Haiti: "We Totally Almost Died"

Today's view from the ground: Milot, Ouanaminthe, and Artibonite, Haiti (and Dajabon, Dominican Republic)

In the above photo, the Citadel rises from its home peak near Milot.

I woke up at 4 A.M. to a shrieking chorus of chickens outside the room I was sharing with Tifre. We hastily prepared our things and drove out of town. On our way, a smiling man stood in front of us waving. He had stopped us before we went to bed on Tuesday night as well, claiming to be a ticket agent for the Citadel. We talked him into getting the tickets out of his office and drove off as soon as he was out of sight.

In the star-pierced darkness above Milot, the truck climbed the cobblestone road up the great height to the base of the Citadel, where four Haitians awaited us. One wore his national ID card around his neck on a lanyard, which is often enough to convince foreigners of authority and therefore earn a few goud for a fake service. They followed us up the path like a group of stray dogs hoping for scraps, attempting to prove their worth as guides by giving vague information about the Citadel's construction. Clancy and I were not in the mood to share this hard-fought moment with strangers, so we sped up and lagged back as much as we could to keep them at bay.

And then, in a moment, there it was. A massive ship of brick and stone, its prow black against the clear grey sky, stood hundreds of meters above the plain that stretched back north to Cap. It revealed itself to us just as the sun began its orchestral ascent over the horizon behind us, making the low clouds glow red and the lines of mountains to the east take on an ethereal orange hue. The lights of Cap, clinging to the crescent of the hook-shaped peninsula far below and behind, began to tremble under the competition. The stars slowly swept back behind the gathering blue until only the brightest remained. By the time we arrived at the gates of the great Citadel, the sky had swallowed them all.

The castle was closed until 8 A.M., proving that our research on glorious dawns seen from the Citadel needed to be updated. However, the door was open so our "guides," Clancy, Tifre and I helped ourselves. We clambered up the worn steps into the battery, where long cannons lay disused and gathering verdigris on the stone floor. This led to the ramparts, built without battlements and still lacking railings, where we could see half of the province that we towered above. I approached the edge for a picture only to throw myself back at the sight of the terrible fall I would take if I put a step wrong. Clancy, with the sureness of a mountain goat, went straight to the edge and set up her tripod.

We watched the sun peek over the horizon and then cast its golden light on the red walls behind us. Our complement of escorts had doubled, as the guards who live in the Citadel had roused and conversed at length with our "guides" and eventually let us stay despite the early intrusion. When we had our fill of photos, we went back down to the ridge that the Citadel tops and walked down onto the green-coated limestone cliff. A man drove a cow and a horse up the tiny steep path toward us, completely ignoring the morning blans. We took in the wondrous scene: the sun illuminated the bright rice fields below and the tangled plants under our feet as smoke rose from the villages clustered in the distance and the city by the sea.

Shadows were shortening by the time we started back down the path, where we were passed by the poor emaciated horse and its emaciated owner. The pair was preparing to bring less able tourists up and down the steep climb whenever they arrived. Close to the bottom of the peak, children beat a crude rhythm on drums and melodic pan flutes burst into a happy song, for which we paid a dollar. Women crowded us with cheap bracelets and masks, and a toothless old man blasted "Auld Lang Syne" with tuberculotic tones into Clancy's cringing face.

No money changed hands but we gave a half-dozen people a ride down the mountain in the back of the truck. The extra weight and the slickness of the stones made it difficult for me to drive, but I have been well-trained in stickshift truck driving by my father. By 8 A.M., we all made it back to Milot, where Clancy got a cup of coffee and I ate my last apple as Tifre finished his Tampico juice (he is not yet recovered enough from his surgery for most solid foods).

We pointed the truck back north and decided on a lark to spend our extra time in the rolling heartland of northeast Haiti. Route Nationale 6, connecting Cap-Haitien to the Dominican Republic, is a perfect road that is rarely used except by tap-taps and sand trucks. I was delirious with joy to be flying through rice paddies and past cows, goats, and sheep at speeds up to 125 km/h (78 mph), which I never dreamed could be safely attained in Haiti. The one hiccough is the number of "dos d'anes" (speedbumps) that the government saw fit to put near villages to keep traffic from mowing over pedestrians. Some are forewarned by signs, while others are not. It took a few stomach-launching blasts into space for me to recognize the unmarked ones. After some practice, Tifre was able to stop yelling "Dos d'anes!" every time one loomed in front of us.

A few idyllic Haitian towns dotted the road between Cap and Ouanaminthe, the border city. Route Nationale 6 became "Rue Espagnole" within a few kilometers of the thin river bounding Haiti. Ouanaminthe, although as frenzied and pleasant as most other Haitian cities, was definitely influenced by the Dominican Catholics and merchants nearby; the town church is topped by the high pointed spires often seen on Spanish cathedrals and the air was held by some Spanish tunes mixed in with the usual upbeat repetitive Creole music that blast from storefronts. At the edge of town, Clancy spotted a large white building with "Mercado" in blue letters on the side. We were looking at a different country over one of the few land borders in the Caribbean. And, as Americans, we were excited to see that we were beholding a duty-free shop.

