travel Haiti

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Travelling through Haiti, Caroline Eden discovers authentic Vodou ceremonies, unexpected mountain views and a country opening its arms to tourists

PHOTOGRAPHS BY VIRAN DE SILVA AND CAROLINE EDEN

CLOCKWISE FROM ABOVE: Port-au-Prince ‘gingerbread’ houses n the outskirts of the town drumming. Shaking a quart bottle of Barbancourt from the 19th century; of Milot in northern Haiti, rum with one hand, Mafoun passes by leaving a Mafoun’s dancers – not night cloaks the hills like a trail of cigarette smoke in her wake. Her dancers, smoking or drinking but blanket. The air buzzes each one holding a lit candle, groove behind her, dancing with candles; a ‘tap tap’ bus – used as with mosquitoes. My feet forming a conga-like procession. They shake taxis, the name comes Osound feeble on wet cobblestones as I follow the their hips and nod their heads, moving trance- from the ‘tap’ that people sound of a rolling drumbeat made by many like around a large table laden with rum, silk give the side when they hands. A thin cloud shifts in the sky and flowers and popcorn that has been scattered like want to board or alight; suddenly a moonbeam illuminates an eerie confetti. These are gifts for summoning the Iwa drummers beating out white crucifix on the roadside. It quickly (spirit conversers). Milk-coloured wax drips a rhythm disappears again. Then, turning onto a dirt track, down the dancer’s brown arms. Sweat rolls in I enter a small hall. Roosters scuttle aside. Under rivulets off their faces. The air is thick with a corrugated roof a hundred or so people are in smoke. Dozens of trance-like male drummers sit ecstasy. The Vodou ceremony is in full swing. in the semi-darkness, singing the same chorus The arrival of my out-of-place presence over and over. The scene is pleasingly authentic, apparently goes unseen. dramatic and intense. ‘That’s the mambo, the Vodou priestess. Her Outside, raindrops spring off the name is Mafoun,’ says my guide Pierre Chauvet, cobblestones. ‘Haitians are like sugar and salt, motioning towards a curvaceous woman whose they don’t like to get wet,’ Chauvet says buttocks are bouncing passionately to the straightening his multi-pocketed utility vest as

