Haiti

2020: The Year that Wasn’t

We left Alter in Preveza, Greece in October 2019 with the firm belief that we would return six months later. We travelled to Haiti to replenish our coffers flying on contract for the local airline, Sunrise Airways. We have both come to love Haiti but flying for Sunrise was not the ideal farewell. Cap Haïtien was our only destination. It is only 25 minutes flying time from Port-au-Prince, and our schedule of up to eight sectors a day was unrelenting. We spent most of our time off in our apartment staring at the opposite wall, trying to find the energy or inclination to do anything else. When we did find the energy, we visited old friends and explored some of the sights that we had previously missed, including one of Port-au-Prince’s iconic Gingerbread Houses: a post-colonial mansion that was built at the turn of the last century.

Then Covid-19 happened. SARS and MERS had both come and gone with little damage and, at the time, COVID didn’t appear to be much different.

We returned to the UK in February at the start of the global pandemic and a world that was inexorably changing. We had booked a short skiing holiday in Valtournenche, in the Aosta Valley. We hadn’t skied for two years and were keen to get back on the slopes. But before we left, while we were staying with Nicky’s sister in Wales, the pandemic began to swell. It flooded the province of Lombardy in Italy and seeped from there via the surrounding provinces into the rest of the country. We considered cancelling. But decided to go ahead and boarded the flight to Turin as planned. On arrival, we joined a long queue that snaked towards a cluster of medical staff who checked everyone’s temperatures and collected contact forms. The Italians were riding Europe’s first wave and were paddling furiously, trying to stay ahead of its curling tip and prevent their winter holiday season from drowning. Most skiers had chosen to stay home leaving the towns of Valtournenche and Cervinia bereft, with many restaurants closed and a curfew that brought an eerie calm to the evening streets. Residents were in shock, their hopes fading like mountain mist. Some stopped us in the streets to thank us for coming.

When the ski slopes closed we went snowshoeing.

On Sunday 8 March, the ski lifts operated at reduced capacity, with blocked-off seats and social distancing in the queues. Then, when it was clear that the wave was really a tsunami, the Italians finally did what they had been desperately trying to avoid, they closed the slopes.

EasyJet cancelled our return flight to the UK on the morning of our departure and muttered vague promises of evacuation flights from Milan, the epidemic’s epicentre. We declined and took the last flight out of Turin on Ryanair, who continued to honour their published schedule. At Stanstead we were greeted by empty hand sanitiser dispensers. Nobody seemed vaguely interested that we were coming from the heart of the pandemic. It was a strong indication that Britain had rolled up its trousers to its knees, pulled a knotted handkerchief firmly down over its head and was preparing to paddle into the wave without a lifejacket.

I left for South Africa shortly afterwards to start a two-month contract flying in the DRC and Nicky returned to Wales. In a world where plans were fast becoming meaningless, Nicky intended returning to Greece to go hiking in Corfu before we met up at the boat in May.

But Covid had a schedule that didn’t involve us. Countries began to close their borders and lock down their citizens. I reached Kalemie in the DRC the day before the Congo closed its borders and cancelled all internal flights, leaving me without much flying to do. I settled in for an indefinite stay. Nicky’s planned hike became impossible, so she moved into her sister’s Airbnb to wait out the pandemic.

My two-month contract stretched three and then four. It was eventually four and a half months before a new crew could replace me. With no flights between South Africa and the UK, or anywhere else, getting back to Nicky in the UK was a challenge. Fortunately, my boss agreed to drop me off in Lusaka and the Zambians let me remain in transit – without going through the mandatory 14 days quarantine – while I waited for an Ethiopian Airlines flight to London, via Addis Ababa.

Post-apocalyptic empty walkways at Heathrow.

During the four months, Nicky had decided that we needed a more permanent home, somewhere that we could always go to in times of crisis. The boat was supposed to be our home, but neither of us could get there. She wanted something more tangible. South Africa was too remote and neither of us wanted to return there permanently, so we decided to take advantage of the Brexit withdrawal agreement and move to Europe. But where?

Our first instinct was Spain. We flew to Granada to spend some time there and see if we liked it. We landed in Malaga and joined a crush of people choking the passageway to the arrival hall. Most were wearing masks, but I’ve seen more social distancing at a Rod Stewart concert.

The crush of people that greeted us in Malaga.

Grenada greeted us with temperatures in the forties and mandatory mask-wearing indoors and out. It was a bit like walking about in a large sauna with a shopping bag over your head, so we often escaped to the coast or drove up into the mountains, where it was a few degrees cooler.

We both loved Granada, and very nearly made an offer on an apartment in nearby Salobreña. But after a month it didn’t feel like home. More importantly, it felt like it might never be.

So, after making a list of all the places that we might want to live: France, Italy, Greece and just about anywhere in the world apart from Chad or North Korea, we decided to move to France. It was already August and under Article 34, we had to be resident and make an application to stay before the end of the year. There wasn’t a lot of time to spare.

We rented an apartment in Carcassonne, a city on the Canal du Midi that we had visited a couple of times previously. Properties closer to the coast tend to be more expensive and we didn’t want to be too far from the sea. After Nicky had examined every property for sale in a five-hundred-kilometre radius, we found a village house that, for me, was a coup de foudre. It wasn’t perfect for Nicky, with little outside space. But other than that it was exactly what we were looking for: somewhere small that we could lock up and leave whenever we wanted to without the property beginning to deteriorate the moment that we locked the door.

Perhaps the best part of the deal was that we bought it from an English couple who had renovated another property three doors down and would therefore be our neighbours.

Having Paul and Tan there to show us around and introduce us to our other neighbours made our transplant almost painless. We quickly discovered that we had a lot more in common and have become firm friends.

And then, finally, in July 2021, Covid restrictions began to ease. By then France had vaccinated us and we were able to consider returning to Greece and the boat.

The Year in Pictures

It’s been almost a year since the last post. A narrative on the happenings would be longer than War and Peace. So, to save you from boredom, we’ve decided to post a smattering of pictures of the year that was:

Île à Vache

When the aircraft was undergoing routine maintenance, we slipped out of Port-au-Prince to explore Île à Vache…

The Island of Cows, lies off Les Cayes, about 200 kilometers west of the capital Port-au-Prince and roughly halfway along the southern coast of the Tiburon peninsula. It is only ten kilometers off the coast, but a continent away from the hustle of Haiti. The island got its name during the seventeenth century when pirates used it as a provisioning stop.

