O Kap

We started our New Year with an adventure.  On the 1st, Beth, Frankie, Eliza, Marine (a French girl who is volunteering with another organization), Renette (one of the girls that Eliza works with and is very close to),  and I left Gros Morne for the north.  Our final destination was Labadee, a town on the northern coast, but we were going to make a few stops along the way.

The gang (missing Marine - she was getting food)
in our first tap-tap before it filled up.
(Photo courtesy of Eliza)

This was going to be our first venture into the realm of public transportation beyond motorcycles.  In addition to the moto, one can also take two kinds of buses - coach-type buses or an old school bus.  These primarily travel between major cities instead of doing more local travel.  You can also take a tap-tap.  This is a pick-up truck that has benches in the back.  Some of them have metal roofs while others are open.  During our whole trip, we took 8 tap-taps.  We were hoping to get spots on a bus, but they were all taken when we arrived at the bus station and you couldn't book them in advance.  While they are a super inexpensive way of traveling, just a few bucks for a tap-tap gets you just about anywhere, but it isn’t necessarily the most comfortable mode of transportation.  We squeezed 14 people and their bags into the back of an enclosed pick-up, with two people sitting on the roof and three people standing on the bumper and hanging on.  On our final leg of the journey between Gonaïves and Gros Morne, we had 18 people and 18 peoples' worth of stuff in the back of an open pick-up.  Over the course of the rides, I ended up with several bruises, a cut on my back from a screw behind my seat and a scar on one of my knees from laundry baskets that we were scrunched against.  But, each tap-tap got us to where we needed and no one fell out, so I can't complain.

A view from the road.  We had to cross 2ish mountain ranges to Cap-Haitian.  It was pretty windy and we were all a little nauseous by the time we were done.  The roads were paved and in pretty good condition, but it was a little scary to see big buses taking all the switch backs.  On our ride home, we stopped on one curve to see a van that had gone off the road and was (luckily) caught on a tree which prevented it from crashing to the bottom.  As we continued, we could see the car as a white speck across the valley and the understood more clearly the several hundred foot drop that the vehicle would have made had that tree not been there.

Our first stop was Cap-Haitian (Kapayisyen or Okap in Creole), the second largest city in Haiti after Port-au-Prince.  Around 200,000 people live in the city.  It was initially called Cap-Français, and was founded in 1670.  Under the quickly-growing plantation economy, Cap-Français was an important and valuable port for the export of sugar, coffee, cotton and indigo.  In fact, the city became so wealthy that it was nicknamed “Paris of the Antilles.”  But, Cap-Français’ history was not always so rich.  It saw various rebellions, was completely burned to the ground in 1803 on orders by Toussaint Louverture to prevent its capture by Napoleon’s army.  An earthquake brought everything back down to the ground in 1842.  In fact, the city has been leveled 5 times throughout its history.  Although it was once a political and economic hub, it seems to have never fully recovered and Port-au-Prince has replaced it.

Cap-Haitian (Beth's photo)

It was interesting to visit the city.  I spent one morning driving around part of Port-au-Prince that wasn’t really downtown, so I can’t really compare it to another Haitian city.  But it was definitely different from Gros Morne.  The city itself was incredibly dirty.  In fact, it was probably the most trash-filled city I’ve ever been in.  There was litter all along the sides of the road and on the sidewalks.  Huge piles of garbage could be found on street corners and the coastline was covered with rubbish.  The architecture was pretty different too.  It had a much older and European feel.  The buildings were taller, with balconies jutting out over the street.  Decorative railings surrounded the balconies.  Tall doors led into shops.  (Fun Fact - in the olden days, the tall double doors signified a shop, with the owners home above.)  It sort of reminded me of images I’ve seen of old houses in New Orleans' French Quarter.

Eliza really wanted to take our picture in front of some of the trash.  Piles of trash like this one were a pretty frequent sighting on street corners.

Some nice, inconspicuous LL Bean product placement as well as a better perspective on the quantity of trash.

The outside of the Iron Market

It was odd to be a tourist in Cap-Haitian.  We saw a couple of the oldest buildings in the city.  We also visited some government buildings.  We walked through the market, which was similar to the market here in Gros Morne, but much larger.  We also saw the "marche de fer" or iron market.  When Eliza first said this, I was thinking that it was going to be a section of the market that sold metal-work.  We walked through and I didn't see anything that was metal.  Then I realized that she was talking about the structure we were walking through.  The iron market is the center of the market, with vendors spilling out all around it.  Since the city is right on the water we visited the Atlantic Ocean.  I was all excited to put my feet back in the Atlantic, but when we got there, the “beach” was covered in garbage.  We had really good BBQ for dinner from a little restaurant on a street corner.  It seemed a little strange, but it was actually some of the best BBQ chicken I've ever had.  We spent the night in a hotel that only cost $10.  Although we only had electricity during the night, we did have running water and a flushing toilet and a pretty comfortable bed and apart from the 60+ bug bites (seriously, I'm not exaggerating) I got during the night, I can't complain about our accommodations.

The inside of the Iron Market. (Eliza's photo)

This is one of the older buildings in the city.  It was a mansion build in 1898.

Cathédrale Notre Dame

This was a small shop.  The sign on the door says "ici robe mariage a louer" which translates to "here, wedding dresses for rent."  I thought that was pretty great.  I tried looking in the window to see if they had anything that was my style, but the shutters were closed.

The Atlantic.  The black things in the water are part of a sunken ship.

The "beach."  As you can see, it was pretty gross.  I put my toes in the water to test it out.  It was colder than the Caribbean, but considerably warmer than the Atlantic by my house (especially at this time of the year).

It's a littler hard to see, but on the front of this fire engine is "Courtoisie de Boston" or "Courtesy of Boston."