Port-au-Prince, introduced

My friend Jonathan Katz, who is, in the words of the BBC, "the AP's man in Haiti," picked me up from the airport in Port-au-Prince yesterday. Well, "picked up" is perhaps too gentle a phrase. "Evacuated" is more apt.

Picture the most congested, loudest, most chaotic mob you've ever been in. (Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras, about the time some pneumatic tart starts baring and bouncing her wares from a balcony, comes to mind.) One of the ubiquitous "taptap" taxis that scamper around Port-au-Prince.OK. That's the baggage claim at PAP. Then you walk outside, and a crush of people are pressed against a barricade so tightly you'd have thought the world had been turned 90 degrees and they were falling against it. That's the parking lot. Katz and I brushed off the calls of "Taxi?" and jumped into the hard-knock SUV of his fixer, the indispensable Evens. We went for fuel, and had words in Kreyole with another driver. "There's some problem in this country with knowing who goes first at the gas pump," Katz said. "Other problems include: everything else."

We then detoured through Cité Soleil on the way to the hotel. Cité Soleil, an infrastructure-free shantytown with the population of Newark or St. Paul, is objectively one of the worst places humans live. We saw the following, in the skinny, strangled paths: open sewers, flaming garbage, pigs eating garbage, chickens eating garbage, soccer on a basketball court, crying pantsless babies, people cooking, people bathing, people selling candy, people selling lotto tickets, people pounding metal, packs of little boys calling "hey, you!", skinny dogs, a U.N. jeep, one little boy on his ass in the road leering at us with a feral and bottomless expression and a face smeared with some unidentifiable black shit. "Is that kid stoned?" I asked Katz. He speculated that the tarry mess might be glue. The drive was all color, color, stench, stench. I refrained from taking many photos, and none with human subjects. I might be a slumming white tourist, getting high myself on the furnace-fumes of unimaginable blight, gawking at shelled-out snipers' nests and young women carrying boxes on their heads and the whole delirious impossibility of it all, but I didn't want to be the drive-by fuck-you photog. No need to make folks any more self-conscious, especially since so many of them greeted us with a smile, a wave, a soft "bonswa."

But here's this: a Caribbean sunset framed by a fetid, suppurating canal of pig-munched garbage and sewage. When I get audio capabilities up and cranking on this site, I'll update this with some sound files.