Mrbrechsclass.weebly.com



A vacation in Haiti — yes, Haiti — offers adventure, great food and a chance to really unplug

You won't find the luxuries you'll get elsewhere in the Caribbean, but there are beautiful beaches, fun-loving people and much more

BY Helin Jung

CONWAY CONFIDENTIAL

Sunday, November 10, 2013, 2:00 AM

For a certain kind of adventurous traveler, the best thing about Haiti is that most don’t have a clue about it.

Of course we’re aware of the earthquake of January 2010, which killed many thousands and displaced still more. Many of us think still of Haiti as an impoverished island nation strewn with tent cities and rubble, a third-world country in need of charity. That’s part of America’s mainstream view. Fox’s “The Mindy Project” even recently used Haiti as the backdrop for the charity work of the protagonist and her minister boyfriend.

But there’s so much more to the place — and Haiti wants to change the narrative.

A trip there proves that’s possible.

The adventurous, curious and open-minded can clearly find these gifts in Haiti: brilliant, unspoiled beaches; delicious, homey food; welcoming, fun-loving people; and enough rum to knock out a gang of pirates.

Yes, the capital city of Port-au-Prince and its surrounding metropolitan area faced extreme hardship and catastrophe following the 7.0-magnitude quake. Swaths of downtown Port-au-Prince continue to be open plots of land where structures once stood. But there’s more to a country than one neighborhood.

Generally speaking, you won’t get luxury amenities or brand-name hotels (more of those, like a Marriott and Hilton Garden Inn, are coming in 2014 and beyond), and the WiFi won’t be reliable. So it’s best to mentally untether yourself from email.

There is no public transportation, unless you count the brightly painted tap taps, or shared buses and pickup trucks, which populate every street in the country. It’s not advisable for visitors to board them — so don’t.

You will probably need a guided-tour package and a good week in order to make the most of your trip, especially if you’re not of Haitian origin. But you will not need to exchange your dollars because they are accepted everywhere, and you also won’t have to learn French or Haitian Creole because English is widely spoken.

In the Port-au-Prince environs, most visitors stay in the city of Pétion-Ville, where Best Western Premier recently opened a modern property. You’ll want to eat at hilltop restaurant La Reserve. A live jazz band will set the mood while you enjoy impressive interpretations of Haitian staples like griot, a fried pork dish.

When the sky is clear, head up Mount Boutilliers, a 3,000-foot peak on top of which is L’Observatoire. Stop there for lunch and you can try one of the tastiest sandwiches around. Sounds simple enough: ham and cheese on a baguette. But the magic here is in the spread, a secret recipe made of ketchup, mayonnaise, mustard and onion juice.

If you have more than a day in Haiti, do not leave the country without taking a 20-minute domestic flight to the northern coast, better known as Cap-Haitien. You’ll feel like you’re in an undiscovered land having a private moment with a place few have ever seen.

That feeling is incredibly special. Especially if you can ignore the fact that here (as in many parts of Port-au-Prince), locals are purposefully kept apart from tourists, whether by 15-foot fences or by the UN patrol.

In Cap-Haitien, head on horseback to the soaring cliffs of Sans-Souci, where Haiti’s first king built Citadelle Laferrière, an enormous fortress that houses a large collection of 17th-century cannons. The brave can gallop up the rocky trail. Two guides on either side of the horse take you along the path, which is lined with fruit trees — banana, mango, guava and breadfruit.

Take a bath and get a good night’s rest at Cormier Plage Beach Resort. There’s a great beach here, with gorgeous views. There’s also good food, motel-quality amenities and nonexistent WiFi.

Head out the next day to Labadee, a port on the northern coast where there’s a private paradise operated by Royal Caribbean International. The boat trip is offered, appropriately enough, through Paradise Tours.

Enjoy a Prestige beer, or even a rum cocktail inside a fresh coconut, while you float in the warm, clear and distinctly blue waters of the Caribbean. This will feel like you’re having the most exclusive, perfect experience of your life. Spotty Internet will be a distant memory.

One last thing: Don’t leave Port-au-Prince without having lunch at the Visa Lodge, a hotel famous for its daily buffet. This spread is stocked with heaping piles of fresh avocado salad, rice with Haiti’s famous djon djon mushroom, perfectly marinated pork, seafood gumbo, twice-baked squashed stuffed with cheese, and other epicurean pleasures that you’ll just have to try for yourself.

Second helpings? Obligatory.

