The boats to Saona leave from the Bayahibe pier. Anyone booking from Punta Cana spends two hours on a bus getting here before boarding, and another two going back at the end of the day. Leaving from Bayahibe, those four hours stay on the island instead.
It is a sandbank a kilometre offshore where the sea stays waist-deep. The catamaran stops there before reaching the island, the engine goes quiet and people jump in. There are starfish on the bottom. You look at them and leave them where they are: lifting them out of the water kills them, and the guides keep saying so because it needs saying.
People live on Saona: about three hundred of them in Mano Juan, a village of brightly painted wooden houses inside Cotubanama National Park. There is a turtle hatchery, a school, and women selling crafts on their own doorsteps. Bring cash in pesos: there is no ATM and no card machine, and whatever you buy you buy straight from the person who made it.
The way out is taken slowly, with music and an open bar, because the catamaran takes as long as it takes and that is half the point. The way back is by speedboat, which cuts the same crossing in half, because at five in the afternoon nobody wants two more hours at sea. If you would rather flip the order, or do the whole thing privately, you can: it is a matter of saying so when booking.
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