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Samaná

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    • TravelerVoluntariat Dom Rep
      Day 2

      First Dive

      May 27, 2022 in Dominican Republic ⋅ ⛅ 27 °C

      After Theresa and I ate breakfast together, I walked for 25 minutes (morning workout) to get to the diving school where I was welcomed by Daria, the Diving instructor and my fellow volunteers. While the others got ready Daria helped me to pick my wetsuit and diving equipment. I had forgotten how heavy these tanks are and I almost fell when I put it on the first time. When everybody was ready we discussed the plan: we would first count a special type of sea urchins, which unfortunately at the moment are threatened by a local disease, and later on pick up trash from the bottom of the sea. I stayed with Dario throughout the whole dive, who turned out to be italian by the way (so we switched from english, to spanish to italian) so that I could readjust myself and get used to diving.
      After the dive we had a quick talk about the results and then I walked home. Unfortunately on my way it started raining very very much, I needed to hide under a roof. Luckily some other volunteers with a car let me ride with them and drove me to our appartments where I had lunch with Theresa.      Read more

    • TravelerVoluntariat Dom Rep
      1
      Day 10

      Plastic Recycling Project

      June 4, 2022 in Dominican Republic ⋅ ⛅ 29 °C

      Even though it was saturday we had to work. We had to be at a location at 10 am in the morning that Jonathan had sent us earlier that week. I didnt stay out long the evening before so I was in good shape. Unfortunately the rest of my fellow volunteers had partied until early in the morning and most of them were pretty hungover, which wasnt the best with the extreme heat we had that day. When we got there we didnt really know what to do and were pretty confused. So we sat around a bit and saw that there were people sitting around, some standing, and some bags filled with plastic bottles. So basically our task was to help the organizers of this project to weigh the amount of plastic people were bringing, weighing it and pay them according to the number of „libras“. I was so surprised to see that people actually brought massiv bags full of plastic; bottles, broken things, cups, even chairs. Since I was the only one speaking spanish fluently, they put me at the desk, where I had to communicate the numbers to different people and calculate the money they would get. The others had to carry the bags under the burning sun. I was really hot too so that after 3 and a half hours of writing numbers I was dying. Thank god they brought us water bottles. Nina and I had switched function once, so I had to carry bags too and I saw the huge mountains of plastic we‘ve been accumulating. In the end we got to 3 and a half tons of plastic. The people there loved me, the head of the organisation even came up to me a couple of times, said my name and asked me if I was okay. Afterwards they invited us for lunch and I hat the typical „gallo pinto“, rice with beans and chicken, for the first time.
      In the afternoon we went to playa bonita and stayed to see the sunset. It was one of the most beautiful ones i‘ve ever seen in my life.      Read more

    • TravelerVoluntariat Dom Rep
      Day 14

      Diving, diving, diving

      June 8, 2022 in Dominican Republic ⋅ ⛅ 27 °C

      I always talk about the diving and our project but never really about how this actually works. Usually we meet at 9am at the diving center, even though normally everybody’s late, dominican lifestyle, that’s how they call it. Then we prepare: I have to get my tank and weightbelt from our tank room. Then I go to the back of the house into the storage room and get my long sleeve neoprene and my shorty, both market wirh blue zippers so I recognize them. After that I grab my fins with the mask already attached to them, my shoes, and my bcd. Before leaving the room i suddenly realize that as usual I have forgotten my regulator, so with both hands already full, I use my little finger to take the regulator with me, because HELL no, i’m not gonna walk twice. Then I prepare the tanks and get everything ready so that the last step, but really only the very last step, is to put on the neoprene. With 35 degrees this is absolute torture but I know that i’ll be thankful for the extra skin later on.
      Then we walk to the beach which only takes about 1 and a half minutes but we have ti cross the street and descend stairs that are even difficult walking on without a 20kg tank on your back and fins &mask in your hand. Once arrived at the beach Rio and I use to jump into the water as fast as we can. Not one second longer will I stand under the burning sun in in utter heat, sweating like a turkey at thanksgiving. After a couple of minutes the boat arrives and we drive to the spot we dive. We “prepare” in the water, which means that we jump into the water with weightbelt, fins and mask, but only put on the bcd with the tank in the water. Then we dive.
      After the one or two dives we drive back to the dive center with the boat, wash all our used stuff and let it dry. In the meantime we start filling up the empty tanks.
      We get dressed and walk home. I must admit, besides the snowy mountains, this is one of the most beautiful offices one could imagine.      Read more

