Samaná Day 1: Playa Rincón

On Thursday morning, we woke up suuuper early and went to the bus stop. (We found some other Americans from Utah there!)  It was a three hour ride on a greyhound-like bus, and I slept most of the way and then woke up in Samaná!
Samaná is gorgeous... it's on a tiny peninsula on the northeast part of the island.

Hotel Docia

We went to our little hotel just long enough to drop off our bags and change into swimsuits, and then we were off to the beach! 
The beach that we went to first is called Playa Rincón, and it is hands down the most beautiful beach I've ever seen.

Usnavi talks about Playa Rincón and how great it is in the musical In The Heights, and I had been keeping my fingers crossed that we'd get to go there when we went to Samaná, and we did!   It was even more beautiful than I'd expected.  I cannot aptly describe how incredibly blue the water is! And salty. It was very very very salty.
We spent most of the afternoon there... just relaxing in the waves, hanging out on the beach, and exploring. We found a freshwater stream that was coming out from under a cliff.
What was incredible is how few people there were on the beach! I thought surely a beach that beautiful would be a big tourist attraction, but I guess it's too hard to get to.  Every now and then there'd be a couple walk down the beach, but usually our group was the only one on the entire corner of the beach! How cool :] 

We went a little bit farther down the beach where there were a bunch more people. There were a ton of kids playing in the sand, people camping, guys playing baseball, and people jumping into the river there. This part of the beach was a lot more happening.

That night we went out for dinner at a Chinese restaurant right up the hill from our hotel.  I didn't really expect asian food in the DR to be amazing, but the fried rice I got was really really good! We had to make fun of Christina though.... who gets spaghetti at a Chinese restaurant in the Caribbean??