Haiti

Day 1 – We were nervous about this trip. We had heard such a combination of stories, warnings, and experiences about Haiti that we didn’t know what to expect. Sure, we knew it was poor, and we knew that Haiti has incredible art, but we didn’t know to what extremes any of it would go. We didn’t even feel comfortable making a commitment for the length of our stay- would we stay 2 days and nights? 3? Turn around at the border?

To start things off, we had no water in our house in La Galera when we awoke. There was a loud sound from the upstairs toilet around 5 AM, and then we discovered no water from the faucets. We later found out that a delivery truck had rounded the corner on our street the day before and driven up on the sidewalk, crushing a section of concrete and the water pipes below it. Most of our neighborhood had lost water services yesterday afternoon- we had held out until the next morning. We packed for our trip and tried to have a breakfast w/o water. We had to tell Mel, who was housesitting for us, that the stay was starting off badly. Dear old Mel took it as well as he always does, and immediately took up house, hosting a visitor while we were leaving.

We rented a car from Wolfgang, a German (duh!) who owns a vehicle rental in town. Wolfgang was one of the people who gave us negative info on Haiti, as his Dominican wife, Jannet, had once crossed the border, been upset by the poverty and crowding, and immediately left.

We were driving one of the longer possible routes in the DR – southwest along the north shore and ocean and down to Route 1, which goes from Santo Domingo thru Santiago and to the northwest corner of the country. We know this route pretty well, as we fly into and out of Santiago and have taken it at least 10 times each. In order to go beyond Santiago, which is new territory for us, we had to find a turn for Route 1 to go north. We found the first turn, and thought we were headed in the right direction, but suddenly found ourselves on a road that stopped being a road – there were broken-down vehicles and broken pavement, with the road seeming to end just ahead. Not wanting to verify this, we turned around and drove to the nearest gas station that didn’t have several stripped cars in the lot. There we asked for directions, and one man told us to follow him. We hadn’t been that far off – just misread a turn – and were on our way again.

This section of the country had some noticeable differences from our lush peninsula. Mainly, it was much drier. We were driving through a valley, with the usual Hispaniola Dr. Suess-ish mountains on the horizons, and the fields looked like they were growing well, but there were few palm trees and, as we continued, the foliage became more brushlike, with cactus that we had not seen on the island yet. I had a feeling of Central Texas on the drive. Also, I realized why I had not been able to find the goat entrees that every guidebook tells you are one of the featured dishes in the Dominican – all the goats are in the west. And I mean ALL the goats. There were goats along the road. There were goats in the road. There were goats in the yards. There were goats in the houses. There seemed to be goats everywhere except in our car.



The Zona Goata continued all the way to Montecristi, our destination for the first night. This was in an area that Columbus first settled, and Montecristi had been an important Dominican seaport until Trujillo had moved all shipping to Santo Domingo, where he owned the ports, in the 1930’s. It gives the feel of being a town that had a moneyed past – many interesting houses that had fallen into disrepair, a town center with a watchtower and several parks. We headed into town, and then back out, along the coast to our hotel, which was 3-4 miles outside of town. The hotel sat on a hill overlooking the bay, with a large mesa behind it. It was a very pretty setting. The hotel was deserted – no guests besides us, and the staff gave off the impression that they weren’t expecting company, even though we had made reservations – the pool was algae green, the restaurant was closed on a Wednesday. I had the impression that this was like “The Shining,” if “The Shining” had been set on a Caribbean Island. The kids were happy, though. We had a hotel with a pool and a TV, their basic needs in life.