Haiti returns to the tourist map

Following the devastating earthquake four years ago, the 'beautiful, bedevilled’ Caribbean island of Haiti is ready to welcome visitors, says Ian Thomson

Rum punches on the veranda of a gingerbread hotel, delicious in the tropical noon… the sound of drums, rumbling in the hills, reaching your room at night. Haiti will always be entrancing for those in search of an out-of-the-way experience. It has echoes of west Africa – the houm-doum-do from that Vodou gathering – and a dash of French custom and Latin devil-may-care cool. This was apparent on my first visit almost 25 years ago in 1990, when I gathered material for a book about the Caribbean island, Bonjour Blanc.

Last June, I returned to beautiful, bedevilled Haiti for the first time in 10 years. I was itching to see how it had changed since I wrote the book and what damage had been left by the terrible earthquake of January 12 2010. This time, I would not be travelling by jitney, lorry or fishing boat, but in taxis and air-conditioned tourist coaches.

From the air, Haiti is a sun-scorched clinker; deforestation, caused by a ruinous cutting of timber for charcoal, has destroyed much of the green. As the plane rolled smoothly along the tarmac at Port-au-Prince, the capital, a group of musicians at Immigration were shaking maracas and strumming guitars in welcome. Bright-coloured advertisements for Haitian beer and rum adorned the walls. The airport looked like any other in the West Indies.

Port-au-Prince was as exhilarating and exhausting as I remembered it. The streets, thronged with pack animals, porters and ambulatory salesmen, were a human ant heap. The smells I knew so well from the earlier visits – jasmine, burning rubbish – hit me forcefully and it was as though I had never been away.

Parts of the city were visibly still damaged from the earthquake. One of the worst natural disasters in Caribbean history, the earthquake claimed up to 316,000 lives. The National Palace was turned to dust; the twin-spired Episcopalian cathedral, the Palais de Justice and the Palais des Ministères were all pulverised. The convulsions lasted just 35 seconds, but a more graphic image of municipal chaos would be hard to imagine: the heart of Haiti’s national and civic life had been razed. Rich and poor alike were reduced to a state of homelessness and despair.

Now, four years on, Haiti is a nation on the road to recovery. The tent cities have mostly gone and I was impressed by the industry of rebuilding and sense of hope for a new start. No traveller should feel put off. The Haitian government is wooing travel companies in Europe and North America. Things are still a long way from perfect – Haiti lacks the refinements of its Caribbean neighbours – yet the US State Department considers the country safe for tourists, while the Foreign Office warns only against travel to four specific slum districts in Port-au-Prince: Carrefour, Cité Soleil, Martissant and Bel Air. Given all this, it will not be long before the first charter flights and cruise ships arrive. I would urge people to visit now, before the country is marketed as the “edgy new Cuba” and loses something of its haphazard allure.

Next day, I took the local Sunrise Airlines flight to Cap-Haïtien in the north. On a mountaintop there stands a fortress they call the Eighth Wonder of the World. It was built by King Henri Christophe of northern Haiti, who committed suicide with a silver bullet (they say) in 1820 following a coup. Obscured by clouds, the Citadel is overwhelmed at first by the king’s rococo palace of Sans Souci, intended to be the Versailles of the New World. With its terraced steps mounting like a ziggurat temple, Sans Souci resembles an Aztec or Sumerian ruin; tangled with lianas, the palace is a luminescent, haunting relic of state power.

Tourists can reach the Citadel by foot or hired horse; the walk uphill takes about two hours, but it is worth it. The Citadel was built as a defence against a return to slavery. A mass of titanic stone apparently welded to the landscape, it towers above the trees on Pic de la Ferrière like a gigantic Crusader castle. Inside, I was shown a maze of passageways, oubliettes and galleries laden with English and French cannon. They say Christophe was buried here in quicklime to deny the mobs his corpse. The view from the ramparts is one of the most magnificent in the western hemisphere: a great antiquity of mountain, forest and sea.

No visit to Haiti would be complete without a Vodou ceremony. Vodou reflects the rage and ecstasy that threw off the shackles of slavery. On the night of August 15 1791, a ceremony was held outside Cap-Haïtien that marked the beginning of the African slaves’ revolt against the colonial French. (Haiti, the world’s first black republic, gained independence in 1804.) For many Haitians, Vodou is a way to rise above the misery of poverty and the devastation wreaked by hurricanes, mud slides, storms and other natural disasters. When a Haitian is possessed by a loa (spirit) he is taken out of himself and gratefully transformed.

