Punta Cana - Beach and Pool

Of course you can't spend all your vacation admiring the buildings or sitting in your room - however nice they all are. So, it was off to the beach. I bought an Olympus Stylus Tough camera for this trip, which can go underwater! I had to learn a few tricks on the trip, which was unfortunate (as my photos before I learned the tricks weren't as good as the ones I took afterwards), but it was nice being able to take photos everywhere, even in the water.

As I said yesterday, the beach was made up of fine white sand. The different resorts all had roped off areas for their guests, with occasional free areas where natives offered boat rides, parasailing and other services. And the area closest to the water is free for everyone to walk, so you can wander for hours down the beach...

Our resort (and this was not true of all of them, as I learned later) had a large number of shade palapas, palm trees and lounge chairs. It also had a beach bar service and a nearby bar/lunch & snack restaurant (at night it was the seafood restaurant). The stretch was also long enough that if you didn't want to join in the activities (at one side), you could read in relative quiet elsewhere. There were also geckos that came by your chair looking for food. One day we walked down the beach for over an hour and came to an area of shops on the beach. It had much better prices (and more reasonable starting points) than the people selling on the beach and the flea market that came to our resort.

After I'd gotten a decent sunburn that first day on the beach, I decided a day at the pool would be nice. There were 3 pool bars, two dry (spaced a ways apart) and one wet bar. A separate kids pool was supposed to keep the noise down (though there was only 1 noisy kid there when we were, and he stayed by our side of the pool, unfortunately).

The pool was lagoon style, with swim up rooms along one side and several bridges to cross over/under. A fountain on one end and 'jacuzzi' (it was jetted but not heated) in the middle made it varied and fun to swim in. And it was gorgeous to look at.

It was especially beautiful at night.