The road from Port-au-Prince to Santo Domingo

Mountainside mining in southeast HaitiThe road from Port-au-Prince to the Dominican Republic is one of those drives that reminds you: No matter how nowhere you think you are, you can always be somewhere more nowhere.

We sped east through the manic traffic at day’s end, passing first through the urban ruins of this sprawling metropolis, which gave way to the grass and sparse cinderblock shacks, which then gave way to adobe huts and fields. Those gave way to cacti and scrub brush. We saw men straining the scree they mine from denuded hillsides here (see the photo above) and a woman sifting through a smoldering dirt pile, looking for charcoal – the fate of a scary number of the trees here. Then we passed a lake that has been rising so fast the roads are disappearing. In this country, humans and nature are locked in a constant landscape-wrecking contest.

The border itself was like a post-apocalyptic disaster movie: storm clouds threatening, a landscape of mud and swamped cinder-block buildings, and sketchy taxi drivers haggling with poor schlubs like us, who arrived too late for the last bus to Santo Domingo. We agreed to pay $140 apiece for the six-hour drive. When it was settled, the owner of the car opened his trunk, pulled out a Dominican license plate, screwed it between the brake lights of his Accord, and then asked us for gas money upfront. A few minutes in, a motorcyclist pulled up beside our driver and flagged him over: a friend of his. Suddenly we were four in the car. And within a couple of miles, we were waved over by the first of a dozen military checkpoints who wanted to know who we were, where we were going and what was in our bags. No, we weren’t Haitian. No, we weren’t smuggling dope. Yes, we were journalists. So hand back the passports and piss off already.

As the road unspooled and blackened, with our driver’s weepy Mexican music seemingly on repeat the whole way, we began to see real towns, something I haven’t yet seen in Haiti: shops with standalone signs, tree-lined plazas, dedicated parking spots. As we went from third world to first world (or Santo Domingo’s passable impression of the same) the military stops got less frequent, less strict. The road went from craterous moon surface to sedan-friendly blacktop. We stopped for freezing-cold Presidentes which we drank wrapped in brown bags and stashed under the seat during checkpoints. We drove through jungles where grapefruit-sized toads and tarantulas like walking hands came into view with the headlights.

Our driver hit a four-lane stretch of burnished ebony – a velvety black carpet of highway that we knew would take us straight to the capital. After a couple of miles, he realized he was driving eastbound in the right-hand lane of the westbound lanes. He cut through a gap in the median and cussed himself. His co-pilot reassured him in Spanish, “People make mistakes.” We stopped for fried chicken and a pit stop in one of the truly skuzzy restrooms of the world: no seat, no light,Santo Domingo: A view of the Caribben Sea from our crashpad as a storm arrives standing water on the floor, stripped shower-knob fixtures jutting out of the wall, an odor like a wet yak breaking wind. Then it was back onto the road with fried chicken and plantains and Jonathan describing the actual worst restroom in the world: a bottomless, seatless shithouse built over the edge of a chasm in the Andes, where bus tourists were expected to risk their lives just to move their bowels. Not surprisingly, the interior was coated with evidence that even Peruvians draw the line somewhere.

The checkpoints became more spare and more chill: the eleventh, in fact, consisted of little more than a quick glance at our passports, a few words from the cabbie and from Jonathan (fluent as he is in Dominican Spanish) and then a large brown hand sleeved in camouflage reaching in to give us dap. Then we arrived in Santo Domingo to find that our esteemed cabbie is allergic to city driving. He parked (again facing oncoming traffic) and left us to stew while he found a Santo Domingo cab that would take us the final few miles to the flat where we were staying. There we found splendid Spaniards, a gregarious Guadeloupean and a 2,000-or-so square foot rooftop patio with an open-air shower. I partook. The next day, as a storm moved in, I got this snapshot. Then, my camera crashed. Subsequent Hispaniola tales may be illustrated lightly.