To attend a Vodou ceremony, you have to follow the rumble of drums into the countryside. This I did on my birthday, June 24, St John’s Day. In Vodou, St John the Baptist (Sen Jen Batis) is a powerful, rum-drinking divinity who is propitiated with bonbons and bottles of alcohol. At the village of Trou-du-Nord, not far from the Citadel, the night air was dirty like a smoked ceiling and eerie with the barking of dogs. Around the parish church of St John the candles and the swaying, crowded bodies suggested a Mexican Day of the Dead.

Crowds stood around the edge of the Vodou temple made of woven palm-thatch; they paid me no mind. The mambo (priestess) was sweating and jiggering her shoulder like an epileptic, her hands loaded with masonic rings and bangles. The drummers, bashing furiously, looked similarly possessed. A peaceable religion, Vodou is derived from the rites and beliefs brought to Haiti by African slaves in the 1600s. It is as old as Christianity.

The main town on Haiti’s south coast, Jacmel, is a glory. Steamships used to sail there every month from Southampton, exchanging tweeds for coffee. Today the coffee exporters’ houses with their wonky verandas recall the French quarter of New Orleans. The Hotel Florita, off Rue du Commerce, is a beautifully restored 1880s town house with teak floors and overhead fans that used to belong to the American poet and art collector Seldon Rodman. From the Florita you can travel by horse or minibus up to the bassin bleu – blue pool – along a beautiful, jungle-like trail in the hills. The waters of the bassin, a series of amazing blue-green natural aquifers, are deliciously cool on sun-heated skin. I stripped down to my underpants and dived in. With the vault of bright blue sky above, I was in heaven.

Back in Port-au-Prince, I made a beeline for the Hotel Oloffson, a magnificent gingerbread mansion made famous by Graham Greene in his Haitian novel The Comedians. Illuminated at night, the hotel was a folly of spires and fretwork. Hurricane lamps flickered yellow, showing white rattan furniture. I had not seen the manager, Richard Morse, since I proposed marriage here in 1990 (I went down on two knees to Laura after a burst of gunfire startled me).

“Ian, it’s been too long,” said Richard, laconic as ever. Not only had he kept the Oloffson open all these years, but he fronts a world-class Vodou rock band, named RAM after his initials. The band played so well that Thursday night in the hotel that I thought I would levitate out of my seat. Past guests have included Noël Coward, John Gielgud, Marlon Brando and Mick Jagger (who wrote Emotional Rescue there). Laughably, a room had been named after me as the author of Bonjour Blanc.

By day, Port-au-Prince is a study in bedlam. The roads are crammed with buses known as tap-taps from the noise of their vintage engines; painted with psychedelic flamingos and palm trees, they list perilously and belch smoke. The Iron Market, a block of bargaining and bawling, is a great arched structure in vibrant reds and greens, with minaret-domes that might have come from India. It is the best place to buy fantastic Haitian paintings, raffia bags, globular straw baskets or Ali Baba jars. I bought a chromolithograph of my birthday divinity St John and a bottle of Haitian Barbancourt rum (five-star), pure ambrosia.

Tired and in need of a drink, I headed for the magnificent National Pantheon Museum, a sleek underground structure across the road from the razed National Palace. Inside was a display of rusted iron manacles, chains, branding irons, muzzles and other implements of slavery, along with portraits of the Haitian national heroes Toussaint L’Ouverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines. Forged in the crucible of French colonialism, Haiti was once the most profitable slave colony the world had ever known.

After a week in Haiti my time had almost run out, and I felt the same emotion as 10 years ago, a mix of impatience for home and regret at leaving. Haiti is one of the most astonishing places – a west Africa in the Caribbean. I found a courage and humour in the face of desperate odds that was like an intoxication of hope. Change cannot come too soon; I can’t wait to go back.

Why Haiti deserves visitors

Five years after Haiti was devastated by an earthquake, tourists are returning – to find a raw and fascinating Caribbean country with a unique culture

Long before I arrive in Haiti I get a sense of what the name itself conjures up. There are no direct flights from the UK, so I’ve flown in via the Dominican Republic, Haiti’s conjoined twin on the island of Hispaniola. The tourists on my flight cannot understand why anyone would risk Haiti: “I hope you survive!”; “Will you have armed guards?” and, perhaps the key question, “Why?” But tour operators like the one I’m travelling with, Wild Frontiers, feel that Haiti’s time has finally come, especially with Cuba looking more visitor-crowded and less adventurous than before. There is also a sense that responsible tourism to Haiti could put money where it is really needed.