One of the local fishermen showing us his crab pots.

Under the Tuscan Sun

In September 2017, we spent three weeks in Italy, where we travelled to Verona and Venice before touring Tuscany.

In Verona, we experienced Tosca in the two-thousand-year-old arena.

Venice was Venice, with tourist crowds that outnumbered the residents. But it wasn’t difficult to get away from the crowds, even near the Rialto Bridge, where a step to the left found us at All’Arco a small bar serving delicious cicchetti to a local crowd.

We attended the Regata Storico, the annual gondola race down the Grand Canal that has been a fixture since the thirteenth century.

Part of the parade of gondolas on the Grand Canal

We travelled to the islands of Murano and Burano, famous for its colourful houses.

From Venice, we travelled to Tuscany, where we based ourselves in the small town of Gambassi Terme. We could see the medieval towers of San Gimignano from our terrace.

The view of San Gimignano from our terrace.

On the way to the market in the nearby town of Certaldo, we stumbled across a medieval festival.

San Gimignano, with its iconic towers, was a short drive away.

The view from the top of one of the towers in San Gimignano

Not far from San Gimignano we followed Francesco and his dogs Sally, Angie and Nuaoro through the undergrowth in search of truffles. Francesco’s biggest challenge was preventing the dogs from eating the truffles that they found.

Francesco Sally Angie and Nuaoro, all digging for truffles.

In Florence, we stayed on the south bank of the Arno, away from the crowds. We visited the Uffizi Gallery and soaked up the standard Florence experience, but the highlights were watching the movie Dunkirk at the Odeon, discovering a wine bar around the corner from our apartment and experiencing lunch at Ristorante Alla Vecchia Bettola, where the locals eat.

We took the train back to Rome, where the journey had started. There we met up with family and friends. Nicky’s sister Susan joined us with Harley and Noa. We also met up with Giuditta, who introduced us to her uncle Giovanni – a devoted son of Rome.

One evening, we were all having sundowners outside the French Embassy. Giovanni explained to us that the embassy was housed in the Palazzo Farnese, a former home of Pope Paul III. He was telling us about the frescos and other works of art inside when the police began putting up barriers in front of the building. We learned that it was the one night of the year that the palace was open to the public and quickly joined the growing queue.

Perseus Turns Phineus and His Companions to Stone by Showing Them Medusa’s Head. Annibale Carracci c1606

Antarctica

In December we sailed to Antarctica on board the sailing vessel Pelagic Australis. It was an unforgettable experience, but we took some photographs, just in case.

The Argentinian refuge hut in Mikkelsen Harbour.

The male penguin constantly upgrades the nest with more stones – to replace the ones that the other penguins have stolen.

Pelagic Australis waiting for the shore party to return.

Pelagic Australis tied up in Enterprise Harbour next to factory shipwreck with another yacht rafted up alongside.

Approaching an iceberg for some more penguin watching

Disembarking onto the ice at Port Lockroy

… which was every bit as cold as we feared.

Passing Cape Horn on the return journey.

Sunset on our last night in Puerto Williams

Jacmel Carnaval

On 1st January this year, we learned that the contract in Haiti had been cancelled by the UN with only a month’s notice. We returned to Haiti uncertain of the future, expecting to fly the aircraft back to South Africa via the Azores. But our employer signed a contract with a local airline, and our stay in Haiti was extended.

We had a few days off between contracts that coincided with the annual carnival in Jacmel.

One of the Chaloskas, a bogeyman of the carnival based on Charles Oscar Etienne, Haiti’s chief of police in 1915, who infamously supervised the murder of 167 political prisoners.

Haiti is the only nation to have freed itself from slavery, something Haitians are fiercely proud of.

As the sun began to set, the crowd at the rear swelled and pressed the procession forward.

Leaving Haiti

The new contract in Haiti didn’t give us any time to explore. So we cut our losses and said a sad goodbye to a country that we’d grown to love.

Vodou

Haiti would not be Haiti without Vodou. Sanley, our driver, told us that when he was in school, he had to state his religion when completing a form. He wrote ‘Christian’. But the teacher made him change it, ‘You are not Christian, you are Vodou.’

‘But my mum takes me to church,’ Sanley replied.

‘You are Haitian. You are Vodou.’

Vodou is as integral to Haitians as the food they eat and the air that they breathe.

The studios of Hollywood would have us believe that “Voodoo” comes from darkness, sticks pins into dolls, slaughters chickens and turns men, and women, into zombies. In reality, Vodou is a religion like many others. And like them, it has some practices that an outsider might find unusual. Vodou has been portrayed by some as evil and even demonic, but the truth is far more interesting.

The slaves that were wrenched from their homes in Africa and shipped across the Atlantic to Haiti, brought with them their culture and their animist beliefs. And when their masters tried to save them with Christianity, the slaves incorporated what was useful from that religion into theirs. To that mixture they added some religious beliefs of the island’s native Taínos, and Vodou was born.

We’ve been in Haiti for a year now and, until a few days ago, had little exposure to Vodou. Last year, we visited the sprawling downtown cemetery on the Day of the Dead, but we felt like voyeurs, uninvited guests. We wanted to understand a little more of the religion and experience its practices.

So, with the help of Jacqui Labrom of Voyages Lumière in Port au Prince, we arranged to attend a vodou ceremony in a peristil, or vodou temple, just above Pétionville.

We followed our guide, Serge, up Montaigne Noire, the precipitous road that scorns the contours of the mountain above Pétionville. Serge led us off the main road and up a another that looked like the construction site for a funicular. We parked the cars near the top and quickly chocked all four wheels with rocks. A narrow alleyway flanked by ramshackle houses led us to the peristil. Some local children stopped to watch the procession of blancs slipping through their territory

We were late. The congregation were all inside and the houngan, or Vodou priest, had begun proceedings. After a short wait, we were ushered into the peristil and given seats in the front row.

The peristil was about eight metres by eight and punctuated in the middle by a sturdy pillar holding up the roof. Jacqui explained that the pillar is known as the poto mitan and is an important part of the temple, a channel from the spirit world that allows them to join the congregation and perhaps take possession of one or two: for a while.

