> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.adamsooley.ca/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Grand Paradise Bavaro - Our 2010 Honeymoon - URL: https://www.adamsooley.ca/grand-paradise-bavaro-our-2010-honeymoon/ - Published: 2010-02-20T05:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-30T13:53:58.000Z - Description: Our February 2010 honeymoon at Grand Paradise Bavaro in Punta Cana. Seven days of beaches, food, dune buggies, friends and a $999 mystery-resort vacation. - Author: Adam Sooley - Tags: Travel & Newfoundland # Grand Paradise Bavaro — Our 2010 Honeymoon **UPDATE:** Go Travel South went bankrupt only three days after we got back. That was close. > **A note from 2026:** I originally wrote this post in February 2010 after our honeymoon in Punta Cana. I'm restoring it as part of bringing some of the older adamsooley.ca posts back to the current site. Prices, businesses, resort details and travel information below are from 2010 and definitely shouldn't be considered current travel advice. ## Intro We decided to do a trip down south in the sun during February for our honeymoon. Jodi and I invited some friends to come along for what would turn out to be a great trip. After deciding on the week, location — Punta Cana — and star rating, we just had to select a resort. This is where Go Travel South (GTS) came in. GTS had deals flying from Halifax and Ottawa called Wild Card deals. Basically, you picked the location, date and star rating, and they picked the resort for you. So we went with the 4+ star option for Punta Cana for seven days, leaving Ottawa on February 13, 2010\. $999 per person, including tax. That was $699 plus $300 tax and fell nicely within our budget. The only worry was that we wouldn't find out which resort we were staying at until we actually landed in Punta Cana. That made doing any research beforehand pretty difficult. Once we landed, we went to the GTS booth and were handed a package telling us our resort and which bus to get on outside. Surprise! Grand Paradise Bavaro it was. ## Photos *\[GALLERY — Original Grand Paradise Bavaro vacation photos\]* ## Food One thing to remember when travelling is that you're somewhere with different food, ingredients and expectations than you're used to at home. Not everything is necessarily going to be exactly what you like. We ate at the buffet for every breakfast and lunch, plus five of our dinners. Although I tried quite a few different things from the buffet, I tended to stick with the stuff I knew was good and that I liked. And here's one important lesson we learned: **Book your restaurants as soon as you arrive.** They fill up quickly, and you might either not get in or not get the restaurant you want. ### Breakfast I'd get a fresh omelette made to order with four eggs, onions, tomatoes, cheese and bacon, along with two slices of French toast and a bowl of Fruit Loops. Yes, apparently Fruit Loops were an important part of my honeymoon breakfast. ### Lunch Fries, nachos, cheese and chili. Healthy living at its finest. ### Dinner I'd usually try whatever fresh item they were making each night, and it was always pretty good, along with some soup and bread rolls. For our other two dinners, we ate at the Dominican and Italian restaurants. ### Dominican Restaurant The food here was better than the buffet. I had a salad with a honey glaze for a starter, followed by crab balls for a warm starter. I did **not** like the crab balls. For my main, I had steak — a small, fast-fry type of steak, but still good — with rice and vegetables. ### Italian Restaurant This was by far the best food I had all week. Naturally, we didn't get to eat there until about two hours before we were leaving the resort. Again: **book your restaurants early.** I had a selection of cold starters with cheese, bread and cold cuts, tomato soup for the warm starter and chicken parmigiana for my main. It was all delicious and easily my favourite meal of the trip. ## Activities There were plenty of things to do around the resort, with many of them included. Free activities included: - Snorkelling - Water boards - Aerobics - Basketball - Bicycles - Catamarans - Dancing - Kayaking - Ping-pong There were also paid activities available at the resort, including the casino, spa, powered watercraft rentals, scuba diving and parasailing. You could also leave the resort for other excursions. We decided to go dune bugging one day. It was fun, but in hindsight we probably should have researched the different companies offering it before booking. Our dune buggies had 150cc engines and cost $90 US per buggy, with two people in each. Ours seemed pretty slow, some of them got stuck in the sand, and the trip itself was shorter and nowhere near as elaborate as what had been described to us. The lesson? If you're booking excursions away from the resort, do a little research first instead of just taking the first option put in front of you. ## Money Both Dominican pesos and U.S. dollars were accepted. At the time, one U.S. dollar was worth about 36 Dominican pesos. I brought roughly $300 US cash with me and managed to spend most of that, including a decent amount on drinks during the plane ride down. You needed cash for outside activities and for things like American snacks from the gift shop. There was also a bank machine at the resort where I was able to withdraw pesos. At the time, 5,000 pesos worked out to roughly $145 Canadian. If I were doing the trip again, I'd probably bring around $500 US, mostly in small bills with nothing larger than $20s. Getting change could be difficult, and smaller bills made negotiating prices considerably easier. ## Shopping There wasn't much shopping directly on the resort beyond a gift shop and cigar shop, and both could be expensive. A bottle of sunscreen was going for $30–$40 US. So yes, bring lots of sunscreen. Just outside the resort and within walking distance to the left was a flea market with around 30 little shops operating out of small garage-like spaces. The shopkeepers could be pretty persistent. You'll hear things like: - *"No pressure!"