Hispaniola is shaped like a large canine tooth extracted from the gob of Mexico and thrown into the centre of the Caribbean Sea. Haiti is the western third of it, and I’m arriving on a small plane from the east of the island, gazing out at the mountainous terrain and totting up reasons for Haiti’s unsavoury reputation. So far I’ve got deadly earthquakes, dire poverty, the brutal Tontons Macoutes, the tyrant Papa Doc Duvalier, plus, of course, the zombies – mustn’t forget the zombies. On the plus side, I scribble “fresh fruit”. Then, out of the aeroplane window, the verdure of the Dominican Republic is giving way abruptly to something eroded and bone-like. Over Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, we enter a pall of dust, and the plane bounces and sways before landing. I cross out fresh fruit.

It was not always this way. Expectations of this land were high when Columbus touched down in 1492, noting the extreme fertility, the abundance of food and clean water, the gold, and the handsome, happy people. “With 50 men,” he noted ominously, “we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we wanted.” And that is what the conquistadores did, shipping in fresh workers from west Africa when the locals died. By 1660, the western third of Hispaniola was French, the other part Spanish, and in all but name, the two countries of Haiti and the Dominican Republic were established. They both had wars of independence, years of American occupation, and brutal dictators, but Dom Rep, as everyone now refers to it, somehow emerged as a place where you can buy a pizza 24 hours a day and visit shopping malls. But what about Haiti?

The first thing I notice in Port-au-Prince is the people: they are all out on the street. Men and women carrying their goods on their heads: bananas to sell, water, a roll of naif paintings to hang up outside a hotel. There are horses, mules and donkeys amid a tangle of good-natured, slow-moving traffic. And behind all this frenetic activity, rising above the heads, is a mixture of ruins and new buildings. It is five years since one of the most devastating earthquakes in human history razed huge areas of the city, killing up to 220,000 people. Finally, Port-au-Prince is being rebuilt, and very attractively too, judging by what’s been done already.

I visit the reconstructed Marché de Fer, the bustling central market, where a stately rastaman called Dominic shows me around (for $1 – this is a place where you need lots of small dollar bills). After spices, vegetables and beauty products, we enter an area selling flouncy blue dresses and sinister-looking dolls. I tackle the voodoo question head on.

“Is voodoo scary?”

Dominic chuckles gently: “No way. It’s our religion.”

He shows me some veve, intricately beaded flags that carry the symbols of certain spirits.

“This one is Ayida Weddo, the rainbow snake.”

Voodoo is a polytheistic faith that came to the island with slaves from west Africa, and took on a camouflage veneer of Roman Catholicism. Its importance to Haiti was firmly established when, in 1791, a voodoo ceremony triggered the only slave revolt which has led to the founding of a state. Ever since, the religion has prospered, often in the teeth of official disapproval. Western attitudes have sometimes been fearful, and frequently condescending: “proper” religions have gods and miracles; voodoo has spirits and mumbo jumbo. Unfortunately, Papa Doc, dictator during the 1960s, further tarnished the religion’s image by encouraging the belief that he was Baron Samedi, the spirit of the dead.

At the refurbished National Museum I get to see Papa Doc’s bowler hat, cane and evil little machine gun, plus photos of Haiti’s many other presidents. It is a wonderful little museum – from the slave torture devices to the inscribed names of early rebels (Hyacinthe and Chickenshit included); from the ostentatiously Napoleonic insignias of the first black leaders to the earlier simplicity of Taino Indian stone carvings (the Tainos were all but wiped out within a century of Columbus’s arrival). There is even an anchor that claims to be from Columbus’s ship, the Santa María, wrecked on the north coast.

After a night at the Montana Hotel, elegantly rebuilt from the ruins of the quake, I meet Serge, my local guide, who takes me to the highlands behind Port-au-Prince. He’s a fascinating character: having grown up in an orphanage, he had a successful career as a dancer, then worked as a researcher on almost every film project in Haiti for the past decade. We leave the car and walk around Wynne Farm, a project encouraging farmers to plant trees and work sustainably. Hummingbirds thrum past and we spot two nests, one with a pair of tiny chicks inside, neither of them larger than the tip of my little finger. Serge’s conversation runs through modern slavery, voodoo, cuisine, art, music and the iniquities of Minustah, the UN stabilisation mission that still exerts a powerful influence in the country. Over the treetops we enjoy vast panoramas of green hills, heavily farmed. Haiti has a severe deforestation problem.

We head downhill, to the home of Janey Wynne, the owner of Wynne Farm, and a plant enthusiast. Her current obsession is bamboo. “It could save Haiti’s poor farmers,” she says. Some of her poor neighbours just sold a bundle of canes for US$200 – a small fortune. We drink herbal tea, eat mango cake and then tour the garden, which is magical: there’s macadamia, ginger, naranjilla, datura, and several strange fruits I’ve never seen before.

