Thursday, July 07, 2005

Mexican Vacation: Dreams Resort

Please click on a picture for a larger view: some are quite worth it! And I apologize if this reads like a hotel review, but that's because it is! This post is only about the hotel.

------------

Our first hotel during our Mexican vacation was the luxurious, all-inclusive Dreams Resort. Located on the opposite side from all of the other big hotels, this resort sits on it's own bay and beach and is thus isolated from all other tourists.

Arriving at the hotel means being greeted by a lovely fountain, a glass of champagne and an amazing looking modern reception lounge overlooking the ocean. The hotel has this Polynesian feel throughout, with dark woods, banana plants and tiki torches glowing at night.



The hotel consists of two tall towers, curved against the road and hill to it's back. All of the rooms have ocean views and all have great big floor-to-ceiling windows that completely open up (ie, patio doors!). The sound of the waves from our room at the 6th floor was incredibly loud and blocked all other sounds even at night with the doors closed. The room has great big beds, a super-modern washroom with an oversized sink and a bathtub completely constructed out of slabs of stone. The mini-bar is well stocked and zen music plays in your room upon arrival, and every time the maids comes in to clean or for the nightly turn-down.

coronita! hotel grounds welcome

What really makes this hotel special is the food. Really, I have never eaten nor drank so well in an all-inclusive resort ever. At every dinner we had endless glasses of champagne. We had lobster, smoked salmon, red snapper, rack of lamb, cheviche and filet mignon. Everything was good except for the lobster, which was too salty and over cooked. But everything else was restaurant quality, the type of plate you'd pay $30 for in a restaurant here and not complain. Breakfast were alright, the eggs were surprisingly ordinary but the French toast were great. We did not often ate lunch at the hotel, but it was also quite nice. They even had miniature burgers for children, which would have made super cute appetizer. Their salsa was great, and so was their pork-pineapple-coriander tacos. Really, the Dreams was really dreamy food-wise.



The dreams has 5 restaurants, 4 of which are set outside or are at least open-air concepts. All have views of the ocean and all are very beautiful. Service was great as the staff was quite friendly.

The beach at the resort was nice but short, compared to what we are normally used to on our vacations. Puerto Vallarta is located in one of the largest bays in the world, and that state is filled with mountains. Where the hotel is located, mountains come closer to the bay and so little bays have formed along the coast, creating secluded beaches. Our beach was on such a bay, set between two sides of mountains/cliffs. The waves though were pretty strong and the red flag was on everyday. This was mostly caused by being there so close to the start of the raining seasons. This also brought in jelly fish: there were some everywhere we went during our stay in Puerto Vallarta. We swam in the ocean only once during our 4 days there and the water was warm and wonderful, but I had to keep an eye out for the jelly fish and still ended up touching one twice. Miraculously it didn't sting me, and we decided to get out of the water before my luck turned.

The little amount of time we did spend at the resort during the day was spent lying in luxurious padded wooden long chairs by the adult-only infinity pool. I say adult-only because that's what it's supposed to be, but of course there's always someone to disregard rules!

chillin

This hotel was very nice and had great perks, such as nightly movies on the beach and room service. On our regular vacations we normally spend all of our time at the hotel, but this time around we spent most of our time outside of the resort in Puerto Vallarta and Yelapa. I really enjoyed these trips that I will describe in another post, but in a way it was sad to not have spent more time at this hotel. This is a great spot, with great services and quite the romantic feel. Surely this was enhanced by visiting during the low season and the place being nearly empty, but still! I strongly recommend that you stay at the Dreams Resort if you ever go to Puerto Vallarta, and if it fits into your budget.

ignuana mexican cat

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.

<< Home