Despite the burning sun outside, the room was dark and cool. The walls were painted for the Haitian flag: dark blue on top and red at the bottom. On one side of the peristil, an unglazed window ran the length of the room, just under the eaves, The opposite window was blocked by a series of pictures: vodou art, two Catholic saints, a busy montage of Haitian heads of state and a map. And on the walls were larger paintings representing Haiti’s history. Pictures of the Taíno, Haiti’s original inhabitants, interspersed with paintings of shackled slaves and heroes of the revolution.

The room was awash with colour; many of the women wore red dresses with black-trimmed ruffles, others were dressed in purple and blue, and some wore their Saturday best. Most men wore their everyday clothes, but a few wore red shirts and a red moushwa, the vodou headscarf.

The houngan sat at the front on a small dais, under a canopy. A wooden sceptre, topped with a skull, leaned on his chair. To the houngan’s right four drummers waited patiently, their sticks poised. One ran his finger over the skin of his drum. It hummed.

When we were settled, Houngan Sambelle continued. He spoke in Creole and, although we don’t speak the language, it became clear that the service hadn’t begun. Apparently, he had been scheduled to appear on a radio show with a vodou priestess, or mambo, who failed to appear with him. The houngan spent half an hour explaining exactly what had happened, how disrespected he felt and then instructed everyone to delete the mambo from their WhatsApp, Facebook and all other social media profiles and also to block her number. Vodou in the 21^st century.

When the houngan stood, we stood with him. The congregation faced the back of the room, all holding candles and, following the houngan’s lead, began chanting to the rhythm of the drums. They sang to each wall of the room in turn before turning in towards the poto mitan. Those closest to the pillar placed a hand on it. The chanting continued.

There was a shiver, a schism and a woman on the far side of the pillar began to chatter. Her eyes widened and she arched her back creating space in her viscera for an invited guest. The chanting stopped and the congregation drew back a little in anticipation. The spirit withdrew and the woman slumped into the arms of her neighbours. They held her and wiped her glistening brow. A collective sigh seemed to fill the room and the tension evaporated like a spent storm.

While everyone took a break, the houngan addressed us, the visitors. He began in English, but then switched to Creole leaving Jacqui and Serge to translate. He gave us a lesson on the history of Haiti starting with the arrival of Christopher Columbus and subsequent extinction of the Taíno. He told us of the origins of the slaves, their journey from Africa and of the roots of Vodou.

When he was finished with us, he turned his focus to the patient congregation and the ceremony continued. A woman walked to the front with a sacred rattle and a candle in one hand. In the other, she held a bottle filled with chilies and a clear liquid. She splashed a little liquid onto the floor in front of each drummer, passed the candle over each drum and tapped it lightly with the rattle. Then she did the same to the poto mitan and crossed herself.

The elegantly dressed women started singing. The dancing that followed was orderly and melodious at first. A couple took the floor. Soon everyone was dancing. There was a rupture and a single figure, bent at the waist, barged through the crowd at speed, circled the poto mitan and disappeared. Another staggered into view, and soon bodies were bouncing off each other like pinballs. People dabbed white powder on each other’s faces to signify death.

Rum flowed, both as spilled offering for the gods and as spirits for the spirits. And then things began to get a little out of hand. The blancs became the centre of attention. A large man grabbed Nicky’s wrist and tried to pull her into the fray. She wasn’t keen. The dancers crowded closer, their bodies writhed and their arms flailed. When they were almost on top of us, the houngan drew them back. It was about then that we decided that we’d probably seen enough.

We paid our respects (and a bottle of rum) to the houngan and retreated to the cars, which were still resting on their chocks in the bright sunshine.

Voyages Lumière: http://voyageslumiere.com/

Jacmel & Bassin Bleu

Distances in Haiti are measured in hours, not kilometers. A five-kilometer trip to the supermarket takes at least half an hour. Jacmel on Haiti’s south coast is only a hundred kilometers from Port-au-Prince, but a three-hour drive.
We planned to depart early for Jacmel to avoid the hour or three when the Port-au-Prince traffic goes from slow to stationary. We should have known better. Carefully planned itineraries in Haiti are naïve fantasies. So, we were unsurprised, but flustered, when a failed clutch stranded us before we had left the house. With accommodation booked and no other means of easily getting to Jacmel, we began frantically calling car hire companies. By the time we’d negotiated a replacement at a sensible price, loaded up, and set off for Jacmel, the roads were as congested as a consumptive’s lungs.

Eglise Paroissiale St. Philippe et St. Jean overlooking the old Iron Market in Jacmel

We pushed through the sprawling Carrefour slum on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, where ruined roads slowed us to a crawl, and negotiated the torturous traffic, flanking water tankers that leaked from their hindquarters like incontinent elephants, and passing brightly painted buses with I Love You God and Grace Bondieu splashed across their windscreens. We fought our way free from the morning melee into the countryside and followed a pass over the Massif de la Hotte, the mountain range that divides Haiti’s Tiburon Peninsula. The narrow road passed through unkempt villages and wound around blind bends, slowing us to a plod. And when we found ourselves behind an asthmatic truck, there was no passing it until we reached the top.
Then we plunged down towards the sea, making up time on the descent, and turned off towards the renowned Bassin Bleu, a little before Jacmel. Thanks to Google Maps, we knew precisely where we were, exactly where we were going, but had no idea how to get there. Google had us fording the river, but a new bridge kept our tyres dry. We ditched the GPS and, with the help of the occasional local, found our way to Bassin Bleu the old way.
Tourism in Haiti endures somewhere between scarce and non-existent. If you ignore the Canadians bussed to the all-inclusive Decameron Hotel in packages or the sun-seekers delivered to Labadee by the shipload, you could count the foreign tourists on your fingers. Consequently, places like Bassin Bleu, which would be overcrowded on any other Caribbean island, are visited mostly by locals, or foreigners living in Haiti. So, the guides, who sometimes wait fruitlessly all day for a tourist, turn into a lynch mob when a potential client arrives. Well, that’s what it felt like. Before I had set the park brake, a crush of guides surrounded the car, knocking on the windows, clamouring for our attention. We emerged into a cacophony of unintelligible Creole.

