All
we can claim is a single day trip to northern Haiti.
We would have liked to visit more of the country, but at the
time there was a lot of political unrest and it was not a safe
place. What we did get a glimpse of was the severe poverty
of the Haitian people as well as a short voodoo show which was
quite a spectacle. The Haitian people seemed to be very
friendly and more or less happy despite the wretched condition
of their country.
Things to Know
There are only two
places to cross the border from the Dominican Republic into
Haiti. We went through the northern one which is not too
far from the Dominican town of Montecristo. The border
crossing was pure chaos, as to be expected. There is a
river close to here where there were thousands of Haitians
butchered and thrown into on the
command of the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo.
Things to See and Do
In the day we
were there we did the following things:
- visited an orphanage
- visited a market/garbage dump
- visited a jail
- visited a typical bakery and ate some yummy bread
- met a typical Haitian family and were shown around their tiny
house and yard
- watched a "voodoo show" which was a little more than
we were bargaining for as it involved trance-induced Haitians
drumming, dancing, then eating glass and fire and biting the
heads off live chickens
There are quite a
number of companies which do similar day trips to Haiti.
We had originally wanted to do a two day trip which included an
overnight stay and a tour of the Citadel but a couple of days previous a
mob had destroyed the bridge leading to the Citadel so all the
tour companies were forced to cancel that trip. That's
life in Haiti!
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