Samaná Day 2: Salto de Limón y Playa Cosón

On our second day in Samaná, we ate breakfast and then headed out hiking. Danny, our fearless guide, said that this was his 22nd time completing the trail to Salto de Limón.... wow.

The trail was absolutely beautiful! We had the options of riding horses (I kinda wanted to just for the sake of saying I'd ridden a horse through the forest to a waterfall in the DR), but we ended up walking and I welcomed the exercise :]  The trail wound through the trees right next to a river--gorgeous!

 We had to hike down a zillion stairs to get to Salto de Limón, and there were lots of tourists everyone (stupid tourists...), but it was totally worth it!  The waterfall is way bigger than my pictures suggest, in fact I just looked it up for you and it is 170 feet tall! Yikes.  There's a pool at the bottom that you can swim in, so we did, of course.  The water was super cold, but we swam all the way behind the falls and there was a little cave behind it! About the size of a small room... it was unreal. I wish I had a waterproof camera--it was so so gorgeous behind the water!
The only problem is that when I was initially getting into the pool, I jumped from a big rock into the water (in an attempt to avoid climbing over little rocks), and ending up slicing my shin on a rock under the water... ouch. So then we got to see the "Salto de Limón" along with the "Salto de Sangre"... ha.. gross.  It's developed quite a beautiful bruise too in the past few days, so that's something.

Christina face-planted into the dirt about a second and a half after this picture was taken...

After lunch we went to another beach in Las Terrenas called Playa Cosón, it was beautiful! (But that's nothing new...) We hung out there for a few hours... we played dodgeball with sand, and some local boys taught Matthew (our resident parkour master), how to swing out of a coconero. All in all, a great afternoon.

 We had lunch at a pizza place, that was quite delicious, and that's where we met an Aggie, class of '74, who invited us all out for drinks and hors d'oeuvres. He took us to this super ritzy restaurant and ordered a bunch of different tapas for us! Almost every dish was something I'd never heard of before, but it was all so good! I enjoyed the octopus ceviche :] The Aggie Network is so cool... he was just so nice to us. I still can't believe he did all that for a group of kids he didn't know!!

Our whole group with Francisco, the Doting Aggie.

We couldn't resist.

After our long day running around seeing the sights, we had a lovely dinner and then went out dancing! The place was actually a car wash which turned into a dance club by night... pretty interesting! We had so so much fun working on our bachata dance skills again...

That's all for Friday!