The Story begins in Punta Cana (Dominican Republic)

Every story is supposed to have a beginning and an end. This is the beginning of our shared travels.

As the beginning of our shared travel journeys just reached the 12th anniversary going back to the year 2010, I want to share with you today the first trip my wife (back then she was my girlfriend) and I ever did together.

Do you still remember these first months of new love where nothing the other did was ever really bad and no one said no to anything?

We do because that's kind of how we ended up traveling to the Dominican Republic even though we just met 5 months before and were both students at the time with a minimal discretionary income and just our savings to fall back on.

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The conversion went like this:

Exams are nearly done for this semester. Let's look for a nice vacation together. What's the maximum amount of money you can afford to spend?

Nice idea, I love to travel. Let's not spend more than 1.000€ per person, I don´t have any more savings!

You can probably guess how much we paid in the end. Exactly 998€ per person 😅

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We decided to travel to the Dominican Republic with our plane taking us from Frankfurt Airport to Punta Cana. This was my first international flight ever (sad to say I already was 22 at the time) and it took us ~11, for me agonizing, hours to get there.

Sleep was impossible even though the flight was during the night, as our seats were directly in front of the toilets, and every time someone opened or closed the toilet doors it was making these incredibly annoying sounds. Well, plus a very nice couple with their newborn baby was sitting in front of us. A newborn baby that did not like flying...at all..

Looking back on this today I can be a lot more relaxed than I was back then. Having kids yourself puts a lot of things into perspective. Nonetheless, we arrived and the arrival was great already.

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The first thing we checked out after our arrival in the hotel was the beach after we carried our luggage to our rooms. And let me tell you - my first Caribbean beach experience was amazing. White beaches, blue sea, green palm trees, and a perfect sunrise:

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But after a couple of days at the beach, we got restless and wanted to experience something more. So we booked a couple of different tours to keep ourselves occupied.

The first tour we booked was a guided Quad Tour along the coast, where I was allowed to drive myself across the quite challenging underground. Sand and sand holes can be quite tricky to navigate, but we had a lot of fun racing along the beach:

The trip was great and I can only recommend trying something like this yourself. Even though the sand was just everywhere after we came back, which you can easily understand looking at this picture:

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The second trip we booked was a guided tour to a cocoa & sugarcane plantation as we always wanted to know where our favorite drink (=Hot chocolate) comes from:

As you can see here, the name cocoa bean is a bit misleading as the fruit is growing on a tree:

And the main ingredient for cocoa is the "beans" within the fruit which taste quite sweet even in its raw form:

But before it can be converted to cocoa as we know it, you need to dry the beans (kind of like with coffee):

On our way back we got the opportunity to try the taste of raw sugarcane and let me tell you this stuff is so sweet, it's kind of like sucking a sugar cube while the consistency will remind you of wood:

On our way back to the hotel, our driver surprised us with the offer to visit a local school and talk to the children about their lives while the school gets a part of the fee for our visit. This felt kind of strange but we enjoyed talking to the kids, who speak English very well even though they are little:

It is kind of sad to remember what they told us. Some of them have to travel to school by foot for miles taking like 3 hours one way and even have to share school uniforms with their siblings so they can only go to school on alternating days as the uniform is compulsory for attendance. It makes one consciously realize the privilege one has been growing up with, within countries like Germany.

But they were happy children nonetheless:

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Our final trip was to explore and enjoy a hot tip of a beach without a lot of tourists. And it was a little piece of paradise:

But without any shade closeby it got quite hot, so I had to find another solution:

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Thanks for reading. Looking back on this start of our travels together is such a nice trip down memory lane. 😀