    • TravelerVoluntariat Dom Rep
      Day 22

      Manty‘s Dominican Food

      June 16, 2022 in Dominican Republic ⋅ ⛅ 24 °C

      Since Nina, Mirjam and Felicie are leaving this weekend we decided to spend one last night all together and go wat dominican food. I knew a hostel where they cook delicious and typical dominican food, because we went there once and organised everything for the whole group. I called the hostelmom Manty 2 days earlier and asked her if she could cook dinner for 11 people and what the price was gonna be per person. She was really nice and told me that for 500 pesos per person, which is about 9 dollars she would prepare different dominican style veggies, fish, chicken, rice, fresh fruit and of course beverage. The day we planned to eat all together, suddenly Manty texted me and asked for a confirmation of the dinner, which I gave her right away. Then she admitted that she still had to go buy the food she wanted to cook but that she didnt have enough money, so she asked me to lend her some money to go to the supermarket. Of course I told her that I would help her out and we met on the street. She sent me a selfie of herself before, so I would know it was her for sure and she even told me what she was wearing. I gave her 2000 pesos, which is only 35 USD… i was shocked and surprised and didnt know what to think of it. She was so thankful, hugged me and apologized a million times. When we went to the Hostel in the evening everything was perfect. No one was late, to start with and we arrived in time. Manty had prepared a huge buffet with everything one could dream of. We ate a LOT and enjoyed every bite of the delicious food. My favourite was the „pescado al coco“, I almost can‘t say it, but I refilled my plate 3 times.
      Afterwards Theresa and I were so full, we were carrying around food babies. But we managed to dance them away at Etno during the following night.      Read more

    • TravelerVoluntariat Dom Rep
      Day 28

      Still alive!!!

      June 22, 2022 in Dominican Republic ⋅ ⛅ 28 °C

      My last 10 days in Las Terrenas were so busy that I didnt even find the time to write a little update on my life. And I even forgot until Grosmami and Gotti asked me if I was still alive, and here’s the proof:) Sorry for that though!
      During my time here I kept adding points tp my bucket list of tjings I wanted to dp for the time being and one of them was to walk from Restaurant Luis all along Cosón to Punta Bonita and later on to Playa Bonita. My friends hadn‘t really been up fot walking but that day I convinced them and they joined me. In the morning we had to do some work at the diving, make new ropes for our coral reef and prepare all the stuff for our next dives. By the way, I am now officially a certified „deep diver“, which is even after the advanced (so my level of diving is higher than papas hihi). So anyways we didnt have to fill up tanks in the afternoon so we had plenty of time. The walk was really nice, we stopped at a beautiful river surrounded by mangroves and palmtrees on its shores. We stayed there a bit and went swimming because it was really hot that day. In the evening we went to groovy Garden again to eat dinner this time & I took rollos de verano con camarones, which ver delicious, however unfortunately earlier they had brought us olives and „papas“ which technically would‘ve been glutenfree but seems like the spices were not good for me, so the next day I suffered from some very bad stomach aches for the first time here in the Dom Rep.
      It got better quickly afterwards and now I‘m feeling great again!      Read more

