Punta Cana: Hurricane, Sharks and Stingrays – Reef Explorer

Sometimes our travels aren’t always as beautiful and great as we planned. If there is one thing we can’t control, it’s mother nature AKA the weather. Luckily for me, I’m a pretty optimistic person and always try to make the best out of a bad situation, especially when traveling because each day is so important.

I had extended my trip to Punta Cana, the Dominican Republic by an extra day, although I would have rather had 2 more days. However, I got a free change by Delta Airlines, which was pretty awesome, due to their delay on my first day there. I was supposed to arrive to Punta Cana at 2pm, which I thought would then give me some time to still enjoy some beach time. The problem was, there was something wrong with each one of my 3 planes there. The first flight left late…at this point I forgot why, the second one left late because the airplane needed to be defrosted, due to snow and the last one left late because there was a problem with the brakes. Therefore, I got to Punta Cana at around 6pm which completely ruined my first day there. So Delta Airline was kind enough to change my flight to the following day free of charge, which I was clearly very happy about!

The reason I wanted 2 extra days, well…what kind of a person wouldn’t want to add 2 extra days on their vacation. I don’t know many who wouldn’t want that, but besides that, the moment I arrived to my hotel I realized there was a lot more activities and awesome things to do than what I found online.

I originally planned on making this trip a little bit different than my normal beach/island trip. I didn’t want it to be only beautiful beaches, I wanted it to be more of a culture adventure. So I booked a zip-lining activity on my second day there, which if you have been following my blog, you’d know that zip-lining is on my top 10 things to do in 2016. For the third day, I booked an all day activity with Outback Adventure Safari, which by the way, was amazing and I will write about it on a different post. The bad thing about this, is that it left me with no beach time because I was supposed to check out the very next day and my flight was at 3pm and my pick-up for some odd reason was for 11am, which again, left me with no beach time. So I got my flight changed and got to add another excursion to my trip, although I originally wanted to add 2 more, one for each day.

After paying for an excursion called Dr. Fish Ocean Spa, which was supposed to be a relaxing day in the beautiful crystal clear ocean with yoga, massages and all things relaxing. The weather was something I never took into consideration but probably should have.

Being that I am visiting a tropical island, things change fast. It can turn from beautiful sunny skies to unbearable crazy hurricane weather. This happened to me my first time in Brazil and later on in Miami, Hawaii, Mexico and a few other places. However, what I was hoping for is that the weather would change. Sometimes a tropical storm leaves as fast as a few minutes, other times it stays all day. The other thing to take into consideration is that different parts of the island normally have completely different weather climates. So sometimes it all works out in your benefit, but not for me.

My Dr. Fish Ocean Spa excursion was indeed canceled. Which made me have to think quick because soon it will be too late to get on any excursion because I would have miss the pickup time. So after having a few people help me out and call almost every excursion on the island, we finally found one single spot left on the Reef Explorer excursion. I was pretty excited to at least have that and thought it would be great since I was planning on doing it regardlessly the next day, before my flight.

Thanks to the amazing crew and staff at Marinarium Excursions – Reef Explorer, I had a pretty amazing time! Even though we were all dealing with a crazy hurricane.

Check out my surprisingly amazing day as I got to swim with sharks and stingrays for the first day, hold a stingray for the first time and easily learned how to paddleboard. Meanwhile enjoying a good laugh, a foot massage and well, the weather! I even got proposed to!

If you ever visit Punta Cana, I highly recommend doing this activity. The staff was amazing and super helpful. The activities were great, you had 11 to pick from and you got to do as many as you wanted in 4hrs and the location was just so beautiful. Of course, it must look even more beautiful sunny weather.

* Vanilla Sky Dreaming wasn’t invited by Marinarium Excursions – Reef Explorer. As always, my opinion is my own.