When we hesitated, they began shouting and shoving each other and fixing for a fight.
I was ready to abandon the visit. But Nicky found David Guerrier from the Renand Foundation, who was a tranquil island amidst the tempest. We followed David along a forest path that wound upstream, until we came across a top hat resting on a pair of boots. Baron Samedi had beaten us to it. We left our trainers next to the hat and slid down a rock face to the river with the help of a knotted rope.

Bassin Bleu nestles in a narrow gorge at the base of a small waterfall. It comprises a series of pools, the most popular of which is the highest: Bassin Clair. Despite its name, its water is a milky turquoise but it is cool and inviting in the Haitian heat. We stripped to our costumes on the steep stone sides of the pool and swam, with our sandwiches, to the toad-like rock in the middle, where we joined a group who were visiting from Jacmel.
While having our picnic, we met Susan an American artist living in Jacmel. She told us about her art studio and also about The Vatican, where Reggie blends his own ice cream creations.
An hour or two later we were back at the car. We felt that David had looked after us well so, although he hadn’t asked for any money, we gave him a thousand gourdes (about $16 US, which, we believed was way above the going rate). He seemed unhappy, so we offered him more. He declined. So, we left mildly disgruntled David, paid the car guard, and tried to ignore the gathering crowd of hawkers and their trinkets. I turned the key in the ignition. Nothing happened. The car was dead.
With some reluctance, we rejoined the atmosphere of mild discontent. The guides, car guards and hawkers gathered around, all loudly recommending solutions. We traced the problem to a loose battery connection, tightened it, and fled for Jacmel. But the car felt spongy, so we pulled over down the road and found that one tyre was badly underinflated. We pushed on cautiously and soon after we rejoined the main road, we stopped at one of the many roadside tyre repair spots and pumped up the tyre. It didn’t go down again. We couldn’t help wondering if someone at Bassin Bleu had deflated it so that they could ‘assist’ us to inflate it again.
When we reached Jacmel, we headed straight for The Hotel Cyvadier just outside town in time to watch the sunset, both clasping large and welcome rum punches.
The following morning we headed for The Vatican and Reggie’s ice cream. Jacmel isn’t very big, and we had directions, but The Vatican was nowhere to be found. We wandered about looking confused until someone emerged from a doorway and asked what we were looking for.
‘Le Vatican.’
C’est ici. Entrez!’ he gestured for us to enter. We hesitated. There was no sign outside and the interior was dark and uninviting, with a pool table guarding a cluster of dusty chairs and half-built furniture.
‘It’s closed for renovations, but you can come in.’

The Vatican occupies a reclaimed alleyway with a roof and mezzanine added. Attached to the restaurant, beyond a small courtyard, are an ice cream parlour and café: both also closed. We followed the guy upstairs, where a long bar counter faced a few tables with bench seats.
Reggie rose from his mattress on the adjacent balcony like Lazarus and, wearing little more than a loincloth around his ample waist, clambered over the low wall into his restaurant. He shook off his afternoon sleep and greeted us like honoured guests. Reggie is a Haitian who, like many of his countrymen, has spent much of his life in the United States. Unlike most of them, he returned to set up his business in Jacmel. He was tickled that we had come specially for his ice cream and reeled off all the different flavours for us to choose from. I don’t remember all of them, but Nicky settled for Rum & Raisin and I requested a bolder Pineapple & Ginger.
When the cups of ice cream arrived, Reggie hovered over us like an expectant father. He needn’t have worried, they were both delicious. Sometimes food exceeds expectations only because the expectations weren’t very high to begin with. But Reggie’s ice cream alone was worth the journey to Jacmel. While we were savouring our treats, Susan and Stephanie, who we had met at Bassin Bleu, arrived. I think they might have entered from another balcony, but I can’t be sure because we were fixated on our ice creams. We sat chatting for a while before heading off to explore Jacmel.

Jacmel has little of the bustle of its big brother on the other side of the mountain. It is a rough gem badly in need of polishing. The Marché de Fer in Bel Air was once a lively centre of commerce, but its heart has ceased to beat. Some of its steel struts have rusted through, causing part of the roof to lean alarmingly into the street. The remains of bright silver cladding imply a scrapped renovation: a love found and lost.

One of the shops selling papier-mâché masks.

Down towards the sea, artists studios and galleries range along the cobbled streets near the Hotel Florita. And further west, towards the river, we found shops with brightly coloured papier-mâché heads for sale, a side-gig for the artists who make masks for Carnival. Graffiti is often a blight, but the Jacmel artists have talent in any medium.

The walls near the Alliance Française are covered in the kind of graffiti that might once have been frescos. At the seafront, the promenade was deserted except for a group of schoolchildren bussed down for the day. The beach would be idyllic, but for a canal that delivers a stream of garbage and plastic containers onto the sand.
The city is a living metaphor for Haiti: warm, picturesque and laid-back; but its crumbling infrastructure is almost beyond repair.

Driving, Me Crazy

Often, when one group of people ignore the rules of the road, it’s a catalyst for chaos. South Africa is a good example of this. So, in Haiti, where even basic traffic rules, like which side of the road to drive on, are treated as mere suggestions, it is astonishing that it all seems to work.

According to ITV, repairing all the potholes in England and Wales would cost £14 billion. If that were accurate, repairing all the potholes in Haiti would cost more than the UK’s gross domestic product. It isn’t a coincidence that almost everyone drives SUV’s. Going to the shops feels more like an expedition than an outing. And, because the city spreads up the side of a mountain, with hills radiating from it like fingers, there are only a few arteries from ‘downtown’ to ‘uptown’. The seven kilometer journey uptown to the supermarket in Pètionville can take over an hour.

Ironically, the worst section of road in the city is the kilometer or so outside the US Embassy in Tabarre. There, the potholes are reversed: little islands of tar sticking out of the dirt waiting to rip the sumps from the bold or the unwary. A constant pall of dust hangs over the embassy, fading the colours of the flag that hangs listlessly outside. It’s probably Haiti’s way of saying ‘thank you’ for interfering in their politics.