Mostly due to our perverse fascination with new places (Clancy had never been to D.R.), we decided to hang the expense and the time restraints and cross the river. We tried driving across the bridge to the "mercado," only to find that it was a "borderless" market, like the many on African borders. We were directed to a different bridge a hundred meters downstream, where hundreds of Haitians stood ready with motos and taxis among street sellers and beggars. The truck had to remain, as rentals were forbidden to leave the country by the customs department. The immigration officer decided not to mess with Tifre's or my passport, as I told him we only planned to spend a few minutes outside Haiti, although this came too late for Clancy, who got an exit stamp. We crossed the metal bridge, passed the Uruguayan UN troops serving as Haiti's border guards, and looked into the river. A large sandbar marked the "official" border, but the river was clearly under Haitian occupation. Women did their laundry in the brown water and naked children bathed in the mud. The Dominican side of the sandbar was, supposedly out of respect to international conventions, vacant.


This is the Massacre River, named after the slaughter of two dozen pirates by the Spanish conquistadors in the seventeenth century. The name was sadly revived when Dajabon, the town on the Dominican side, became the epicenter of the Parsley Massacre after President Rafael Trujillo drunkenly pounded on a dinner table and ordered his soldiers to kill every Haitian they could find on their side of the river. At least 15,000 Haitians died in one bloody week of October 1937, and the Massacre River ran red.

We passed through the gates and had our passports checked by the slackly-dressed Dominican immigration officials. They balked at Tifre's presence, for he had no visa. We pled to allow him in for a few minutes, but they refused and began to pull him back to the gate. I managed to throw him the keys to the truck so he would at least have a place to wait for us. I earned a nasty look from the officer by muttering a Spanish curse as I walked away. Clancy earned entry with a ten-dollar tourist card and a green stamp in her virgin passport; I avoided the charge because I had not "officially" left Haiti, but paid for Clancy out of fairness.

A woman in a food stand sold us two tostadas and a Sprite for Tifre, accepting an American $5 and giving me 100 pesos in change. We walked to the mercado, smiling at the absurdity of our adventure, to take a pie in the face: the mercado was not open - and not finished. From the Dominican side, it can be plainly seen that the building is under construction. A cheery sign offered an opening date of later this year.

Thus, we walked back to the bridge and exited the Dominican Republic, after Immigration tried to charge Clancy a $25 fee, which sent her into a righteous rage that prevented the legal theft. Our only import was Tifre's Sprite. In Ouanaminthe, I stopped and bought a bootleg hip-hop compilation CD and showed the boy who sold it to me that I was testing it in the truck's CD player. Another pie in the face: the CD player was jammed. I hope I didn't get stiffed.

Just outside the city, we stopped for diesel. The attendant tried to overcharge us for dollars and we were ready to drive off. Fortunately, I have been well-trained in patience with unreasonable people by my mother, and sorted it out by producing $50 worth of goud that I had hidden in my boot. The five Haitians hanging out at the station all laughed as I removed it; I answered by saying "Vous l'aimez? Ingenuite americain!"

We tore back to Cap (avoiding the invisible "dos d'anes") where we discovered we were 45 minutes ahead of schedule. We also discovered that the Haitian need to transport things by moto may know no bounds; a man drove down the crowded road on a moto that bore a coffin lengthwise on the back. I was still driving on the shattered road to Limbe, where UN troops were stoned for not distributing food a month after the quake. The town is much nicer than journalists and peacekeepers led me to believe, although peace in Haiti is always a fragile enterprise. As we left town and began to discuss the future of NGOs in Haiti (much to Tifre's boredom), a full-size bus attempted to pass a slow-moving truck heading the other way and set its course to plow into us. I swerved into a cutout as the bus missed us by inches and threw gravel and dirt into the side of the truck. Clancy yelped as said "Oh my God, we totally almost died!" and then continued our conversation otherwise unfazed. That seems to happen more as we spend more time in Haiti.

The truck climbed slowly into the mountains as the sun reached its zenith and cumulus clouds cast friendly shadows on the valleys below. I had never seen this face of Haiti, this gorgeous mix of bright colors and lush land resting beneath the rugged heights of Artibonite. We stopped several times to take pictures, as well as to pee and buy a grapefruit. At one stop, we were mobbed by women selling fruits and meats; one woman sanguinely held up a goat head with the bloody neck hanging loosely beneath it. Although we are both rather hard-boiled, Clancy and I both thought that was a bit much.

At Gonaives, the road improved again, and I got into the bed of the truck. I drank sache dlo (the bags of purified water sold for pennies on the roadside) and ate crackers as Tifre hauled ass down Route Nationale One toward Port-au-Prince. We occasionally slowed for photos, as the setting sun cast yellow light onto the water of the rice patties, creating gorgeous strokes of dark green in constrast from the rice plants. We reached the easternmost reaches of the Gulf of Gonave as the sun prepared to tuck itself in, and the placid inviting water glowed dark blue under the red sky, the pink mountains, and the lush green rice. The colors faded and disappeared as the sun's trail faded in the sky over the water and the moon smiled on our last few kilometers. I lay back on the mat in the bed of the rumbling truck to visit my night-time friends - Orion, Cassiopeia, the Pleiades - constant companions throughout all my adventure since I first went camping. I must have dozed off, as the next thing I remember is Clancy waking me up to make sure I had not been thrown from the truck on a bump.

We returned the truck without incident - with seven minutes to spare - and took a tap-tap back to Communitere for a few well-deserved beers and dinner at the UN base with Howard. We fell asleep muttering praise to the day when we crossed nearly all of Haiti and brought its soul deep into our hearts.

That's the view from the ground. Next stop: Pestel.