    • TravelerVoluntariat Dom Rep
      Day 32

      Jungle Party

      June 26, 2022 in Dominican Republic ⋅ ⛅ 26 °C

      The infrastructure of our Building is decent but the worst is definitely the laundry machine. I promise that each time theresa and I’ve washed our clothes, they came out dirtier than they were before. Since I didnt have many days here left and I really really desperately needed some clean clothes to go on to Costa Rica, I decided to bring my clothes to a laundry and let them wash and dry. So I brought them to this girl at 3 pm, and went to playa Bonita. I went with Henrike, Theresa, Matteo, Rene, Antonia and Micka. (Now you know the names of my friends here too) all volunteers working with me, except for Micka, he lives here. We spend the whole afternoon there, while the others were just lying around and eating, Micka and I walked along the beach and played some ballgame in the warer sirh Matteo and Rene. At 6pm I went to the laundry to get my clean, soft and extremely good smelling clothes. My jeans shorts finally didnt feel like packing paper anymore but like normal jeans textile as they should. In the evening there was a mottoparty at Mosquito and the theme was „Jungle“. I had brought a bandana, for my hair, so I didnt have to buy anything. Before going there we went to groovy garden for a cocktail and then I went to Micka‘s place. He lives in a residencial complex but they have a private rooftop. We went up and talked a bit, looked at the stars, which were very bright that night, and generally are because there‘s no light pollution over here. We saw the milky way and many constellations. Eventually he put on some music and chose a bachata song. He had joined our dance class 2 days earlier so we had already danced together and knew it was a lot of fun. We danced and tried out new moves. At around midnight we joined the others at mosquito. This was probably going to be one of my last real official parties here so I hoped it would be good. I wasnt disappointed at all, the music was amazing, people were dressed up and the vibe was really good. Micka and I shared a frozen strawberry daiquiri. I got a tired after dancing for a long time, so we had a break and I did something I usually never did: i drank an energy drink and it seemes like not drinking the same amount of coffee as at home actually has an effect, because It woke me up right away, actually it did not only wake me up, I was so hypernergetic that we went back to mosquito and danced until 3 am when the party ended and the people started going home. There was an afterparty but we decided not to go. I wanted to walk home or take a concho but Micka didnt let me and drive me home. When I got home Theresa was already sleeping and I noticed that she had fallen asleep half-sitting in her bed with her phone in her hands. It looked so funny I started laughing and took her phone out of her hand and loved some stuff so she wouldnt gwt hurt in case she moved. I still wasnt tired so I did a bunch of stuff I had wanted to do but hadnt done yet, as for example book our accomodation in Cabarete, where we planned on going after Las Terrenas. So I went to sleep at 5am when I finally was tired.Read more

    • TravelerVoluntariat Dom Rep
      Day 33

      Pasolas and Karaoke

      June 27, 2022 in Dominican Republic ⋅ ⛅ 26 °C

      Second last day, still a couple of things left on my bucket list. One of them was eating breakfast at the beach, so I woke up with Theresa‘s alarm, prepared breakfast and took a motoconcho to punta poppy. I loved how calm this beach was during the morning anf enjoyed the time I had all by myself. We did a double dive that morning, one of them was a deep dive I had asked Daria if we could do while I was still here. At this point I really have to sayc I am so so so thankful to have had a diving instructor like Daria. She always did everything so we could dive as often as possible. Aldeas de Paz, the organisation actually only wanted us volunteers to do a max of 3 dives a week. Well with daria we had an average of 6 dives, counting in that weekends are always free). After diving I went to tropikbowl, one pf my favourite places to eat with Theresa because we wanted to plan our trip to Cabarete. In my last post I talked about these sandflies. Well, Theresa had an allergic reaction. Her legs were full of inflamed red dots, that were biting her the whole time, so she couldnt stop scratching her skin. The hospitals here are really bad so all they do when somebody has an ailment, is giving them painkillers, which didnt help her at all. In the restaurant she could handle it anymore, she was shaking, freezing and sweating at the same time, she started crying and I told her to go home. She stayed the whole afternoon in bed but couldnt sleep. I stayed a bit with her but there was nothing I could do except for getting her ice and trying to calm her down.
      Another thing on my bucketlist was to rent pasolas, motos, and drive around and go to some beaches. It took us some time to find a good rental place because some that we saw were really sketchy and we didnt feel comfortable. We found a really trustwothy one with good pasolas at the end. A day of rental including complete insurance costed 20 dollars. They wanted to see our drivinf licenses and I showed my car license. Guess that was enough because they didnt want futher documents, they simply asked if we knew how to drive and if we had driven before. I didnt lie. I had driven one before. For about a minute. After drinking some cocktails. With somebody behind me who took care. But hey, I had driven before. I know all the people reading this are not really proud of me at this point, (sorry mami)
      While we were still at the rental place they gave us each a pasola and explained the basics. Then my big moment came. I obviously had no idea what I had to do but it had to seem like i did. I sat on the pasola, and kicked in the stand. I didnt know a pasola was this heavy and it almost fell to the side. Luckily René was standing next to me and helped me. Then I tried to accellerate but I had forgotten to turn the key to turn on the engine. The guy at the rental looked at the others and asked them if I really knew what I was doing. It was really embarassing but eventually I did it and this stupid pasola started moving. I had some severe difficulties in the beginning especially because in las Terrenas these people drive like crazy but I got used to it fast. We drive to a lookout point which was really beautiful, then headed to Coson for a swim and afterwards drank a sundowner at Mosquito bar in El Portillo. At night there was karaoke at the Garage Bar. First I went to an ice cream place woth Micka and then we met the others at The bar. It was so nice to see how we europeans, usually so strict and controlled, just let ourselves go and sang to songs, danced and enjoyed the night fully as if we were locals.      Read more