In a city with choked roads and knackered cars, the potholes slow everything down. Where there are potholes, accidents are slow, almost graceful affairs, but on the few smooth stretches of road, things often turn deadly. In our first two months, we saw two motorbike riders lying dead in the street; a newly dismembered Tap Tap appeared one morning. It still lies on its side on one corner as a memorial to those who were in it when everything went wrong.

Speed bumps calm things down in the suburbs, where the roads are generally in better condition. They aren’t the long, rolling speed bumps that SUVs sneer at as they cruise by at warp speed, but the short sharp ones that reach up and tear the guts out of the disrespectful.

Our daily commute to work is a good example of what it’s like to get around. There are two main routes, the shortest one is unremarkable, but during rush hour, nothing moves. So we often take the back route through Vivy Mitchell. It’s a bit of a roller coaster ride. It starts off innocuously enough along the back roads out of our gated suburb to the foot of Rue Vivy Mitchell. That’s where the cog engages and the car tilts up for the big climb. It rattles to the top, bouncing over the speed bumps and potholes. The next section is harmless: a sharp left turn, followed by a sharp right. Then the road plunges down, past a police checkpoint and on to the bottom where it swerves right and starts to climb again. When we plunge down the second drop, I brace for the loop.

About halfway we reach the flat lands, leave the roller coaster and board the bumper car. It’s easy to avoid the other cars on the straighter roads at the bottom of the hill; stray goats, dogs and cows are the main obstacles. But closer to the airport, where the road widens, the action picks up again. The roads there are heavily potholed and everyone seeks the path of least resistance: swerving back and forth like drunkards, veering from one side to the other, undertaking and over-braking, all in an effort to stay on the tar.

At first, we relied on Sanley, our driver, to get us around. But we wanted our independence and were determined to venture out on our own. It’s one thing to sit passively (if you don’t count the clenched teeth and white knuckles) while someone else negotiates the mayhem. It is a completely different tin of tuna to do the driving yourself.

We made an arrangement with Sanley to hire his car. It is a Ford double-cab and has seen better days. Half the indicators didn’t work, the windscreen wipers had no blades and the bodywork was held together with wire. We dubbed it The Beast.

The Beast standing out a bit at the Pètionville Club

We quickly learned that there are many intersections, but few stop streets. Nobody pays any attention to either. Most intersections need some extra caution, because it’s seldom obvious who has right of way. Even when it does seem evident, it’s always good to remember that assumption is the mother of all fuck-ups.

The busier intersections are more of a challenge. Traffic from four or more directions meets in the middle and grinds to a halt in a Gordian knot. One by one, the cars, taxis and trucks disentangle themselves from each other, working their way carefully through the snarl until they are free again. It requires just the right balance of passive aggression, and it wouldn’t work anywhere else in the world. But here, nobody gets stressed. When we first made it successfully through one of the big intersections, we both whooped, high-fived to celebrate.

On one occasion, we had to cross a line of cars that was bumper to bumper in the opposite direction. We settled in for a long wait, but a taxi in the queue reversed to try to let us through. There still wasn’t space to turn. We couldn’t reverse because the traffic behind us was equally backed up. Then the guy on the motorbike behind us made space and signalled for us to reverse. We made the turn, squeezed through the line of cars and were on our way: synergy amongst the chaos.

One-way streets are not always signposted and it is not uncommon to meet someone coming down the wrong way. In our case, we managed to go the wrong way a couple of times and met cars coming the right way. There was little more fuss than a quick flash of lights to let us know that we had cocked up.

Our first foray out of town was to one of the beaches north of the city. We had passed the airport and were almost out of town when a policeman pulled us over. He was very smartly dressed and extremely polite. The conversation went something like this (in French and a little Creole):

‘Bonjour.’ He said, smiling.

‘Bonjour. Koman ou ye?’ Nicky had already learned some Creole.

He smiled, came straight to the point. ‘I’m okay, but I’d be much better if I had as much money as you have.’

My heart sank, but I kept smiling.

‘Too bad,’ Nicky said.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Where are you going?’

‘To the beach.’ I pointed to the others who had seen us being pulled over and had stopped a little way ahead. ‘With our friends.’

‘Have a nice day,’ he said. And that was it. He could have fined us for an almost endless number of things, but The Beast doesn’t exactly exude wealth. We’ve come to love the car because it allows us to blend in.

The open drains are deadly for the unwary.

After almost four months, driving here has become normal. The open drains, the Mack trucks that hog the road, the fact that nobody indicates all add to the challenge. They are just part of the daily commute.

Coffee in China Cups

By the end of October, we had settled in to our normal schedule, flying three days a week to Cap Haïtien and Santo Domingo, with the occasional medevac thrown in to keep things interesting.

The UN wanted us to fly to the southwest, but the runway in Les Cayes is a smidgen too short, which only left Jérémie as a possibility. Its runway is long enough, but size isn’t always everything, as we would soon find out. The UN asked Nicky and I to go and inspect the airfield. We couldn’t fly there in our aircraft until we’d done the inspection, so we hitched a ride in a Bangladesh Air Force Mi17 helicopter that was headed in that direction.

Boarding UNO-122 for the flight to Jérémie

The Mi17 is not a pretty beast; not many helicopters are, especially Russian ones. But it is built like a brick shithouse and it gets the job done. UNO-122 is a people carrier, but has a military swagger and carries extra fuel in drop tanks that look disturbingly like bombs. We boarded with eight others bound for the UN Helipad at Les Cayes.

After a thorough briefing from the flight sergeant, the engines began to whine and the big fan above us stirred, bringing some relief from the humidity inside. When the doors were closed, the breeze was shut out. Beads of sweat slid down our faces. Small fans (rubber blades – no guards) were suspended inches above our heads. The sergeant flicked them on; the droplets dried to dampness. The helicopter shook, big blades beating the air into submission. We lifted off from the UN apron.

The helicopter flew south over Vivy Mitchel before turning west over the city and down the coast towards Grand Goâve. The downtown area of Port-au-Prince still bore the scars of the 2010 earthquake that struck seven years ago today. The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption lay in ruins, kept as a monument to the disaster. Nearby an open lot marked the spot where the National Palace once stood.

Shantytowns spilled down to the water’s edge, hugging the tributaries and channels that carry the city’s refuse and sewage down to the sea. The press of humanity thinned as we moved further away from the capital and the coastline exchanged effluence for affluence. Properties grew in size until some had their own swimming pools and jetties. The transparency of the water was inversely proportional to our distance from the city, and by the time we reached the swimming pools, the sea was Caribbean clear, and reefs began to appear.

