For our holiday all of us were looking for some serious relaxation and a chance to do next to nothing beyond eating lots of bad for us food, drinking cocktails and collapsing on the beach. The windsurfing town of Cabarete was suggested as a possible destination and it turned out to be just what the doctor ordered. We were surrounded by other tourists, bars, sand, surf, food and were a bit overwhelmed at first but managed to accept the pace of life and spent five days being lazy, drunk and stuffed with food. It was great.
When our holiday came to an end we were actually all ready to get back to Haiti. Cabarete was nice but too orderly and I think we were all craving the chaos and mud that we had left behind. After taking a tap tap with its own sound system we arrived into the chaos of central Cap Haitian and accidentally held up an entire intersection for a few minutes while we wrangled over price to meet a friend in a hotel at a beach an hour away. This taxi was definitely not meant for the hilly, pot holey, and all around terrible road and I was amazed it surived the journey. The road did a number on the taxi though and all the driver kept saying over and over was ‘not good, not good’ as the bottom of the car scraped along the road.
When we eventually made it to the hotel at 6pm and were in good spirits since we never expected to survive the ride. We were happy and confident having survived the taxi ride but were surprised to see that our friend had left for a place nearby called Labadie Beach. Normally no problem, we’d just go to the other beach… but this is Haiti and getting there involved short taxi and boat rides. Problem? Because he had already nearly killd his car, our taxi driver refused to take us any further and there’s virtually no traffic on the road we came in on. So we paid loads for the airport taxi guy to take us down the road and even more for random boat people to take us to Labadie. It all worked out ok after we got to the beach and were led on a wild goose chase down dark alleys and riverbeds. We found our friend, had some drinks, spoke to an interesting 83 year old American guy who runs a beautiful hotel there and pretty much just chilled out.
Getting to Labadie was kind of a nightmare so I’m not sure why it never crossed our mind that getting out wouldn’t be just as much of a pain. But we don’t think of these things so we wandered around town a bit and left way later than we shoud have. We ended up getting stuck for several hours at the end of the dirt road right next to a beach that Royal Caribbean has leased for it’s guests. The ridiculous thing about this beach is that the entire thing has been walled off so that on one side there are floating bouncy castles, cocktail bars, jet skis and copious amounts of white people and, on the other side, there is a dirt road and 100 Haitians (and us) fighting to get onto a pickup truck to get away from there. There was a gasoline shortage that day so very few tap taps were operating which meant that our fight to get onto a truck was unsuccessful and we were sort of stranded. Not how I was hoping to spend my New Years Eve.
By this point it was about 2pm. We were at the end of a long road with no hope of getting onto any kind of transportation so we just started walking. The new plan was to get to the hotel were almost stranded at the previous night and hope for the best. We had a sympathy drink once we got there which raised our spirits but a friend of mine was sick of waiting around and headed off walking further down the road. I joined her and we walked for about 3 minutes before finding a bar, grabbing some drinks and parking our asses at the side of the road chatting to a couple of nice Haitian guys who gave us jewellery.
Eventually we snagged a ride back to Cap Haitian with an airport taxi and managed to get on a tap tap that was due to leave at 5pm for the 4 hours journey back to Gonaives. I didn’t think vehicles travelled at night in Haiti but I was happy to see they did… until we actually started moving. We were pretty crammed and the road was terrible and even scarier at night than during the day. We passed the time by chatting to the locals and getting a mobile Creole lesson in the process.
We arrived back at base at 10:30pm and I’ve never been so happy to see a place in my life. We were all in one piece and pretty thirsty so we headed up the road to Speaker Guy for several tasty beverages, a badly timed New Years countdown, hugs and kisses, terrible dancing, some serious avoidance of drunken Indian UN guys, more drinks, worse dancing, and fuzzy memories. It was probably my best New Years so far and it couldn’t have been in a more bizarre place, dancing on the side of the road in Haiti and happy as hell to have made it there in one piece.
Happy New Years everyone!
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