* - *"Looky looky!"* - *"Cheapy cheapy!"* It's entertaining at first but tt gets old pretty quickly, and make sure you haggle. Pick out what you want, decide what you're willing to pay, start considerably below that and work from there. If one shop wouldn't agree to your price, chances were pretty good the next shop had exactly the same thing. At the time, you could get large oil paintings for around $12 US, bottles of rum for $5 and keychains for about $1 each. Again, these were **2010 prices**. Please don't show up in Punta Cana in 2026 waving this blog post around demanding your $5 bottle of rum. ## Rooms We had a standard room with two double beds. It was clean and cozy, although our bathroom left a little to be desired. The faucet for the tub came off, but we could still use the shower. The soap holder on the shower wall fell off too. Neither was really a big deal. The fridge was restocked daily with two Cokes, two Sprites and a four-litre bottle of water. There was also a safe in the room, but you had to rent the lock for $20 US per week. Worth the money, in my opinion. The other two couples travelling with us both had cockroaches in their rooms, although they decided to live with them. On our second day, we were told we had to be out of the building by 9:30 the following morning so they could fumigate it. So there was that. We stayed in the older beach section of the resort. The newer section was farther away from the beach but apparently had nicer rooms, including plasma TVs. Remember when having a plasma TV was noteworthy enough to mention in a hotel review? ## Beach The beach was long and covered in beautiful, soft white sand. It was cleaned every night, and there wasn't much seaweed in the water except after some rain. You had to get to the beach pretty early if you wanted chairs and a good spot. On a couple of days, it took us quite a while to gather six chairs and find somewhere decent to put them. The resort was family-oriented, although topless sunbathing wasn't unusual on the beach. Overall, though, the beach was beautiful, the water was clean and warm, and it was a pretty great place to spend a February day when home was buried in snow. ## Nightlife There was always something going on at night. Every evening there was a live show in the theatre with dancers and performers. The show changed nightly and often included audience participation. The **Crazy Moon Disco** was a regular dance club and stayed open until 3 a.m. There was also a 24-hour sports bar with some games and, unsurprisingly, a lot of soccer on the TVs. Each night there was a beach party near the beach bar, and the resort also had a casino with slot machines and some tables. One terminology lesson we learned: what we'd normally call a nightclub back home was generally referred to as a **disco** there. ## Staff Most of the staff were wonderful. Spanish was obviously the main language, but many of the staff could get by in English and French as well. Tips were greatly appreciated. One bartender we got to know told us he earned about $200 US a month and worked 12 days on followed by three days off. Tips therefore made a significant difference. Even tipping $1 US with a drink could make a difference, or you could give a larger tip once you got to know a bartender or housekeeper who would be looking after you for the rest of the week. But the staff member I remember most wasn't a bartender or anyone we'd been dealing with all week. It was one of the gardeners. I noticed him on our last day working around the property with basically nothing but a machete. He'd been working from early morning until late in the day, seemingly without much of a break, and most people probably never even noticed him. I offered him a bottle of water, which he was incredibly appreciative of. Later, I gave him my Bubba Keg filled with water and a bag of clothes. Jake gave him a pack of cigarettes and 500 pesos. We actually had to write him a note saying that we'd given him everything so he wouldn't be accused of stealing it. The smile on his face made it pretty clear we'd made his day. And that ended up being one of those little moments from the trip that stuck with me. It's easy to notice the bartenders, servers and entertainers when you're staying at an all-inclusive resort. It's just as easy to overlook all the people working quietly in the background who keep the entire place looking as beautiful as it does. ## Conclusion Looking back at this post more than 16 years later, some of the details are very obviously from another time. The prices are different. The resort has undoubtedly changed. Go Travel South went bankrupt **three days after we returned**, so my original recommendation of the travel agency certainly didn't age particularly well. Like I said at the beginning: That was close. But as a honeymoon? It was a great trip. We spent a week escaping an Ottawa February, hanging out with friends, sitting on a beautiful beach, eating far too much, trying dune buggies and generally enjoying ourselves. And we did the entire thing for $999 per person. Not too shabby for February 2010. Just remember one last piece of advice from the original post: We had to keep $20 US per person aside for the airport departure fee. Because apparently the vacation wasn't officially over until somebody found one last way to get $20 out of you.