Before long, the helicopter dipped inland to cross the mountainous peninsula that is the south-western part of Haiti. A roofless house might have been the first sign of hurricane damage. But a closer look revealed a tree growing inside. About a quarter of the houses were unfinished: grey shells awaiting more blocks, cement, or enough money for a roof.

An uprooted tree lay in front of the terminal.

Only when we approached Les Cayes did we see the unmistakeable swathe of destruction from Hurricane Matthew. Palm trees, accustomed to the constant trade winds, lay scattered like matchsticks. The shacks that were still standing were mostly roofless; bright blue plastic sheeting provided shelter for a lucky few. Some of the bigger houses had already been repaired, their corrugated iron roofs glinting in the sun as we began our descent.

The helipad wore bruises from the blow. An uprooted tree lay in front of the terminal, while others leaned at precarious angles, all pointing north, accusingly in the direction the culprit had fled.

We touched down gently, the huge blades stilled and the whining engine silenced; one of the crew soaked two towels in ice water and took them forward for the pilots. And a few minutes later, while we were chatting to the commander on the landing pad, the engineer brought us coffee, served in china cups from a silver tray. First Class service. The best we could manage on our aircraft was a flask of tepid water and a peanut butter sandwich. We were going to have to up our game.

After the coffee break, we lifted off from Les Cayes and headed north-east, where the mountains were lowest and the clouds thinnest. The countryside there had succumbed to the tempest; denuded fields were strewn with broken trees, sheets of corrugated iron and a littering of treasured possessions.

Houses with blue plastic sheeting near Jérémie

Jérémie had fared no better than Les Cayes. From the air, the runway looked promising. On closer inspection its limitations were numerous. There was a settlement on one side of the runway and a small UN outpost on the other. The UN was providing potable water to the local people, who were forced to cross the runway to collect it. As a result, the runway was a local highway. There were no fences to separate landing airplanes from the stray goats, dogs, cattle, motorbikes and pedestrians that roamed freely. The few UN soldiers positioned to protect the helicopter landing pad had long since given up trying to stem the flow of traffic across the runway.

The surface wasn’t promising either. While some areas were firm and smooth, others were rough and stony and in places where water had pooled, the mud was as slick as goose shit.

Nicky and I prodded and poked and took pictures, but with each

Jérémie’s runway with mud as slick as goose shit

passing minute we became more convinced that it wasn’t a runway we could use. Some fixed wing aircraft were landing there, but most of them were designed for the rougher conditions, with bigger tyres and stronger undercarriage. Although we both agreed that we could theoretically land and take off from Jérémie, the chances of an incident were too high to warrant the risk.

Back in Port-au-Prince, we wrote the report for the UN reluctantly, knowing that we had ruled out what might have been one of our more interesting destinations.

The Day of the Dead

Inspired by the James Bond movie Sceptre, Mexico City recently tipped a sombrero to Hollywood by holding a Day of the Dead parade for the first time. The Mexican parade, while spectacular, is all Disney, a tourist temptation. The real thing happens in a cemetery.

Nowhere is the fusion of Christian tradition and local culture more symbiotic than in Haiti where, according to legend, Haitians are 60% Catholic, 39% Protestant and 100% voodoo. Haitians traditionally celebrate the Day of the Dead much like anywhere else, by visiting their family tombs, offering gifts to the departed and remembering those that they have lost. But voodoo adds spice to the soup.

On the 1^st November, a public holiday in Haiti, the people of downtown Port-au-Prince descend on the single square kilometre of housing estate built for the dead, not far from the football stadium.

Stallholders and hawkers clog the road between the stadium and the cemetery, taking advantage of the crowds. A tinny voice blares from loudspeakers on top of a pickup truck, vainly competing for attention amongst a cacophony of konpa music that blasts from every stall. Closer to the cemetery a bass beat from speakers near the entrance shakes the ground and drives air from the lungs of the revellers. The crowd roars, encouraging a half-dressed woman onstage, who is gyrating hypnotically to the music, thrusting herself at the crowds and rolling her possessed eyes until only the whites stare blankly out.

People jostle across the bridge that crosses the river of garbage into the cemetery itself. White-clad mourners move quietly to their family tombs, the only island of calm amidst a sea of drunken revellers. Rum flows; people shout, spill, stagger and canon about on random trajectories. A line of crones sit on a low wall eating from tin bowls, their faces smeared with the lumpy beige gruel that drips to the ground at their feet. Further along, a knot of gawkers surround a small ceremony targeted more at the watchers than the dead.

Two human skulls lie haphazard atop a pile of bones littered with burning candles and offerings of coffee, food and rum.

The tombs that fill the cemetery are as grand as the relatives of the departed could afford; offering them, in death, a house that they might only have dreamed of in life. The coffins are not buried, but are placed in crypts built into the tombs, secured by locked steel doors. The locks are no match for the grave robbers, who raid the coffins for whatever lies within: trinkets for the thieves or perhaps bones for the voodoo priests.

An abandoned coffin in the Grand Cimetiére

Broken locks, doors smashed from their hinges suggest that the dead have little rest. Many of the desecrated crypts are empty; others are strewn with rubble and garbage. Inside one of them, a coffin bears scars from a crowbar, a corner bent down for easier access. Nearby another coffin lies open, lined with yellowing lace. There is no trace of the former resident. An overgrown patch is littered with rib bones and vertebrae. A tibia (or is it a fibula?) protrudes from the detritus. A few meters away lie a bundle of pin stripe rags; bones spill from the bundle, a suit than can no longer contain its owner. One crypt still bears token remains of the previous occupant; a small scapula hints at a younger victim. And all around the revellers keep revelling, staggering about, swilling rum and pulling on joints: dancing, swirling, laughing, shouting and singing.

Back at the bridge, a group of drinkers dribbles offerings of rum onto the sticky ground and chugs the rest. The dark rum flows like blood into the gutters. A man walks by, gnawing on a chicken bone, turning something ordinary into the macabre.

