The Moulin Sur Mer dining room overlooks the beach
The beach was warm and the sea inviting. So I was less than enthusiastic when Jeanroger Dorsainvil and Sala Landemaine, guides with the tour company Touris Lakay, arrived after lunch to take me for a previously scheduled walk to the market.
I was staying at Moulin Sur Mer, an 18th Century former sugar plantation turned into a family-friendly resort on Haiti’s Cote des Arcadin about 90 minutes north of north of Port au Prince.
“Listen, gents,” I told them, “Earlier, I thought I would be interested in seeing the market, but really the idea of going pales next to the possibility of staying right here.”
But Sala was insistent. “No, you will enjoy this walk,” he told me, so off we went.
The historic section of Moulin Sur Mer
Like most everything else in Haiti, the Cote des Arcadin is off-the-grid, meaning that power comes from generators, the market in the town of Montrouis is of the covered card table variety and to take a walk in the woods is to pass through the heart of the nation. That latter point I was to learn later.
Jeanroger and Sala steered me away from the sun-washed white sand beach where a smattering of palm trees created a picture postcard effect and led me into the leafy forest that surrounds the other three sides of the resort. We walked slowly on narrow well-worn footpaths, the green from the vegetation so bright it was as if the Lord had placed a Hollywood gel over the sun.
An unhappy momma and a frustrated baby goat
Sala, a recent arrival to Haiti from France, was explaining some of the native plants and I was listening, when out of the corner of my eye, I saw a little goat tied to a tree that was doing her best to ignore the baby kid trying to suckle. The kid was below her and leaping up, grabbing on and practically hanging by its mouth until the restless mama shook it free. It was a real-life slapstick performance going on right before our eyes.
Here I thought we were in the uninhabited woods, but this little comedy team was owned by somebody. Well, I was wrong about the uninhabited part anyway. Not only were people living here and tying up their animals, there was commerce going on too. As we rounded the curve, we found an older woman and a younger man who might have been her
Wholesale breadfruit merchants on a shopping trip
son, packing green, grapefruit-sized plants into the largest burlap bag I’ve ever seen. I’ve visited many tropical places but this was the first time I’d seen breadfruit being harvested. The Haitians call it lam veritab and these were being picked and purchased for sale back in the markets of Port au Prince.
What Haitians call lam veritab
We watched for a while as the two vegetable merchants kept finding space for one more, one more, one more in the overstuffed bag for which they would pay a flat fee of $70 according to the owner of the tree who was supervising the operation.
City or country, time is money when there’s work to be done, so we didn’t hang around interfering with sales but moved on to our next stop, a fresh water spring that many in Montrouis use for drinking, washing and swimming.
The Montrouis river is a source of water for the locals
In contrast to the half dozen hotels on the Cote des Arcadin, which are on par with resort hotels in other more acclaimed Caribbean destinations, few residences here have running water.
Girls take water from the river
During our walk, I saw young girls using the Montrouis river to fill buckets that they carried back home on their heads. The river was shallow but in the woods we came across a spring fed pool that looked deep, cool and refreshing. The villagers have divided it into two areas, one for drinking and the other for clothes washing and swimming.
The freshwater spring provides water and refreshment
On the recreational side, frolicking children were doing handstands and otherwise showing off while their mothers scrubbed laundry. An older man with a donkey laden with who knows what, filled a aluminum pot and offered it to the thirsty critter. The whole scene made me feel I’d stepped onto the pages of a National Geographic magazine, right down to the nearly naked children who gathered around me – as filled with curiosity about me as I was about them.
Some kids are more ready for swimming than others.
After we passed the pool I saw the first houses, making it more apparent that people really did live in these woods. For the most part they were built from thatch, constructed in the classic square base, triangle roof shape of a child’s sketch. A kind of palm frond fencing material provided privacy for the residents and structure for the path, which was now the width of a generous sidewalk. At a little outdoor garden, several men invited us to sit with them and the one who spoke English talked about his brother in New York and we shared the opinion that in December, Haiti was the far more pleasant place to be.
A stop to meet the locals and rest
CD’s were hanging like ornaments from the branches that crossed over our heads. When a breeze made them spin, beams of sunlight shot all around. The patio was loosely paved with cool white golf-ball-sized stones another product of the local commerce.
We’d already passed several pyramid-shaped piles of bowling-ball-sized white rocks. Now as we left our hosts and moved on, I saw an elderly man squatting by one pile of those same rocks. With a hammer and chisel, he was turning them into smaller stones which Jeanroger explained would pulverized again until it was salable as gravel, turning the abundant rocks into building material for the ever-growing needs of Port au Prince.
The gravel production line. The worker asked not to be photographed.
Population density is just one huge difference between Haiti’s congested capital city and the tranquil beach community of Montrouis. Even the hustle and bustle of the town market had a relaxed vibe.
As the sun set, Jeanroger, Sala and I boarded a tap tap, (the second most common form of transportation after one’s own feet) and sped back to the beautiful Moulin Sur Mer. Beyond goat tending, vegetable growing and gravel manufacturing the big business going on here is tourism.
Sala and Jeanroger on the tap tap as we headed home
And to be sure, the beaches are definitely worth hopping on a plane to get to. I flew on JetBlue which just started service from New York and Ft. Lauderdale. Other airlines also fly to Port au Prince, where an 90 minute drive can get you to the Cote des Arcadin’s miles of powdery sand suitable for swimming, snorkeling, kayaking and sailing.
What I saw on my walk, though was another view of Haiti; a place where visitors are invited to experience the authentic life of the locals and welcomed when they do so. And the beach and the sun will be there tomorrow.
Author of The New York Times bestseller, The Crash Detectives, I am also a journalist, public speaker and broadcaster specializing in aviation and travel.
Yes, come visit Haiti, an authentic and beautiful Caribbean island waiting to be discovered…se la pou ou la!
Well Written Christine!
This was a wonderful departure from the aviation stories of yours I’ve read. It was a nice way to start my day reading this with my morning coffee while James Taylor plays softly in the background.
Is there scuba diving available as the rest of the resorts offerings sound very inviting? This also brought back to mind a similar experience I has last May in Mozambique. Taking a tour of the villages near the town of Palma where live is subsistence living at best. These are images I will carry with me for the rest of my life.
Keep writing and sharing your stories. They are more than worth the investment of time taken to read them.
Thanks Mike for the lovely compliment. What doesn’t seem great when accompanied by James Taylor? Writing about aviation allows me to travel to many places. I was delightfully surprised by Haiti. As for scuba, I did not have the opportunity to even get in the water, my time there passed so quickly. But I’d imagine it would be sensational.