The Road That Runs Out of Room

Polly comes in from the north with the mountains on her left and the sea on her right, and there is not much room between them. This is the southwest corner of the Dominican Republic, the part of the island most visitors never see. The big hotels are all far away on the other coast. Here the Sierra de Bahoruco comes down to the water in one long green shoulder, and the road has to squeeze along the gap.

She follows that road south out of the town of Barahona. It bends around headlands, climbs, drops, and every few kilometres a river arrives out of the mountains and cuts straight across it on its way to the sea. The water in those rivers is cold. It has come down out of cloud forest in a hurry. Where it meets the Caribbean there is a pool, and the pool is cool at the bottom and warm at the top, and you can feel both at the same time.

The beaches here are not what people expect from the Caribbean. There is very little sand. Instead the shore is built of pebbles, grey and white and rust brown, rounded smooth and stacked in long banks that the waves rattle and drag back with a sound like applause.

Polly lands on the bank at a river mouth and walks along it, tipping stones over with one foot. Then she stops. One of the pebbles is blue. Not painted, not glass. Blue all the way through, pale and cloudy, like a piece of shallow water that somehow went hard.