Amateur Traveller at Large

by Karly Knott (Canada)

Making a local connection Dominican Republic

Back in 2014, my now husband and I had decided to take our first trip out of the Country. We were a young couple, who didn’t have a ton of money, but he had recently been laid off from his Job that he had been at for over ten years, so he came into a good amount of money. We decided to go to Puerto Plata in the Dominican Republic. Neither of us had ever left the country, so let me just say we were very inexperienced when we started planning the trip. For starters, I had booked our flight for midnight, thinking we would drive to Edmonton to drop our son off with Grandma during the day, and fly that night. Well, as we were preparing, I realized that based on the date the flight was the night BEFORE. So, the trip did not start off very well, as we lost a day of travel. Once we arrived at our hotel, we were both so exhausted we fell asleep on our bed until about 7 PM and had no idea what had happened. We started putting our clothes away and getting ready to venture out. We decided to hide our cash somewhere where we wouldn’t be temped to spend all of it in one night, as we didn’t have a lot of it with us, probably about $500 CAD for the whole week. We go out, and there is a table with a man selling all sorts of trinkets and souvenirs. We buy a beautiful purple oil painting of the ocean, which we still have to this day. My husband and I are very friendly people and love to talk, so we start talking to the man who sold us the painting, and he ends up telling us he wants to take us on the town. Now I know that this was not a smart idea, considering where we were, and we had already been taking advantage of the “all-Inclusive” free beverages for a little while now. The man takes us, along with another couple we had met out in a fancy car to this Karaoke bar in the city, and tells us we have bottle service all night, on him and to just enjoy ourselves. We have some drinks, chat with some of the locals, and the man decides he wants us to pay for everything now, after he had told us it was on him! This was stressful for us since we had left most of our money in our hotel room and only had about $40 American dollars with us, and he seemed like he was profoundly serious about us paying for everything. We noticed that the other couple had sneakily found their way out of the bar, and took off down the street, we followed. We ended up walking down to the water but being in the city the area we were at was very dirty, and there was a lot of garbage down there. It was a huge shock from where we had been earlier to where we were now, only because we had never been anywhere else before and had assumed that it was everywhere. So, we were all sitting there just chatting, and we hear someone yelling our name, the man who took us out had sent one of his friends to find us. Thinking we were about to be in a fight about the whole not paying for the bar tab thing, we were surprised he was just sending him to make sure we got back to our hotel safe. The rest of that trip home was kind of a blur, but when we got back to our room, I was looking for our money, and shocking surprise, I could not find it! I ended up spending the rest of the night/morning looking for my husband’s wallet, thinking he dropped it somewhere, but ended up getting lost and walking around in circles for four hours, trying to find out where the room was. The rest of our trip was also just as eventful, but we will save that for another day!