Beron, or Veron. In Spanish the V/B are interchangeable. This is the name of the nearest town. It is on the fringes of resort territory and consists of one road, and along this road, on the verges and stretching back a bit, is the town of Veron. It is a town which has sprung up in response to the labour requirements of the resorts. Every day thousands of manual labourers, men (road builders, machete workers, quarry workers), pile into open-sided trucks and old US yellow school busses and get deposited on the roadsides, building sites and quarries of the resorts and development terrains. Every evening they are trucked back again.

It takes about 15 minutes in the truck to get there from where we stay. 15 minutes past the resort golf courses, past the airport at Punta Cana, being passed by Mack lorries loaded with limestone blocks, rumbling on 20 wheels, burping diesel smoke. Daihatsu’s loaded with thirty to fifty labourers at 100km per hour. X4 wheel drives from the resorts carrying tourists and
management.

Never slower than 80. Mopeds loaded with carrier bags and families, weaving through the trucks. Houses, bars, shops. house-bars, shop-houses, brothels, beauty salons, churches, internet/mobile phone shops/houses lining the road.

Beron reminds me of wildlife programme descriptions of inhospitable habitats with amazing evidence for life. Against all the odds, people live in a dynamic community and thrive. This is entirely to their credit, and no thanks to any infrastructural support, amenities or services (I don’t even want to know where the sewage goes, or the number of deaths incurred on the road each year, or the health problems). It is loud, smelly, scary, dirty. It is wonderful, funny and exhilarating. It is a town where you can have the coldest beer in the world, chicken and fried banana whilst almost being killed by an HGV and breathing in as much pollution as 3-pack a day smoker. It is a town where most shops and bars have “Guns and knives forbidden” painted over the entrance and where every shop has plastic tables and chairs set outside and a huge speaker mounted on the wall so you can dance all night (Zaccaria Ferreiras ‘es tan dificil’ and "la Avispa" are this months fave bachata anthems. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQVnlzGTKC0&mode=related&search=).

The smells and scenes in Beron will be one of the things I most remember about the DR. Colmado Luis is one of my favourite shops, run by a group of brothers with family photos on the wall behind the cash desk. It is a large concrete shed; against one wall are boxes and crates ceiling high which you have to squeeze past, between the ice freezer and the guard with the gun, and shove your way to the long counter in front of the other wall. They sell beer, cold drinks, murky things in tins, smelly things in bags, rum, sweets in pots and aspirin, cigarettes and shampoo in as small quantities as you want (they decant the shampoo into smaller and smaller bottles and sell tablets by the one or two).