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he points to the crowded room. He tells me that chatter on the roadside dressed in homemade in her ‘ordinary life’ Mafoun doesn’t drink or rain hats fashioned out of bubble-wrap and smoke cigarettes but she has been ‘mounted by shower caps. Jean Laurent’, a local Iwa who is a lover of We trundle along jungle-clad roads for several debauchery, decadence and general hedonism. hours before entering into the traffic-choked Then from a dark corner, an elderly woman city of Gonaïves. This is where, in 1804, a emerges. Mafoun pads across the dirt floor and declaration was signed that created the world’s leads the woman to the table. Aside from a silk first black republic. Fittingly, we spot a petticoat, the woman is naked. I put my camera monument to Jean-Jacques Dessalines – leader away. Mafoun, still singing, still smoking, begins of the Haitian Revolution – standing tall in the her alchemy. Taking the woman’s small hands town centre. We then drop further southwards, into hers she gently cracks an egg onto the slowly skirting the western coastline of the Gulf woman’s scalp. Then, rubbing an elixir of yolk and of Gonâve. In small towns, summery carnival some kind of red soda into her short frizzy hair, music blasts from barbershops providing a Mafoun gently administers a cranial massage. cheery soundtrack. Chauvet tells me that the believer is in good Makeshift settlements on the outskirts of health but has come to be cleansed. Mafoun Port-au-Prince signal the entrance to the city. smiles at her disciple, and gets a toothy grin in Around 85,000 people still live in these camps return. It is an odd scene for the uninitiated to after the deadly earthquake that shook Haiti in witness but it is nothing like the Hollywood January 2010. It was estimated that around ‘voodoo’ of zombies, snakes and sacrifice. Vodou 250,000 people were killed when, in the town of ties communities together in Haiti. It forms the Léogâne (an hour’s drive from the capital), a country’s national identity and it is the cultural magnitude 7.0 earthquake flattened the entire expression of the Haitian people. It also region. Locals, Chauvet tells me, refer to the connects today’s population of nine million to earthquake as ‘guddu guddu’ after the noise the their ancestral homeland of West Africa, where buildings made when they collapsed. they lived before being brought to Haiti as It was one of the world’s worst ever urban slaves to work on sugar plantations. Despite the disasters but it has not crushed the spirit of the saying that Haitians are ‘70 per cent Catholic, 30 Haitian people. At night in the city, people dance per cent Protestant but 100 per cent Vodou’, to live music in nightclubs while artistic graffiti anti-Vodou campaigns have recently been brightens walls and gives snapshots of Haitian stepped up. Some say Haiti’s first ever Roman politics. Creative industry abounds at places like Catholic cardinal, Chibly Langlois, is to blame Village Noailles too where arty flat metal after he reportedly dismissed Vodou as ‘magic.’ sculptures, known as fer découpé, are made. As I stand up to leave, Mafoun puts down her rum and stops dancing. She gives me a warm smile, then leaning in gently she presses me against her huge sweat-drenched body and The saying goes that Haitians are ‘70 hugs me tightly. As I walk away, she gives me an unexpected thumbs-up. I return one awkwardly. per cent Catholic, 30 per cent More dancing starts. The ceremony will continue late into the night. Protestant but 100 per cent Vodou’ We depart slowly. Our driver is focusing on the road – ominously called Carrefour La Mort – that will take us to our hotel in Haiti’s second city, Gradually, infrastructure is returning. We pass Cap-Haïtien. In the minibus I am committing the newly rebuilt Iron Market in downtown observations to paper and Chauvet is telling me Port-au-Prince, instantly recognisable by its how, under French rule in the 17th and 18th giant red roof. This is where you can buy centuries, Cap-Haïtien was the richest city in the everything from a wig to a cat on a rope and Caribbean. This unpaved mess of a road, barter for souvenirs like paintings, key rings and punctuated by holes and made more hazardous wooden statues. These aren’t made for tourists by wandering pigs, makes you wonder where all in Haiti per se – business wouldn’t be very good those riches went. if they relied on the small numbers arriving – but for tourists all over the Caribbean. Haiti makes SLOW RETURNS around 70 per cent of the Caribbean’s tourist Dawn brings a weak sun, deafening birdsong ABOVE: the Statue of the souvenirs. They are made here, then shipped and a patience-testing seven-hour drive south to Unkown Maroon in out to be fraudulently stamped with ‘made in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince. Easing out of Port-Au-Prince, a symbol Puerto Rico’, or similar. Next to the market many Cap-Haïtien, we snake cautiously through the of Haiti’s struggle for buildings, once banks and offices, are crumpled metallic churn of battered 4x4s, candy-coloured independence; LEFT: heaps of rubble still. As we drive along, Chauvet Jacmel, a town in tap-taps (shared taxis) and convoys of white UN southern Haiti tentatively poignantly says, ‘we can only talk of what trucks driven by Uruguayans in wrap-around accepted as a UNESCO downtown used to be.’ shades. Ready for more downpours, women World Heritage site Bolstered by the current calm, Haiti has been

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removed from America’s ‘most dangerous places’ watch-list. Encouraged by this, western brands are starting to arrive such as the recently opened Best Western and Marriott hotels. UK-based tour operators are arriving too. Exodus, Wild Frontiers, G Adventures and Steppes Travel now all offer tours. Haiti, it seems, has turned a corner.

CLEAN, GREEN AND SERENE Occasionally tour groups head to the high- altitude market town of Kenscoff, a couple of hour’s drive from Port-au-Prince, in order to experience a greener side of Haiti. We follow their lead and leaving the city limits, climb up the Route de Kenscoff in the direction of the Massif de la Selle. The urban stew quickly falls away and soon terraced fields and red earth dominate the landscape. After an hour’s drive we reach 6,000 feet. Vegetables are being harvested in fields. Pine trees create a natural canopy. Crossbills and hummingbirds buzz around and the air is clean. In a country where deforestation is a huge challenge (today only around two per cent of the country is forested) Kenscoff, looks, feels and tastes, a bit like paradise. The other immediate difference is that there is far less sign of the plastic rubbish that plagues the country. Despite the ban on Styrofoam boxes – mainly imported from neighbouring Dominican Republic – thousands of takeaway cartons still pollute streets and clog drains causing floods. Out of the minibus the air is cool

In a country where deforestation is a challenge, the high-altitude market town of Kenscoff feels like paradise

and fresh. The taste and smell of burning rubbish is conspicuous by its absence.

