Dominican Rpb: Failed whales-watching and hitchhiking on the coast

^{Salto El Limon}

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[17/02/18] However much I liked Jarabacoa, boredom was kicking in so I found myself on the road again with the thumb up.

Made it to Las Terrenas, that located on Samana Peninsula. I wanted to see humpback whales which come to the bay every year in this season to produce offspring.

I was stupid enough to relax and do it the easiest way, joining an excursion to the bay. They organize the transportation and the boat for whales-watching.

At night and in the morning it was raining heavily and I was tempted to ditch it and sleep some more, but I got my shit together and left the hostel to the rendezvous point.

I immediately realized my grave mistake - the excursion was oriented on the typical tourists (rich old people, families and the like).

The manager was mainly speaking Spanish, cracking stupid jokes, that he's probably cracking every single time he leads the group. The most important info was also translated to for me.

And I was out of place in this lame touristic crap so much that during a stop in El Limon he sent a henchman to me who declared that my face is "too serious" for this party or something along these lines.

He tried to give me 50 pesos (1$) so I could please leave and go back myself (the payment for the excursion I did not yet make). Take into consideration that I came to this peninsula specifically to watch whales.
I wish I took the money and left, but no, I got angry instead and confronted the manager who did not dare to say anything in my face, so I went on with them.

We were taken to the town Samana and loaded on a boat. It was windy, the sea was restless and from time to time we were showered by occasional rains.
For a few hours the boat braved the waves, which drenched the unlucky upper desk passengers like we weren't wet enough. And with all this in mind, I only had a glance at whales' tails a couple of times and made exactly 0 worthy photos.

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A complete fiasco, considering that apparently it could have been done much cheaper if only I wasn't a fool and went there by myself.

After a day I and Florian, a German guy I met in the hostel, went to check out waterfall Salto El Limon. It is usually accessed by horse riding by tourists, we could do it on foot easily.
Even though at first we chose the wrong direction and came to some wilderness, but then corrected the mistake.

The next day we hitchhiked by the coast to the west. It was easy and a helluva lot of fun, but in the process my camera died, the lens, to be specific. And now I have to find new ones and also buy some casing for the camera, absence of which was the reason for the incident.

With the last light we reached Cabarete, where we hanged out for 1.5 days. Not much to do there, this little resort town can't boast anything but beaches. Though, it can't even do that, the beaches are pretty mediocre.

In the hostel we made acquaintance with a Greek guy Alexis who never hitched, but wanted to join us, so the next day it were 3 of us on the road. At some point we split, they went to Puerto Plata an I to Santiago de los Caballeros, the second largest city in the country to try and fix my camera.

To be continued...

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Check out my travel blog:
Dominican Republic: 26, 27, 28
Turkey: 21, 22, 23, 24, 25
Iran: 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20