Serge finally drags me away: he wants us to visit Croix-des-Bouquets, a village on the east side of Port-au-Prince, where a tradition of metal-working has developed. As we drive, I note that Janey’s enthusiasm has worked: Serge is clutching a handful of seeds and some cuttings for his garden.

En route, we stop at an upmarket art gallery, a chance to orientate myself. Haitian art is complex and colourful, incorporating various schools and traditions, and long since “discovered” by collectors. Top names, such as Prospere Pierre-Louis, command substantial prices, but there is always the chance of finding an emerging talent.

When we reach Croix-des-Bouquets, Serge introduces me to Jacques Eugene, who makes mask-like pieces, punctured and perforated, adorned with twisted cutlery and car parts. His inspiration comes in dreams, from a voodoo spirit called Ezili Danto.

Down the road we pass dozens of workshops and shops. At one we meet Serge Jolimeau, one of the stars of Haitian art, whose work hangs all around us: huge, textured heads surging with vitality. In Jolimeau’s hands the metal becomes fluid and magical. The trouble is, once I’ve seen what I can’t afford, I don’t want the cheap stuff.

We drive north-west along the coast, stopping at simple fishing villages such as Luly, where the people are sitting in the shade, weaving fish traps. The beach is something of a curate’s egg: gorgeous pink conch shells mixed with plastic bottles in one great fascinating mess, like the country itself. At Montrouis I tour the Museum Ogier-Fombrun, part of the delightfully laid-back Moulin-sur-Mer beach hotel. At this former French plantation, 600 slaves eked out miserable lives to help create what was France’s richest colony. Now the place is home to a superb collection of artefacts, and tranquil gardens filled with semi-tame birds.

The visitors here seem to be mainly Haitian emigres from the US. The few European tourists tend to head south – to Jacmel, and a few well-kept beach resorts. Haiti, however, has a lot more to offer. Up in the north is the city of Cap Haïtien, a crumbling masterpiece of colonial-era architecture: brightly painted, well-kept houses mixed with the dilapidated and ruined. Like everywhere in Haiti, I find the people friendly but not effusive: smiles are not freely given, they have to be elicited. I stay at Habitacion Jouissant, a much-extended, shady bungalow on a patio high above the sea, where at dawn, wooden sailing boats can be spotted heading off to the Turks and Caicos Islands.

Cap Haïtien has some great markets and, nearby, good beaches and a potentially world-class attraction in La Citadelle Laferrière, an imposing fortification that sits on a high ridge above the village of Milot, where it’s worth seeking out Maurice Etienne, owner of a guesthouse-cum-cultural centre. Maurice’s great-great-grandfather was a soldier in La Citadelle, and Maurice has turned himself into an expert on the place. When I arrive, two American archaeologists are picking his brains.

Built by Haiti’s first post-slavery president, Henri Christophe, between 1805-1820, La Citadelle was both a warning to France and a bold statement that the former slaves were capable of great achievements. As the latter it was a success, but sadly the French did return, blockading the ports and demanding reparations for their lost, slave-driven businesses. Haiti capitulated, embarking on a withering series of debt repayments that would sap its strength for generations to come.

After our visit, Maurice and I have lunch on his patio. He’s optimistic about Haiti’s future now, and with La Citadelle, he knows Milot has a real winner. We eat fresh fruit – yes, there’s plenty of it – and he talks of Haiti’s unique culture, more strongly African than anywhere else in the Caribbean.

“Once, a government delegation came here from west Africa and we entertained them with voodoo drummers.” He laughs. “When it ended, we found the head of the group was in a deep trance.”

I’m beginning to feel a similar trance-like state coming on.

Back in Port-au-Prince, I meet up with Serge again, and ask him a question that’s been bothering me: do zombies exist? He is perfectly sure they do, but there is nothing supernatural about them. He found some when researching a film years ago. “They are people who get drugged, then buried alive and dug up at midnight. After that they are kept as drugged slaves, working in bad conditions.”

“And people are really afraid of it – being made into zombies?”

“It’s like a cultural memory of slavery, really – a fear that it could return, to you personally.”

In a few words, Serge has blown away all the nonsense that is talked about zombies, and revealed something deeper and very real. And then, a few minutes later, I’m heading into the airport to leave, and I’m thinking, I’ve barely scratched the surface here. This place deserves time, and it deserves visitors who want more than a beach.

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download