Exploring the North Coast of the DR

It’s official…we have our own motorcycle! Since we have been renting a bike here so often we decided that it was time that we got one of our own. Nothing fancy, we got a used bike from one of the other cruisers that we will use while we are here. Now that we have our own wheels we are free to explore more of the DR. We’ve been busy seeing all that we can whether it is with a group of others or on our own. Freedom….what a great feeling!

Along with a few other cruisers from Luperon we decided to take a road trip. Our first big trip was to Cabarete the wind and kite surfing capitol of the island and known worldwide for it’s ideal windsurfing conditions. It is about 100 kilometers or close to 60 miles east along the coast from Luperon. It was a nice ride. What a difference Cabarete is from Luperon…it is a true tourist area with lots of shops and places to eat, young surf dudes and gals all over the place and of course the beach is beautiful too! We ended up staying the night and we had so much fun we decided to keep on going further east along the coast when we woke up the next day.

I thought that this beach hut was pretty

Next stop…Rio San Juan. The beaches here are very pretty, the water is so clear and it looked like it would have been great snorkeling but unfortunately we did not think bring any snorkel gear. Right in the middle of town is a lagoon called Laguna Gri-Gri it takes you through the Cueva de las Golondrinas that was formed by an 1846 rock slide. It is a beautiful nature preserve and you can take a tour through the winding mangroves to see all of the wildlife. We skipped the tour and just enjoyed the lagoon since we see lots of lagoon like wildlife right from our boats…lol! We spent the night right on the beach in a nice hotel and found a great french bakery for breakfast (finally some good eats, I was happy!) and once again we were having so much fun we decided to keep on going east again further down the coast.

Chilling under a beach hut

Pretty palm trees lining beach

Pretty view of the ocean from high above

We headed next to Las Terrenas. I think that I mentioned this but all of this trip was unplanned. We knew that we wanted to spend the night in Cabarete but the rest of the trip was by the seat of our pants or whatever we thought would be fun next. The trip to Las Terrenas was the highlight of our whole ride. The road was a brand new built highway that was incredible to travel on. It wound through beautiful steep mountains and valleys and had a really neat cave that was right by the roadside that we stopped to check out. Until we had traveled on this highway we had only seen the scenic views of beaches, rice fields, plantation and banana fields and lots of cities that we had traveled through but, this mountain road was a something else…beautiful!

Horses running down the beach in Cabarete, pretty mountains in the background

Don’t know if you noticed but the photos and stories in this post don’t really match that’s because my camera battery died right when we started this trip. I did not have the charger with me so I’ve improvised with the pics..they are good ones though. I guess that means that we will just have to go to all of these places again so that we can take some photos to show all of  you how nice it was… 🙂     After all we can’t leave you guessing what it looked like…LOL!

Street view in Cabarete and the last pic that I was able to take before my camera died!

Well, we’re back on the boat right now catching up on some chores and dreaming of our next big ride to someplace new. We’re getting excited because plans are for Rachel to come to visit us sometime in late August so of course we have to check out where the best spots are to take her when she gets here. I’m especially excited to see her because I miss her soooooo much and I’m counting the days until she gets here…as a matter of fact we miss all of you and sometimes we get a bit homesick…all right, I better go before I start to tear up thinking about it….love and miss you all!

Take Care,

Jennifer and Brian