Land in the capital and walk it before heading inland. The Colonial Zone is compact, and the ecological park along Avenida Mirador Sur is car free at peak hours and holds the largest urban tree canopy in the country.

Jarabacoa sits in the Cordillera Central at around 500 metres, cool enough for pine forest and the country's whitewater rivers. This is coffee and vegetable country, and the mountains behind it hold Pico Duarte, the highest point in the Caribbean.

Stay put for a day. The lodge is owned and run by a local women's association rather than an operator, generates its own cooking gas from decomposition, and builds environmental education into the stay, so the value of a second day is in the place rather than the itinerary.

Puerto Plata is cacao country, and the cooperative at Altamira is thirty local women growing, fermenting and bar making organic cacao bought from surrounding smallholders. The waterfall circuit nearby is community run, with a fixed sum from every ticket going into a village fund.

Cross to Samana for the undeveloped north east. Playa Rincon runs for five kilometres with no resort development along it, which in this country is genuinely unusual.

The Boca del Diablo to Playa Fronton path is the best walk in the country and it is free, where the boat everyone else takes is not. Coastal forest the whole way to a beach walled in by limestone cliff.

Barahona in the south west is the wildest coast, inside the Jaragua, Bahoruco and Enriquillo biosphere reserve. If the week is too tight for it, spend the day back in Samana rather than driving nine hours for one beach.