Talanquera !!!! HOT OR NOT? (Barcelo Talanquera Beach Resort)

Member Name: patricio

Product:	Barcelo Talanquera Beach Resort
Date:	08/11/01 (1643 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Weather good, Friendly Locals, Excellent choice of food

Disadvantages: Not enough to do , busy on weekends, Sea dangerous

My partner and I were looking for a nice 2 week break where it was going to be hot but not too expensive. After looking around lots of travel agencies, it became aparent that the Dominican Republic was going to be the cheapest..
We found a deal in June 2001 for 2 weeks all inclusive at the Talanquera beach hotel in Juan Dolio.

Upon arriving at the airport from the bumpy flight over the bermuda triange, we were shocked to find how hot it was. We joined our coach and waited to see what wonders we would see. After leaving the airport, the first thing we saw was the locals market.. It was absolute chaos, cars, people, bananas everywhere and I got the feeling that the whole island would be the same.

Around an hour later we took a turn off the main road to reach our hotel.. The cases were unloaded and we were told to leave them as the porter would take them to our rooms when they were allocated. We were assisted to our first room by the porter, I gave him a dollar tip as advised. The settings around the room were absolutely beautiful and outside our room on the ground floor were pink flamingos.
unfortunately the room was really damp and felt it would not be suitable for a 2week stay. We contacted the rep who moved us, this again was the same.. After the rep pulled a few string and shouted at a few people we were moved to a 1st floor room..
The room was really spacious with wardrobes, double bed, airconditioning, Bath, shower and nice views over the ponds.

We decided to venture over the main road to the other section of the hotel, to find a place on the beach.. The beach was a really nice white sand with a number of sunbeds strewn around. The one thing that I noticed was there was a number of security guards patrolling the beach.
We found a place to bathe and realise why the guards were there, as next to where we were sat was around 10 traders trying to sell things to the people at the hotel.. These guys would come to you ev
eryday, every hour to see if you wanted to buy anything from Flip flops,hats,lilo's,Cigars,timeshares and even Drugs.
Whilst at the beach I decided to go out to the Coral Reef, which had unfortunately died, but it was so close that you could walk about 50 meters to it. The one thing you will need to make sure of is that you always wear flip flops in the sea, as I managed to get stung by an urchin, which when I spoke to locals they said to "drink more vitamins" which meant the local rum..
The good thing about the beach was that is was very cool due to the nice sea breeze.
A few days we stayed by the pool, but found that it was very hot with hardly any breeze at all, which meant that you were in and out of the pool trying to cool down.

As it was an all inclusive, all of the drinks and food were free, which was good but you did have to struggle on an evening to get served at the bar as it was always very busy, and on weekend locals would visit the hotel making it even more difficult to get served.
The restaurants always had a good selection of foods and you were always well looked after. The one thing that usually caused a problem was when entering, as a lady would check your clothing.. A few disputes were had when I tried to enter with a vest type top, and they wanted me to change it to a t-shirt.. but i managed to talk my way round..

On one of the days we decided to go to the capital, but wanted to save money by hiring our own car and driving there.. We had a few warning about what to do in advance. On the way to Santo Domingo, we realised that the roads were terrible and that they never completed the brand new roads next to the old ones, so cars were driving on both and at roundabouts sometimes it would be just dirt and big holes to drive around..

The capital is very poor, whilst walking through, we were the only foreigners and everybody just looked at us in amazement, again being pushed into buying things a
ll of the time..
On the way back to our hotel, we were stopped by two guys on a motorbike, one of them had a white shirt and was carrying a gun. He asked to see my license and said that he wanted me to pay a fine for going through a red light... he wanted £100, and I played dumb saying that I couldnt understand him, and eventually I got my license back and I said "take me to the british consulate".. The man pretty much just walked away. We were warned of police doing this to make money on tourists!!!

All in all the whole 2 weeks was very different and you had to appreciate that it was a 3rd world country with very little outside of the hotel complex..and still not cleaned up from the hurricane a few years ago..

I would go again, but to the north of the island to the nicer beaches and hotels.. im sure its worth paying more!!

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