Haiti? For working online? Yep, Haiti! I spent over four months in Gonaives, Haiti with a surprisingly fast and only sometimes tempermental internet connection. Things seemed to disconnect when the wind blew but besides that, the connection was great. Skype was possible, I downloaded some songs, and we were able to stream You Tube and music without any problems. The problem with Gonaives, though, is that it isn’t a very nice place and probably not somewhere you want to spend an extended amount of time unless you like dust, garbage fires and coughing.
So where in Haiti is nice, I hear you asking? Labadie! It’s a small village an hour west of Cap Haitian down a bumpy, horrible road and once you reach the end of the road you need to take a small boat around the headland to get to the village. Labadie is a bizarre place because that’s where the cruise lines stop to let their passengers enjoy Haiti in a walled off area of beach that they call Labadee. In actuality, the beach they stop at is called Coco Beach by the locals and the real Labadie remains off-limits to cruise passengers. They are forbidden from going ashore under the guise of it being unsafe. The reality is that the cruise ships have a captive audience on their super strange walled off beach and why would they want their passengers spending money elsewhere? They have leased the beach for 99 years from the Haitian government and the real Labadie doesn’t see any of that money despite having to put up with massive cruise ships in the bay as an eyesore.
Ignoring the insulting beach fiasco, Labadie is a great little village set in a beautiful bay with leafy hills rising up behind it. It’s the only place it Haiti I’ve ever seen with trash cans (although that doesn’t mean they’r eever emptied) and it has a steady supply of hamburgers from the cruise ships that visit three times a week. The locals are friendly and happy to chat, drink or play chess with you and it’s just a chilled out escape from the chaos of the rest of the country.
I stayed with some friends at Norm’s Place. Norm is an 80-something year old guy who landed in Haiti over 30 years ago and built his hotel from scratch using old ruins as a base. He’s a character and always happy to talk your ear off about how he was the reason women started wearing pants. An odd story but fitting for the surroundings. There is a beach right out front of the hotel, the rooms are huge and beautiful, local art is all around you and, most importantly, there are hammocks.
Actually, I suppose the most important thing is internet and this is the only downfall of Labadie. Norm’s Place has wifi but it is pretty unreliable and I never got it to work while I was there. But if you have a connection through a mobile phone or you are able to work offline or only with an occasional connection then this place would make a great, peaceful stop.
At $25 per night it’s a bit pricey but that’s actually cheap for Haiti. The country is bizarrely expensive for accommodation and the cheapest places in the capital city Port-au-Prince are $40. So Labadie, for Haiti, is a bargain and it’s a stunning, friendly, remote and relaxing place and worth a look if you find yourself in the area.
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