My Dominican daydreams began long before I boarded a plane for the city of Santo Domingo.

I dreamed of the crumbling colonial buildings and the soft green unfurling of the mountainous countryside, the wood smoke drifting from tin roofs and the sea salt whipped off the break, the sweet hot oil of fried plantains and the pale malt of a cheap national lager.

I had less than two weeks, and I wanted to see it all: town and country, highlands and coast, coffee farms and fisheries. And I wanted to prove the Lonely Planet guidebook wrong.

"The DR isn't an especially great destination for shoestring travelers," the travel guide said. It highlighted the Caribbean country's reputation for cheapo all-inclusives, which monopolize stretches of coastline and offer airport-to-resort shuttle service, Brobdingnagian walls topped with concertina wire (to keep the jungle elements out and you in), meticulously raked white sand, and all the watery liquor your distended stomach can hold. Also: water aerobics, 4 p.m., west pool, BYO floatie. In short, gated fantasylands of which I wanted no part.

I had my eye instead on a small thumb of land, the Samana Peninsula, in the island's northeastern corner. I imagined few roads, plenty of tropical beach and blue sea, and blissful isolation. On a map, my finger made a northward traverse of the country, tracing what promised to be a study in opposites, from the sprawling, boisterous capital of Santo Domingo to a tiny dot at the peninsula's farthest tip, the seaside town of Las Galeras.

Slow down

The Zen shoestringer's ethos, "Wherever you go, there you are, and take your sweet time getting there," is well-suited to Caribbean living.

The Dominican Republic's famous north coast is served by several regional airports. But flying into Santo Domingo, the first viable European settlement in the New World, founded in 1496 by Columbus's younger brother, Bartholomew, allows you to spend a day exploring the old Spanish city and observing the fault lines created by rapid economic development. Here, colonialism is still hard at work in the form of Ferragamo boutiques, BMW dealerships and McDonald's franchises.

Five hundred years of earthquakes, hurricanes and battles for independence, from Spain, from France and, finally, in 1844, from adjoining Haiti, have exacted a toll on the urban architecture. Still, small pockets of Santo Domingo retain their original quiet grandeur. Leafy cobblestone alleyways and flowering courtyards whisk you back several centuries. Pastel arcades line the streets; wrought-iron balconies billow overheard.

Multilingual tour guides do a steady trade in the walled colonial quarter, or you can simply ruins-hop, reading plaques and poking your head into half-closed doors. Dominicans like to say that their capital is a City of Firsts: the first cathedral in the New World, begun in 1512, with a 19th-century cannonball still lodged in its roof; the first university; the first hospital, sacked by the pirate Francis Drake in 1586, rebuilt and now fallen again to elegant decay; the first military fortress; the first royal palace; the first paved street, Calle de Las Damas, commissioned by Columbus' son, Diego, so that his wife could take walks without dirtying the hem of her dress.

Santo Domingo is awash in startling contradictions and disparities. The beautiful and the profane are both impossible to ignore. Along the city's winding Malecon, a sea wall and waterfront park, dispossessed junkies and young lovers shared the benches and old men with fishing poles cast off from the jetty's slick riprap.

In the new commercial heart of Santo Domingo, there was a colossal Ikea (Latin America's first) and an unending string of Outback Steakhouses, drive-in liquor stores and sleek megamalls. Heavily tinted Escalades and Porsches purred in long lines outside clubs. Motorcycles darted against the flow of cars.

To the coast

In the morning, I escaped for the coast. Caribe Tours offers the country's most reliable first-class bus service, and at midday the station was a riot of passengers and packages.

The coach was comfy and air-conditioned to the point of refrigeration and across vast stretches of the interior the same violent movie showed twice. I studied the distant mountains, which rise to more than 10,000 feet at Pico Duarte, in the country's navel.

The bus went as far as Samana, a sprawling port of call halfway out the eponymous peninsula and dropped passengers in a crowd of touts promising low room rates. We sat on our packs along the side of the highway until a "guagua," a pickup already full of passengers, slowed just long enough for us to be pulled into the bed.

Making judicious use of the oncoming lane to avoid potholes, the truck climbed a low pass into the mountains; beginning to descend, a cooling afternoon thunderstorm unfolded across the sky like a black carpet.

Through the rain and breaks in the rolling jungle, someone pointed out Golfo de las Flechas (Bay of Arrows), the cove where Christopher Columbus was said to have skirmished with the indigenous Ciguyaos.

By the time we arrived on the outskirts of town, the highway turned to dirt, and then to sand, and then petered out in a stand of worshipful palms.

Las Galeras has been spared the boomtown development afflicting its north-coast neighbors. By day, the barrio carried the sounds of pots banging on stoves, roosters crowing, dogs brawling and cellphones chirping. By night, the slap of dominoes ricocheted around the alleys like gunfire.

Curvaceous women in drainpipe jeans, halter tops and stilettos strutted in the gravel. Couples flirted and fought over the strains of sorrowful music on the radio, and Sunday night at the pool hall promised no less raucous a party than Saturday.

I hired a moto driver, Rodrigo, for a 40-minute trip on the back seat of a motorcycle to Playa Rincon, one of the many half-moon beaches that dot the peninsula's lush coastline. Rodrigo had been an extra in "Pirates of the Caribbean," shot on location around Las Galeras, and now operated a one-man taxi service. He easily navigated the unmarked spider web of roads toward the ocean, swerving to avoid washouts and mottled chickens.

The earth was copper red but fertile, giving rise to pineapple and banana plantations. Long-horned cows grazed in stick-fence pastures. Rodrigo slalomed through one final stretch of boulders ending at the beach, the sand as soft and white as sugar. He promised to return at sunset.

The surf at Playa Rincon was more green than blue, inky in the farthest depths and a brilliant topaz in the shallows. Tiny-footed sandpipers played tag with the sea foam, and steely-eyed frigate birds, their tails forked like devils' horns, hunted silverfish from on high.

I watched a small wooden fishing boat, painted daybreak blue, make its way along the shore. The three sinewy fishermen bent over their hand-hewn oars. When they made land and hauled the net in, the sand shimmered with their catch. "It's hard work," one of them said. "But it's easier when you know you're pulling in money."

Rodrigo reappeared as the last light of the day stretched its fingers across the water. On the ride home, the cool air was thick but welcome, and the silhouettes of skyward palms exploded like asterisks.