stay in Puerto Plata, a Spanish colonial town of 80,000 on the Dominican Republic’s northern coast. Almost all go to the Playa Dorada complex of a dozen luxury hotels two miles east of town.
If you’re an escapee from a cold climate, you can be forgiven if you don’t set foot outside the hotel compound for the first two days - there are beaches, golf, tennis, parasailing, windsurfing, gambling and three dozen restaurants. There’s even a mall.
But when you grow restless, you may want to explore Puerto Plata, or snorkel in Sosa, or take a jouncing jeep tour into the interior. Exhausted at the end of the day, you will have a quiet and comfortable room awaiting you.
Playa Dorada caters more to Europeans, especially Germans, than to North Americans, although English is spoken everywhere. The grounds cover several hundred acres and are gorgeously landscaped; it’s a pleasure to stroll among the ponds, bamboo groves, pink bougainvillea, red hibiscus and palm trees alive with songbirds. Playa Dorada is beautiful, but also walled, guarded, and probably too insulated for some people.
By its existence, Playa Dorada has spared Puerto Plata of postcard carousels, T-shirt shops and tour kiosks. Puerto Plata is chaotic, noisy, gritty, colorful, safe and friendly, and a spirited change from the scrubbed isolation of Playa Dorada. Take a taxi ($5) into town if you’re in a hurry, a blue-and-white bus if you want to meet people (25 cents from the gates of Playa Dorada).
On the way, you’ll rattle past peach, pink, lavender or peacock-blue cottages of red-tile roofs, and a yard full of tropical plants and flowers. You’ll see one-room tire stores with their goods stacked at road’s edge. And, like my wife and myself, you may be drawn into a fragmented and friendly Spanish/English conversation by someone worried you’ll miss your stop.
You can move about in Puerto Plata unnoticed and unhassled. Your only concern will be crossing streets. The light motorcycles that whiz by with heavy burdens will puzzle you, until you realize that many serve as inexpensive taxis (motoconchos). I saw a red scooter buzz past carrying a man, two women and a three-legged wooden table.
The town’s biggest draw is the Amber Museum. Amber, the hardened, translucent sap of a tree extinct for millions of years, is found here in great quantities. Although much amber ends up as beads for bracelets and necklaces, it interests scientists for the insects and plants sometimes trapped inside. Steven Spielberg used several of the museum’s amber pieces for the his film “Jurassic Park.”
The museum shows off dozens of polished, pendant-sized amber pieces in backlighted wall displays. Red-brown, orange-brown and yellow are the most common colors of Dominican amber. Some of the pieces I saw contained termites, fern leaf fragments, a baby lizard, flower petals, and an embarrassed pair of chinch bugs caught forever in romantic embrace. Located at the corner of Prudhomme and Duarte streets, the museum is open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., closed Sundays, costs $2, and becomes crowded when tour buses arrive (thanks in large part to “Jurassic Park”). The gift shop displays tempting buys in amber necklaces ($70 and up).
Across town sits the 16-century Fort San Felipe, which from its peninsula perch provides a fine view of the harbor, hills and ocean. With its turrets and cannons and fortified walls - its mission was to repulse French buccaneers - the fort is a necessary stop if you’re traveling with children. Just be sure to keep them back from the unfenced moat. (Hours 9 a.m.-noon and 2-5 p.m., closed Wednesdays; 75 cents admission.) If heights don’t frighten you, take the 10-minute gondola ride up Mount Isabel de Torres, the 2,565-foot peak that hovers behind Puerto Plata (the taxi from Playa Dorada costs $9 one way). The gondola opens at 9 a.m., charges $3, runs regardless of weather, and has long lines starting mid-morning. Once on top, you find a restaurant, a gift shop and an enormous statue of Christ. Ignore these and go directly to the botanical garden that covers the peak - if you arrive early, you’ll have the place to yourself. Follow the crisscrossing footpaths that take you through pine groves, blooming shrubs, and hundreds of bright flowers. Birds are everywhere, and ocean breezes rattle the palm fronds.