Naked woman dancing and rubbing chillies into her genitals in the Grand Cimetiére

The beat from the band outside the cemetery swells to a heart-stopping crescendo. The woman is more naked now than clothed. Her black dress hangs from her shoulders and her breasts, unfettered, sway to the music. Her pants are around her knees as she rubs fresh chillies onto her genitals proving to any doubters that the spirits really do possess her and she feels no pain.

It’s nice to have a parade. But if you want a raw and real Day of the Dead, Haiti’s the place to be.

The Motorbike, The Jeep and The Bitch Who Tried To Kill Us

With Matthew gone, it was time for us to get on with the business of living and working in Haiti. The company had provided us with a car and a driver to get to and from work, but also to take us to the shops or out for dinner in the evening. We like Sanley, the driver, quite a lot as it happens, but we don’t necessarily want him with us every time we go out for dinner; and having him wait around while we do our shopping just doesn’t feel right. There are also two other people sharing the house who need to get to the airport at different times, so the car isn’t always available.

Before we arrived in Haiti, we had researched the possibility of buying a motorbike so that we could have our independence. We were looking for an old BMW or Honda but couldn’t find anything for sale. In the meantime, we learned that one of the crew that was leaving had hired a motorbike, so we took it over when we arrived. More than 90% of the motorbikes in Haiti are Chinese and they are all pretty much the same: 125cc road bikes. This one was no different.

I took the bike out for a spin straight away; it worked pretty much like any other, except, instead of one-down-four-up, it was down-down-down… It also came with a sound system that pumped out Haitian konpa music, complete with a remote control. The only thing that it didn’t come with was a helmet.

You can buy anything in Haiti, as long as you know where to find it. But even Sanley, our resourceful driver, struggled to find a helmet that would fit my head, which is on the extra size of large. Unfortunately, and unusually, all the helmets in the shop were too big for Nicky.

We were longing to get out and start exploring, but a few things gave us pause: the state of the roads, the traffic and the driving. Imagine for a moment, every driver on the road as a Jo’burg taxi driver, without inhibitions. Then Ian, the swimming coach at the Pétionville Club, heard that we were planning to get around on a motorbike. He told us that it was far too dangerous, that we should reconsider, and that if we fell off, we would probably get bubonic plague from the road rash. So, we decided to limit our first, helmetless, trip to a nearby gym, about three kilometres away. The trip went well, for me; but when we hit the first speed bump, Nicky discovered that the rear suspension was set to unyielding.

A couple of days later, emboldened by our first adventure, we decided to go the local supermarket, just over a kilometre away and outside the gated suburb where we live. As a precaution, we parked the bike inside the gates so that we wouldn’t have to negotiate the twenty meters of bedlam known as Route des Frères between the gate and the entrance to the shop.

It was on the way back that things went wrong. We were only a few hundred meters from the house. Nicky was on the back, clinging on to the shopping. I was navigating between the potholes, not looking far ahead, when Nicky screamed. A red Jeep shot through the intersection without hesitating, and was right in front of us. I jinked left in the hope that the driver had seen us and would stop, but she hadn’t and she didn’t. I laid the bike down instinctively, not wanting to tee the Jeep. We slid a short way before crunching into it, just behind the front wheel.

I was okay, thought that we’d got away with it. I killed the screaming bike, got up. Nicky was sitting in the road behind me, hunched over, holding on to her foot.

‘Are you alright?’ I asked.

She shook her head.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘My foot.’

I checked her over to make sure there weren’t any other obvious injuries; all seemed okay, but there was no mistaking the claret leaking from her foot.

By then, the Bitch That Tried to Kill Us had noted our presence and offered excuses, then assistance. I asked her to take Nicky back to our house, so that we could deal with her injuries there. It was a bit of a squeeze as there were four children and a nanny in the car. Fortunately, none of the children looked up from their cell phones for long enough to be traumatised by the sight of the blood.

Back at the house, the Bitch That Tried to Kill Us dropped Nicky off and gave us her telephone number and fifty dollars. Fifty dollars? WTF?

When Nicky finally let me had a closer look at her foot. She had a nasty open wound on her toe that looked like it had some gravel in it. A delve with the tweezers revealed that the ‘gravel’ was the end of a vein and it was about then that I decided that the limit of my medical skills had been exceeded; that, and the distinct possibility that the toe was fractured.

With the help of an Argentinian officer we had befriended, (yes, he does know that Nicky is English, but doesn’t hold it against her) Nicky was admitted to the Argentinian Hospital casualty department. Not taking any chances, she told them that she was South African, which was a first.

X-rays showed that there was no fracture, but the wound was very deep and could not be sutured. That meant a loose dressing and no flying for a few days. Fortunately, flight operations were still in the recovery phase from Hurricane Matthew and there was no flying for us to do.

Nicky’s toe has recovered, but the motorbike never went out again. We decided that quite apart from the risk to us, our ability to work here relies on us both being healthy. Just as well. Since then, we have seen two dead motorbike riders lying in the road. Sometimes in the face of all good advice, one has to learn the hard way.

Hurricane Matthew

Matthew turned out to be the most powerful storm to hit Haiti for a generation; but it left Port-au-Prince relatively unscathed. The communities of Haiti’s south-western peninsula weren’t so lucky. While people in Florida were preparing for the worst by boarding up their premises and making plans to retreat to hurricane shelters, the residents of Les Cayes and Jérémie had little choice but to brace themselves for the onslaught, and hope for the best. Matthew crashed through their lives, left them homeless, destroyed their crops and killed their livestock.

In Port-au-Prince, the airport was closed as a precaution. With our aircraft safely tucked away in the hangar, we were left to watch helplessly from the fringes. Matthew drenched us with torrential rain but only ruffled the leaves in our garden, leaving the trees firmly rooted. It took another day after the storm had passed for the airport to open, and still there was little for us to do.

Because we were new to the UN mission in Haiti, we were required to do a familiarisation flight. So while a US Navy aircraft carrier steamed into the bay and disgorged relief supplies from a steady stream of helicopters, we went on a flight to Cap Haïtien in the north and Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. It was an unusually clear day. The hurricane had mopped up all the atmospheric detritus revealing that the province to the north, Artibonite, was relatively unscathed. And, although there was some flooding around Cap Haïtien, it also seemed to have escaped the worst.