RECYCLING AND RE-EDUCATING Up here, one family is leading by example in the battle against rubbish, deforestation and hunger. Wynne Farm Ecological Reserve is run by Jane Wynne, a proud Haitian, environmentalist and educator. Slightly built and wearing an orange bandana, Wynne’s enthusiasm, positivity and laughter proves infectious. Within moments of me arriving, she is steering me past the yurt (‘this is where we have our yoga classes’) and the compost loo (‘the walls are made of bamboo, ABOVE: a street in but it’s quite safe’) both of which she is proud of. Cap-Haïtien; RIGHT: Anse-à-Galets is an island We stop to admire the climbing vines of northwest of Port-au- Black-eyed Susan and Wynne’s bandana merges Prince; FAR RIGHT: a perfectly with the abundant orange petals. waterfall at Bassin-Bleu Spanning 30 acres of land Wynne tells me near Jacmel

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as terracing and the use of bamboo in the soil to stop run-off during the rainy season. ‘Bamboo is a saviour to us. It regenerates and it is flexible in earthquakes,’ Wynne says. She calls to one farmer who is carrying a basket on her head filled with vegetables. Putting the hamper down, the farmer holds up – one at a time – a cabbage, a handful of carrots, a bunch of dill, green peppers, potatoes and a sizeable squash. It’s an impressive haul in a country that fails to produce enough food and imports 80 per cent of its main staple, rice. Today when Haitians visit, Wynne tells me, they are encouraged to put their hands in the soil and to ‘reconnect with nature.’ There is a recycling area too, which often amounts to several tonnes and on Sundays there is a farmer’s market. Next, we jump back into the minibus and drive with Wynne to her main reserve, a little higher up the road. ‘On a clear day it’s like a map of Haiti up here,’ Wynne says. Despite the haze we can see the southern mountain range and the sprawling city of Port-au-Prince. Around us 15-litre water bottles have been recycled into giant plant pots and lettuces sprout from them. In greenhouses Alstroemeria blossom in hues of peach and yellow, practically bursting out of ABOVE: fer découpé how her father, Victor Wynne, born in New York, trays. Honeybees buzz around the Acacia trees. metalwork at Village arrived in Haiti in 1925, as a civil engineer during One problem, Wynne tells me, is fencing. ‘It Noailles the US occupation (between 1915 and 1934). He would cost us $150,000 to put in a cyclone fence later returned, married and purchased various to stop people just jumping over and picnicking. plots of land from local landowners around People help themselves and take what they Kenscoff. His aim was to fix the misuse of land, want, when they want.’ She sighs. Then, with a tackle deforestation and eradicate threats of sparkle back in her eye, she says ‘ironically, that erosion. He founded and terraced Wynne Farm is what my father would have wanted. He with 40 men in 1956 propagating indigenous bought this land to show Haitians the beauty of species to conserve Haiti’s biodiversity and what they have.’ emphasising the need for soil conservation, The hope for Haiti today is that as the tourists composting and reforestation. He also slowly start to return, it won’t just be the experimented with agricultural techniques such Haitians who will experience this beauty.

Co-ordinates HAITI i

When to go December, January, February and March are the best months to visit, avoiding the intense heat of summer and the rainfall between April and November. map to follow Getting there There are no direct flights from the UK. Exodus has a 12-day tour to Haiti from £2,399 including return flights from London exodus.co.uk/haiti-holidays( ).

More information Haiti is malarial. Visit a doctor for advice before travelling. British passport holders can buy a visa on arrival at Port-au-Prince airport for $10. Hotels: Cap-Haïtien – hotelroichristophe.com Port-au-Prince – hotelvillatherese.com Wynne Farm Ecological Reserve: wynnefarm.org Tourist information: ExperienceHaiti.org

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