I’ve been in Haiti for about six weeks now and the blisters on my hands and bruises on my legs say that I need a holiday. So early on Xmas day, myself and three other volunteers wished our HODR family a Merry Xmas, opened our stocking of goodies, ate some breakfast and then wandered off down the road in what we hoped was the general direction of the bus station. The plan was to attempt to make our way to a town in the Dominican Republic called Cabarete. The reality is that we didn’t have much of a plan for actually making this happen and no map or guidebook but we were hoping for the best and ready for an adventure.
We arrived at a non-operational Texaco gas station and assumed that was the bus station because of all of the tap taps and school buses in the area. No ticket windows, signs, or even staff… just a collection of scary looking vehicles and drivers shouting their destinations loudly in an attempt to lure you on board. We found a tap tap (a popular Haitian vehicle which is basically a pickup truck with hard benches around the outside) to Cap Haitian which was to be the first stop on our route. It didn’t bode well that the tire was off and we were the only people on board but we stuck with it. It was due to leave at 8am and we eventually rolled out at 8:45am with 27 people on board, a fat woman practically sitting on my lap, an iron bar in my back and my friend’s knees pinning me down at a really awkward and painful angle. Add to that a bumpy road, sheer cliffs and a crazy driver and you have, possibly, the most uncomfortable four hour journey of my life.
Our arrival at the border soon turned from relief to distress when we found out that the border was closing. The clocks are an hour ahead in the DR and, as it was Xmas day, their immigration department had closed and the gates for the bridge were in the process of being locked. We started chatting to a friendly Canadian UN guy who told us where to get our Haitian exit stamp before we could cross the border. Unfortunately, their immigration office happened to be all the way across a huge field. With the fear of being trapped in this ghetto Haitian border town we all legged it across to the office and were hoping for the best.
We got the stamp without too much hassle and ran back through the desolate, trash fire, litter landscape towards the bridge to the promised land of hamburgers, strawberry daquiris and toilet paper. As we arrived we saw that the gate across the bridge had been closed and locked. The Canadian UN guy told us that we could go around the gate by hanging off the edge and climbing over a rope and then told us to hurry because the Dominican immigration office was closing. He then continued talking to us for another 10 minutes about buses, hotels, passport stamps, fees and a few other topics that were totally unrelated to our predicament while still telling us to hurry. We eventually escaped his conversation, got past the gate and found ourselves at the mercy of the Dominican immigration officials. We were adopted by a nice guy on the other side and he told us we could pass but would have to come back the following morning for a passport stamp.
So we were in the Dominican Republic but trapped at Dajabon, the border town. Not the beach setting we had in mind but we made the most of it and had plates of chicken and french fries for Xmas dinner and washed it down with a few beers and then a few more. we ended the night drinking Bailey’s in a gazebo after hopping a fence to get into the park. A pretty surreal ending to a crazy day but it was one of the best Xmas days I’ve had, despite the craziness.
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