I reached the Haitian border after a 3 hour bus ride from Santo Domingo. Most of the road was single track, thru the mountains, so at least 1 vehicle or maybe both had to move aside anytime there was 2 way traffic. They do it in a highly choreographed way so nobody really has to slow down much.

The difference between the countries was obvious. On the Dominican side small groups of people languish under trees, having heated discussions over who gets the next coconut off a human-powered 1-machete assembly line. The bus narrowly scrapes thru a concrete passage and suddenly there is nothing but elbows, crammed stalls, goats+dogs, traffic and pedestrians both choked by brilliantly colored hand-painted buses, each with a slogan, fatalistic or ironic, across the front. The sleepy mountain villages on the D.R. side seem like Levittown by comparison.

The capital, Port-Au-Prince, was the same, only more. Given the level of sanitation, I took to calling it Port-A-Pot. I stayed at a guest house run by an American missionary type who takes in orphans and trains them to care for guests in addition to developing and giving performances of dance and 'theater' about their former lives on the street. Some of his graduates have started a satellite home in the south, and I followed him there for a visit.

The city of Jacmel is on the Caribbean Sea and was once a proud port for both industry and elite tourism. Now it looks like a scene out of Casablanca: grand old hotels with verandas sagging 30 degrees as the support beams rot; there is a rusting ship hull beached in the center of town.

I found a quiet place to stay a few miles away. Its private cove was a tropical paradise with no hint of the plumbing-less shacks which line the road back to town. The only other guests were two doctors, a canadian and a congolese, who'd been working in the countryside for two years, They seemed a little burned out.

On the way back into the DR, the border police apparently were lacking for entertainment, and I was elected "most likely to be a drug dealer". They spent an hour searching and questioning. Anyway, I had little in the way of expectations for this trip, and I was most definitely not disappointed!