Old but air-conditioned guaguas, or buses, depart for the provinces from Santo Domingo, the capital, filled with passengers and blasting a reggaeton beat. The six-hour, $11.50 trip, with stops at military checkpoints and colorful vendors hawking chewing gum and roasted corn, allowed plenty of time to learn my seatmates’ life stories.

When Junior Jimenez, a local farmer’s son, said of his hometown, “Everyone loves Pedernales,” he was right, but people have to discover it first, and few do. There are no all-inclusive resorts. Life here is filled with simple things like breezing through the night on a motorcycle for 38-cent empanadas, or swaying to Bachata music in the public square. I owed my discovery to Jimenez’s girl-friend, Kylie Culver, a Cali-fornian working for Batey Relief Alliance.

When Culver heard I was coming for a school project, she introduced me to Marino and Katia José, who lead the area’s nascent ecotourism movement. They offer tours to the Bahía de las Águilas (Bay of Eagles), Bahoruco mountain range, and El Mulito, a beauty spot located an hour upstream on the Pedernales River. Scientists and backpack travelers are among the guests at Doña Chava, their hostel. For $500, including breakfast and dinner, its cool, dim rooms and garden shaded with fruit trees were my budget base for the month.

Founded in Katia’s mother’s house, Doña Chava feels like home. The whole family makes and serves the Criollo meals, the best food in town. For me, a typical day started with coffee on the patio or at one of the town’s two bakeries. While roosters crowed and cows wandered onto the sidewalks, vendors opened their stands to sell spaghetti or chicken — Dominican breakfasts are hearty.  Conchos, or motorcycle taxis, cruised by looking for riders, while a line formed at the polleria for fresh-killed chickens.

On my days off, I walked with a book and a picnic to the end of Avenida Duarte, where the beach, unfurling in grainy white sand and ultra-clear water, was often empty except for fishermen unloading their catches of lobster and rubio. A $1.30 concho ride would have gotten me there faster, but walking guaranteed I would make discoveries: a house with a “se vende mabi” sign selling the homemade beverage of fruit, bark, and spices, or Dominicans like Eduard Claudic, who often walked with me, practicing his English.

At 8 p.m., people stepped out to the public square, sipping flasks of rum or papaya milkshakes, and moving to the disco, which shares space with a car wash, or to food stands dishing chimis, or burgers, and fried chicken and plantain chips ($5). Haitian orphans waited in the shadows for leftovers, accepting them with a polite “messi,” or thank you. Pedernales sits a mile from the border with Haiti and every Monday and Friday by government agreement, the cultures come together to trade at the market just before you cross into Haiti’s Anse-à-Pitres.

Outside of town several attractions are best seen by rented 4x4 or on tour ($65-$114 per person). But you can have as enjoyable a time seeing the region by guagua, or motorcycle, on Route 44. Doña Chava’s Marino Jose offered his Honda 99 cc for $13.50 a day.

Seven miles from the hostel on 44, glimpses of garnet earth signal CaboRojo, or Red Cape, home of mining company ALCOA. Don’t be deceived by the industrial look: The beaches here rival the world’s best. A marked dirt road turns off to Bahía de las Águilas, part of Jaragua National Park. Along the way I ducked through the white mangroves — watching for tethered cows — onto blinding stretches of sand and sea.

At the bumpy road’s end, for a $1.50 entrance fee, you can hike a beautiful 1½-mile trail with columnar cacti towering overhead to the four-mile beach. Or you can hire a fishing skiff and breeze past coral heads the size of small buildings ($8 split among six passengers). There are no facilities other than the seaside restaurant Rancho Tipico, whose fried whole snapper and cold Presidente make a happy ending to a beach day ($8).