TREASURE ISLAND
Treasure Island - Luxury Travel Magazine
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Treasure Island | |||||
| By: Timothy Morrell, Issue 48 – Spring 11 | |||||
| Hispaniola Island, Dominican Republic | |||||
| PIRATE GOLD NO LONGER LURES ADVENTURERS TO THE LEGENDARY HISPANIOLA ISLAND IN THE CARIBBEAN. TODAY THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC OFFERS PRICELESS TRANQUILLITY TO WELL-HEELED TRAVELLERS. TIMOTHY MORRELL ALSO DISCOVERED OPPORTUNITIES FOR ADVENTURE BOTH IN THE WILD COUNTRYSIDE AND ON THE MANICURED BEACHES. French doors open from the large and elegant drawing room of your villa onto a broad stone paved portico. Only a few steps away across an immaculately tended lawn bordered by palm trees is your private beach, then the infinite blue of the Caribbean. Perfection doesn’t get any simpler than this. I tend to get bored very quickly on beach holidays, but the level of refinement at the Dominican Republic’s Tortuga Bay Resort was more than enough to keep me captivated. The accommodation, which was designed by Oscar de la Renta, consists of just a few columned, airy houses in a lush garden. A charming white bungalow provides the reception area. It doesn’t seem like a resort at all. You feel instead that you’re staying on a very fine country estate, right beside the ocean. It’s actually part of the larger Puntacana Resort and Club. The resort is on the edge of the most visited tourist destination in the Dominican Republic, the Costa del Coco. This 64-kilometre strip has the most beautiful beaches on the island, or on the planet, depending on who you talk to. A few kilometres up the coast from Tortuga Bay is the densest concentration of Caribbean resort hotels outside of Cancun, but you’d never know it. The busy international airport nearby is the only giveaway. This gem-like property is far too small and exclusive to be economically viable without being subsidised by income generated by the airport, which is conveniently owned by Puntacana. Disembarking passengers who are headed for Tortuga Bay are met as soon as they get off the plane by staff who take care of tedious details like customs and immigration. Guests are escorted directly through the terminal building and driven to their villa, just ten minutes away. The accommodation is a scaled down and modernised version of the neoclassical mansions built for sugar plantation owners in the West Indies during the 18th century. The result is a graciously symmetrical pleasure pavilion with an expansive two-bedroom apartment on the ground floor and a smaller, separate, one-bedroom suite upstairs. These have separate entrances, but would work well in combination for a house party. The pale, handsome double drawing room in the principal apartment has matching sofas at either end and the two halves mirror each other like a carefully proportioned Robert Adam interior. The decor is calmly understated. While drifting about your private realm of dream-like contentment, don’t forget that there’s a whole country out there waiting to be discovered. It was only a couple of months after arriving in the New World that Christopher Columbus reached Hispaniola Island, the eastern two thirds of which now comprise the Dominican Republic, so the colonial history surrounding you dates back to 1492. The old part of the capital city, Santo Domingo, has splendid 16th century streets, squares, houses and churches. That’s 250 kilometres away, however, so it’s a lot easier to explore your immediate vicinity. From Tortuga Bay you have to drive through flat sugar-cane country for about an hour before the landscape becomes really interesting, but a distinctive Latin-American-African culture lies just outside the boundary of the resort. Multi-coloured houses and tiny shops with lurid homemade signs line the roads. You drive through pulsing merengue music, past stalls selling exotic fruit and between fences draped with sheets of meat hung out to dry. Up in the hills local colour is a little less full-on. Soothing aqua blue painted shacks bring reminders of the ocean into the heart of the jungle, and there are scarlet flowers everywhere. Mountain ranges form the spine of the island, and intrepid travellers with several days to spare can ascend to alpine scenery. The lower peaks are easily accessible on a day trip from the Costa del Coco. Hidden in the dense vegetation are small farms where you can see vanilla orchids, pendulous cocoa pods and vermilion coffee berries. The produce is all organically grown and sold by the producers. After declaring it to customs I was able to bring everything into Australia with no trouble. Food in the Dominican Republic is dominated by a remarkable diversity of mashed and fried starch. Dedicated culinary explorers will discover some robust bean dishes and delicious soups, but if the local cuisine fails to spark a lifelong love affair with plantains and manioc, Puntacana’s restaurants serve stylish, Mediterranean-influenced dishes. At La Yola restaurant you can enjoy fine, simple seafood on a thatched platform built out over the sea. Bamboo, the restaurant at Tortuga Bay, has more ambitious food and (thanks to Señor de la Renta) more chicsurroundings, but it too is refreshingly simple and relaxed. For guests who start to feel guilty about the hedonistic pleasure of doing nothing other than absorb the beauty of their surroundings and eat, there are plenty of opportunities for healthy activity. Puntacana has tennis courts and three golf courses, one of which was described by US Golf Magazine as the number one course in the Caribbean. You can go back in time by exploring the local countryside on horse back or relive memories of 1970s advertisements by cantering through the shallows of a pristine white beach. There are coral reefs just off the coast where tropical fish thrive and several ships have come to grief, making this a renowned area for snorkelling and scuba diving. I tried kite surfing, but that takes about three days to learn. Riding a Segway personal transport vehicle is much less challenging - that takes about three minutes to master. You can join a line of rigid figures gliding through the landscape like a South Park animation. It’s silly but fun. If letting gyroscopic wheels do the walking for you sounds like too much of an effort, take serene refuge in the Six Senses Spa. That’s healthy too. | |||||
| WHEN TO GO | |||||
| While temperatures average between 28 and 31 degrees Celsius for most of the year, tropical humidity can make the temperatures feel higher. May to June is historically the wettest time of the year, though you are unlikely to experience much rain at any time. The hurricane season is during August and September, though these are rare. The most popular time to visit the Dominican Republic is from December to February and during July and August. Unfortunately this means higher prices and more crowded beaches. Another popular time for tourists is Semana Santa, the week before Easter, and the country is especially busy at this time. February has great weather, and while Carnaval is a major drawcard for tourists, nature-lovers will also enjoy the whale watching during this time. Sports fans can skip the whales and still enjoy the weather during the baseball season in November. | |||||
| GETTING THERE | |||||
| Qantas flies direct to Los Angeles from Sydney daily. From Los Angeles, there are several connecting American Airlines flights to Santo Domingo via Miami, but it is best to leave for Miami as soon as possible, as the last flight to Santo Domingo is at 6:20pm. Total travel time is just over 24 hours, leaving Sydney around 10 or 11am and arriving in Santo Domingo at 8:30pm on the same day, due to the flights crossing the International Date Line. Return economy fares start from A$3,132 and business class from A$17,280. | |||||
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