    • TravelerVoluntariat Dom Rep
      Day 26

      Bonfire Night

      June 20, 2022 in Dominican Republic ⋅ ⛅ 26 °C

      Finally after passport problems and missing her flight a couple of days earlier, now it was finally Nina‘s last night and we decided we wanted to go to the beach and make a bonfire. We ate on the rooftop and went to the beach but the spot we wanted to go to turned out to be way to windy, and the only thing we had brought was a lighter. So we moved to another part of the beach where there wasnt any wind and some more light coming from restaurants near by. The others sat down in a circle and wanted to do a fire but were not really sure about it and just sat around. I tried to convince them several times that we could still try and go find some wood but they had already kind of given it up. That‘s the moment I learned that sometimes you just have to do things by yourself. So while the others were just sitting, I started showeling a hole in the middle of the circle and grabbing some wooden sticks on the ground. On friend started helping me, the others were mostly laughing it off and telling me kt wouldnt work, telling me it wasnt possible etc, but that pushed me even more, I wanted to prove them they were wrong and that if you want something you can make it if you put enough effort into this. When we had gathered enlugh wood we build some kind of tent with it and I tried to remember how that used to work. We foind some tissue to that we used to get flames that quickly went over to the wook. 10 minutes later we had a cute little Bonfire and when I told the others that if we didnt look for more wood now it would be off soon, everybody stood up and looked for wood. Eventually Micka came and brought his guitar. So we sat around until 1 am in the morning, playing guitar, singing and listening to songs.Read more

    • Circular Odyssey
      111112
      Day 89

      Samana

      April 1, 2023 in Dominican Republic ⋅ ☀️ 27 °C

      Péninsule de Samana - on se souviendra :
      - De la Watermelon house dirigé par les adorables Isi et Dodley. Dodley venait d’Haiti & Isi du Chili pour faire un reportage sur le mur entre la République Dominicaine et Haïti
      - De la musique super forte dans les bars
      - De la soirée coucher de soleil sur le pont Samana avec les autres guests dont le couple d’argentin. Isi a animé la soirée en joutant quelques chansons à la guitare.
      - De la visite du parc national de los Haitises qui s’est avéré être un attrape touriste un peu pénible.
      - De la journée en scooter pour arpenter El Valle et se retrouver sur la plage magnifique d’El Valle. On n’oubliera pas la ptite assiette de fruit sur la plage.
      - Du beau point de vue sur la péninsule et des vidéos reportage sur les déchets laissés partout sur les plages…
      - De l’histoire avec le couple qui est partit sans payer de l’auberge.
      - De la dernière nuit à côté de l’aéroport et la discussion avec l’hôte haïtienne qui nous a raconté les conditions difficiles de la vie an Haïti.
      - Des galères avec le Uber qui essaye de gratter plus cher.      Read more

      See translation
    • TravelerDominikanische Republik
      111
      Day 64

      Playa Rincón

      September 14, 2023 in Dominican Republic ⋅ ⛅ 31 °C

      meiner Meinung nach, der schönste Strand, an dem ich je war..
      •keine Leute
      •wunderschönes Wasser
      •keine Steine/Korallen sondern nur Sand
      •frisches Wasser
      •keine grosse Wellen
      •keine Algen
      was will man mehr?😍      Read more

      See translation

    You might also know this place by the following names:

    Samaná Province, Samana Province, Samaná, Distrito de Samana, AZS

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