A note on the full day run from Punta Cana across to Santo Domingo, since it seems to come up whenever a ship stops there and we have now actually done it. We were on a Caribbean itinerary in early April with two nights in Punta Cana either side of the sailing. My wife wanted the colonial quarter and I was perfectly content to be driven, so we took a private car for the day rather than the coach. It is two hours and twenty minutes each way on the Autovía del Coral when the road is kind, and it was not entirely kind coming back, as there were works east of San Pedro de Macorís which added the better part of forty minutes. We left the hotel at seven and were back at twenty past seven in the evening. That is a very great deal of day for a man of sixty three, and I slept in the car in both directions, which my wife found rather less amusing than I did. The Alcázar de Colón took us about an hour with the audio guide. The cathedral was blessedly cool inside at the precise moment we required cool. Calle Las Damas is a good deal shorter than one imagines, perhaps two hundred metres from end to end, and I would not build a day around it. It was 30 degrees by midday and humid with it, and the stretch between the Parque Colón and the river has very little shade at all. We bought water twice on El Conde at around 60 pesos the bottle. The coach exists and costs a good deal less. What the car bought us was an hour sat down at two o'clock when my wife had had enough of walking, and leaving at half four rather than waiting on a group. Our driver parked near the Puerta del Conde and read his newspaper, which suited us since neither of us wanted a guide at our elbow, and he answered a message within a minute when we were ready to go. Do it if the history is genuinely the point of your holiday. If it is not, four and three quarter hours in a car is a long time to spend looking at old stones, and I am a man very fond of old stones.