Few visitors rent cars due to poor road conditions in rural areas and to the husky fearlessness of the Dominican driver. (“Driving in Puerto Plata,” an American expatriate tour-bus driver told us, “is like living right inside a video game.”) Hotels therefore offer a wide choice of tours to inland villages, to cities such as Santiago and Santo Domingo, and even to Haiti (two days, $195).
Quality varies, so before making reservations talk to someone who has taken the trip you are contemplating. The slow-paced boat ride to Playa Grande is worth the money ($38). You cruise for an hour through a mangrove forest, and then follow the ocean coast past cliffs and caves to an isolated beach for a two-hour swim. But the Catamaran “La Pantera” does not visit Sosa as advertised, anchors offshore instead, and you must swim 100 yards to snorkel over the reef ($60); better to take a $15 taxi ride to Sosa and snorkel from the beach.
The Dominican Republic is one of the greenest islands in the Caribbean, whose jungled rolling hills look primeval (if you’ve already visited the Amber Museum and still have “Jurassic Park” on your mind, you can easily picture a rogue tyrannosaurus rex crashing through the trees to stomp on a paleontologist or two). To get into the back country, the young and very brave may choose to rent a jeep; but for the rest of us, a four-wheel-drive tour is adventure enough.
Trips last a day, include lunch and drinks, and your vehicle will ford streams to take you into areas that you would otherwise never visit. You’ll see termite nests as big as basketballs, bright laundry drying on cactus fences that keep goats and cows at home, butterflies in swarms of hundreds, and clean and tidy oneroom cottages of thatched roofs and walls of woven palm branches. In spite of its luxury, Playa Dorada sometimes functions less smoothly than other Caribbean resorts - things go wrong, events do not start on time, the electricity fails at least once a day.
On the plane home, the vacationers I spoke with who were the most pleased with their trip were the ones who knew how to stay loose, to shrug off inconveniences. They spoke of the beautiful beaches and mountains, of a countryside that gave them a glimpse into a different life, and, in particular, they talked about meeting some of the friendliest people in the world.
If you go The best deals are flight/hotel packages (Union International Airport is a few miles east of Puerto Plata). All-inclusive hotels (meals, drinks, free use of tennis courts, windsurfers, etc.) include the huge Playa Naco Golf and Tennis Resort on the beach ((800) 223-6510) and the Puerto Plata Village off the beach ((809) 586-4012). ((809) is the Dominican Republic area code). Non-inclusive hotels include the tastefully decorated Flamenco Beach Resort ((809) 320-5084, fax (809) 320-6319) and the Paradise Beach Club and Casino ((800) 752-9239). For information on all hotels, telephone (809) 586-3132 or fax (809) 586-5301. The best hotel in Puerto Plata itself is the Hostal Jimesson, close to town center but far from beaches and subject to street noise (J.F. Kennedy 41, (809) 586-2137, only $22.50/night during winter). Restaurants in Playa Dorada offer many Dominican specialties, but also prepare a great variety of dishes to please an international crowd. Dominican meals often center around chicken or seafood with salad, fruit, and soups, and include interesting side items such as sweet fried plaintain and yucca bread. Drink only bottled water. Willys, on the Malecn in Puerto Plata, a 10-minute walk from Fort San Felipe, is popular with townspeople. Sandwiches run about $3, full meals (chicken, fish, lobster) from $5-$12. Helados Bon, an ice cream shop right on the main town square at the corner of Beller and Separacion, is a pleasant, high-calorie spot from which to sit and watch the world go by. Inquire at your hotel about golf - nine holes plus club rental and caddie is about $40. For gamblers, the Paradise Beach Club Casino is small and subdued; the Playa Dorada Hotel Casino is larger but noisy; and the huge and elegant Jack Tar Village Casino contains dozens of slots and blackjack tables. May your luck be better than ours. Best buys are rum, amber jewelry, and hair braiding. No girl between 6 and 16 boards the plane home without her hair in thin tight braids tipped with multicolored beads. From $25-$40, depending on one’s hair length and bargaining abilities.