It was only the following day that Nicky and I finally joined the response effort. We still couldn’t land anywhere in the hardest-hit south-west, as the only runways that were long enough for us to use were waterlogged and had been inundated with helicopters from the UN, the US Coast Guard and Navy and a myriad of other agencies.

We were tasked to fly a Civil Defence team to the north and, from there, along the coast back to Port-au-Prince to assess the coastal damage from the hurricane. A flight like that is a dream come true for most pilots. With much of our time normally spent trying to keep the blue side up while not spilling the passenger’s gin and tonics, this was an opportunity to fly low over the sea while hugging the coastline and exploring all the coves and inlets.

Once airborne out of Port-au-Prince, we climbed to nine thousand feet to clear the mountains of the interior on our way to Fort Liberté on Haiti’s north-eastern corner. When we were over the ridge, we started a shallow descent past the imposing Citadelle Laferrière, which squats on top of a tall peak, with a commanding view of the northern shore. The castle was built shortly after the slave rebellion of 1804. The new ruler Henri Christophe built the citadel, which looks more like a Crusader fortress than a Caribbean stronghold.

We left the castle behind and circled the floodplains to the northeast of Cap Haïtien, before following the coast westwards.

We rounded the peninsula to Labadee, a resort leased by Royal Caribbean Cruises. It is yet another curiosity, totally removed from the reality of Haiti, where cruise ship passengers are disgorged onto palm-fringed beaches where they play in the surf without a thought of what lies beyond.

After Labadee, we changed course for Île de la Tortue (Tortuga), a turtle-shaped island off Haiti’s north coast that was once a major centre of Caribbean piracy in the 17^th century. Not much has changed. We were told that the island is still a no-go area for the authorities, as it is now the centre of the Caribbean drug trade. It looked peaceful enough, with a small settlement on the southern shore and sailing boats gliding though the turquoise shallows.

With no hurricane damage in sight, we skipped back across the Canal de la Tortue to Port de Paix and continued along the coast, before slipping inland towards Bombardopolous, which belied its grandiose name.

When we reached the coast again, we followed it south past Gonaïves to mangrove lagoons speckled with flocks of pink and brown flamingos that splashed into the air as we passed overhead. Just beyond the mangroves, the small town of

Grande Saline lies at the mouth of the Artibonite River. Its salt pans were flooded and much of the town seemed partially submerged. It was the only significant hurricane damage that we observed during the flight.

Time and fuel were getting short, so we made a quick detour across the bay to Île de Gonâve, the largely barren island that dominates Haiti’s bight. We found little damage and turned back to Port-au-Prince for a long final approach to the easterly runway.

After two hours of virtual silence, the airwaves filled with chatter from all the helicopters ferrying supplies out to Jérémie and Les Cayes.

It was an amazing flight, but we couldn’t help feeling somewhat inadequate. We were longing to join in with the relief efforts in the south.

The alarm went off at two the following morning for our our five fifty-three flight to Port-au-Prince. We made our way, bleary-eyed, to the airport and found ourselves in a sleepy departures hall with all the shops firmly shuttered and not a cappuccino in sight. With Hurricane Matthew making its way steadily through the Caribbean, we checked the weather channels to see if it would make landfall in Haiti. It was veering towards Haiti’s south-western peninsula and was expected to arrive within forty-eight hours. We began to wonder if we would get there before the airport closed. But boarding commenced on schedule and we were soon on our way.

I had an aisle seat and Nicky was in the middle, so when we started our descent, there wasn’t much for us to see. I craned to get a view of the island, but could only glimpse patches of green, white and blues: the indigo of the Caribbean and the lighter blue of the sky. Reassured that the hurricane hadn’t arrived, I retreated to my book.

We touched down just before nine and emerged into a tropical clammy heat that felt like West Africa.

Neither the airport buildings nor the arrivals hall dispelled the notion that we might be in Africa. But the posters advertising Caribbean beach resorts just north of the capital gave away our real location. We were met by the base manager, Patrick and driver Sanley, who drove with a nonchalance that belied both the traffic and the state of the roads.

Dusty, garbage strewn roads with potholes that stretched all the way across and beyond provided a battleground for a helter skelter of cars, taptaps and motorbikes that weaved in amongst each other in seemingly random trajectories.

Port-au-Prince hugs the foothills of Kenscoff, the cloud-shrouded mountain that overlooks the city, and hugs them hard. Its many foothills are precipitous, growing in stature and steepness as they near the mountain, turning the twelve-kilometre journey from the airport to the crew house into a thirty-minute rollercoaster ride.

In its place was a voluminous six-bedroom house, situated in Belvil, a gated suburb, and one of the sanctuaries where wealthier Haitians, and UN staff, retreat from the mayhem. It seemed deserted, its doors ajar to take advantage of the breeze. We were shown up to our room, where we dropped off our luggage before exploring our new home.

Despite the obvious lack of a swimming pool, it was more than we’d ever expected from a crew house. Apart from the six bedrooms, there were two lounges, one with a television and the other on a lower level. The kitchen was a good size and seemed well equipped, if a little dated. When I had a closer look at the four-burner gas stove, I let out an involuntary shiver. It was wretched. The sort of wretchedness that eventually accumulates when something hasn’t seen a scourer since it was born: last century sometime.

The rest was typical of a crew house: stale food in the cupboards, bottles of water stacked haphazardly outside an empty cupboard in one corner and dirty dishes in the sink. In contrast, the garden was beautiful with a profusion of tropical flowers and a scattering of coconut palms. In one corner, a vine covered pergola looked like a good spot for Sunday lunch.

‘Where are the other crew?’ I asked Patrick.

‘In their rooms.’

Nicky and I looked at each other. ‘Here?’

Patrick looked at me strangely. ‘Yes.’

‘But it seems so quiet.’

Patrick shrugged.

One emerged a few hours later. He seemed to by a nice guy, but he soon retreated to the darkness of his room. The other didn’t emerge from his bat cave until the following day.

So once we had unpacked, with no-one to talk to, Nicky and I rolled up our sleeves, boiled up some water, dug out all the cleaning stuff that we could find and began the long and arduous process of dismantling the stove piece by piece and giving it the first thorough cleaning of its life.

By the time we put the kettle on, our first day in paradise was drawing to a close. And Matthew had yet to make landfall.