As all good things must, our time in the Caribbean trundles slowly to an end. It finishes not with a bang so much as a gentle sigh. We are waking from a deep sleep now and although we try to hold onto it, the dream is fading already, slipping through our fingers.

On our last day in Cabarete we pack up the car then while Menna feeds the kids, I slip off for one last kitesurf in the bay. The last time I ventured out a couple of days before, everything had gone wrong: in a hugely crowded ocean my first kite turned out to be punctured (not my fault… I don’t think… who knows?), then on the second try, my harness and safety rig had blown off spectacularly, not once but twice, so the session ended with my kite tangled in some palm trees at a nearby hotel. The dudes at the hire shop kept their white-tooth smiles in place but I left feeling somewhat in disgrace.

This time it goes like a dream. I arrive just as the trade winds are picking up, but before the rest of the crowd, and the confluence of board, kite, wind and waves all come together like a farewell gift. And so my last views of Cabarete are from out at sea, skimming over rollers, a 13m kite above me and a solid force five at my back. And from far out by the reef, those ramshackle cabins, the web of overhead cables, the neo-classical concrete hotel balconades even look kind of pretty. Maybe the salt spray blurs my eyes.

Menna has planned some detours on our way to our flight, so we roar out of town in our battered Ford Escape like generals departing on a valedictory tour of the island.  We will spend four nights in four towns around the island.

Puerto Plata – the silver port – was described by Christopher Columbus as “the most beautiful land human eyes will ever see.” In the intervening 530 years, a layer of industrial complexity has superimposed itself upon the virgin landscape that greeted those pioneers, but there is still some charm here. Menna goes off running around the city and the rest of us skateboard on the boardwalk, skim loops around the bandstand, hit up the fort, then we cruise through the colonial town center accumulating a posse of small shouting children. They borrow our skateboards for a complicated obstacle race while we all dine on a veranda overlooking the town square. I foolishly order ‘old goat curry’ and get served a pungent plate of tripe and sinew that makes my family recoil. We sleep in the cellar of a tumbledown old palace, hosted by an irascible Italian aristocrat and his wife. Early in the morning we ride the teleferico up the volcano and walk in lurid botanical gardens before we blow out of town.

Jarabacoa has a very different vibe. It is a sprawling humid mountain town that reminds me of those Ecuadorian villages where they pile as many square cement buildings as possible onto a small patch of mountainside, then tether the whole teetering mass with phone cables, chicken wire and washing lines. The streets are narrow and shady; choked with motorbikes and scooters. We are staying in a tiny apartment in the rough part of town where the locals sit out bare-chested on their doorsteps and act like they’ve never seen a white person before. When we walk out to dinner we take a wrong turn and find ourselves deep in some shanty tenement. We spend a quarter of an hour there, traversing a maze of laundry-filled alleys, pushing our way through sheets, peeking into dark doorways, splashing through sewage puddles while old ladies cackle at us in amazement. The interplay of light and shadows in those darkened streets at sunset would have made for a beautiful series of black and white photographs, but we don’t dare pull out the camera. We leave town early next morning mosquito-bitten with the whine of two-stroke engines still ringing in our ears.

We recuperate in Samana, some five hours drive westwards. Now this is the kind of Caribbean paradise you see stretched out behind some Rolex-wearing playboy on a Condé Nast double page spread. The sea is an embarrassing shade of turquoise. The palm trees are laden with coconuts. The beach is of the softest whitest sand, strewn with exotic shells that must have been placed there under cover of darkness by the busboy from the five star. Mountains arrange themselves obligingly into receding layers of delicate mist-shaded blue. Rich round Americans lounge around on loungers around us.

We are scruffy and too poor for this place but we find a sweet Italian lady who cooks us shrimp in a driftwood cabin a few streets behind the waterfront. We drink an overpriced beer or two, we watch a sunset for free, we play frisbee in the dusk. Next morning we rise early and surf in an empty bay. We climb back into the car and head towards Santo Domingo and the departure airport.

And what of Santo Domingo? A big ugly city clogged with traffic where the baroque colonial quarter is encircled by highways, burger joints and squat mid-rise cement goblins. We tramp the boardwalk and buy last moment gifts for family. I get a bad haircut. We submit to the first of the series of six nasal swabs we will need in order to make our way back into Britain. We eat jerk chicken and swim in the hotel pool.

On the day of our departure we go for a walk in the ornamental gardens on the other side of town, to stretch our legs and breath in some last Caribbean smells before our long flight. Then we can’t find any taxis or buses to get back to our hotel, so we have a long, hot, slightly-panicked march through some bleak industrial suburbs, attempting to flag down passing cars, before finally paying two couriers to take us across the city on their motorbikes.

And so our last memories of the Dominican Republic are all roar and diesel, centrifugal sway, the sun on windshields as we weave our way homeward through the traffic, three to a bike, hearts in mouth, gripping each other tightly as we laugh and scream.