Quoting from Gourmet Magazine...

[canadian bob]

"It is comforting to know that one is completely safe to wander anywhere in the Dominican Republic, day or night. There is very little crime here......"
This is a Quote from the October 1980 issue of the Gourmet magazine which I happened on in a used bookstore in Ontario. It is an interesting 10 pages of descriptions and recipes. "Puerto Plata is the liveliest town on the north coast, and cruise ships make frequent calls there".
What a pity that "progress" changed so much in the last 26 years.......
Canadian Bob.

 

[Hillbilly]

It was the "tour guides" that destroyed the cruise ship bonanza....they rioted if things were not just as they wanted...no competition of any kind....

Bunch of real axxholes....... city has been dead since.....

HB

 

[dv8]

a bit nostalgic...

before i came her my boyfriend assured me there is no danger of any kind in dr. then i have found out about earthquakes (forgive my ignorance, a year ago i would have not been able to pin point dr on the map, but how many dominicans know where exactly poland is?). from then on it was getting worse and worse, first a spider the size of a car has chosen my wardrobe as his residence, then equally big cucaracha was chased thgough the flat by our gatito mestizo and now i found out about landrones... such a shame. puerto plata has a great potential, it only needs more money and more order. imagine clean parks instead of heaps of rubbish dumped among the trees, imagine a big public pool and leisure centre near malecon, just as i used to be... hope now when the government wants to make pp more appealing to the tourist and less appaling it will lift up and come back to its glory...

 

[CyaBye3015]

I remember my parents taking a Caribbean cruse about 40 years back, the port of call on hispaniola then was PAP. Go figure, now wild horses couldn't drag me to PAP.

 

[canadian bob]

The trend to "all inclusive" tourist hotels certainly has severely affected local restaurants& other businesses. Cheap flights from Europe and Canada which bring in folks not interested in venturing outside these resorts have exacerbated the problem. Recently, there has been talk of dredging the harbour at Puerto Plata to facilitate big cruise ships. Has this been done? Such a simple act would bring in huge revenues. As HB has noted in past posts, there is no local authority with power to swing things around. All orders (and money) for this sort of activity come directly from the Capital. Canadian Bob