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.
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.
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.
