Haiti

If you've got soul, you'll get Haiti. No Anglo-isle polite pastels here. Pungent, potent, a land of seething streetlife, cockfights, dancing, bonfires, birthday cake graveyards and hyperactive voodoo gods. A land to pole-axe the senses. Haitian Visions: Fire! fire! colors hot as five alarm flames. Girls toting baskets on scarf wrapped heads, flamingo, sunflower, go-light green, their sketchy dresses a soda pop clash of cherry, grape and lemonlime. "Tap-taps," mini-buses painted from stem to stern with anecdotal religious and native scenes, sailing through human traffic like Sunday comics in the sultry winds. Each tap-tap is emblazoned with a name: "Thanks, Mother Dear," "O.K. Zaza," "All Is Mystery," "Let Me Live." Molten hedgerows of tangled poinsettias, bright laundry lines of mass-produced naive art. Parrot green mountains, sunset seas, floodlit swimming pool skies. Haitian Sounds: Languorous whir of ceiling fans, the slap and clatter of gambling under farmyard trees, on top of tombstones, in the rhinestone cowboy casino. Incessant high-blood pressure voodoo drumming, radio blasts of Cuban merengues, a muzak ooze of sweetened Chopin and tango soup. Raucously welcoming twenty-four hour dawns. Haitian roosters, like Haitian divorce lawyers, seem never to sleep. Haitian Aromas: Seductive gusts of vetiver from the perfume factory, fragrant herbal teas, sea salt, acrid I market vapors, the penetrating signature smell of the country...charcoal and wood smoke from constantly flickering cooking fires. Haitian Flavors: At expensive tables, tropics-tinged interpretations of classic haute cuisine. In traditional Haitian haunts, the world's best deep fried fritters, at once mellifluous and crunchy, fishnet-fresh seafood, expert grilling, savory black mushroom-stained rice and acetylene sauce ti malice. As far as gloriously fresh food is concerned, Haiti is an earthly paradise. In the country markets, more than thirty kinds of glowing vegetables and herbs may be quickly counted; purple-mirrored eggplant, frail stalked watercress, melting avocados and the hi-fi volume dials of Creole cuisine...peppers, red, yellow, green, sweet to hot, hotter, hottest. Haitian fruit is dangerously addictive. Even varieties familiar to foreigners tend to startle: powerhouse grapefruit, green skinned, explosively tangy and sweet; elusively faint blue raspberries, like ghosts of their black and red cousins. For the novitiate, Carmen Miranda extravaganzas of muskily perfumed tropical fruits are worth the trip alone.The selling, display and sharing of food amounts to a national obsession. And almost any common occurrence can trigger an improvised party meal. A ruptured banana truck stalls on a coastal highway. The drivers, an amazing number of them, Haiti (con'd.)tumble out to commiserate with their stricken overload. Within minutes, they have started a blaze in a nearby ditch and sprawl beneath the truck's dangling innards, peeling plantains to boil with salt or sugar for a chatty communal lunch followed by a spread-eagle siesta. After dark, the poorer streets of Port-au-Prince metamorphose into funky fairgrounds. On low makeshift candlelit tables, amateur shopkeepers and primitive restaurateurs arrange their sparse displays. Frequently the barter system prevails; a hungry stroller may trade, for example, a single juicy mango for a few crisp nuggets of deep fried fish or pork. Aside from excellent Haitian beer and coffee, coconut milk and the sticky nameless floral colored syrups and spirits purveyed in the streets from ramshackle trundle bars, rum is the universal drink. Your average voodoo altar is laden with bottles. The gods, one is told, love rum. And with good reason if it's of a reputable local brand. Elaborate rum drinks are the stock in trade at all tourist lures, whether restaurant, nightclub, bar or hotel.

Big time tourism came to Haiti in the late '40s and early'50s. In low lying Port-au-Prince, hotel and architectural styles tend to Late Somerset Maugham laced with Early Greenwich Village, Ethnic Art Gallery and Charity Auction. High up on the mountain, surveying the city and sea, in the haute bourgeois suburban realms of Pétionville, the 1950s Latin Riviera schools reign: vast eccentric shaped turquoise swimming pools, gurgling fountains, landslides of pink and white stucco, tufted banquettes and native art by the yard, groaning bars and fleets of bolero-jacketed servitors, manicured jungles, king-of-the-mountain panoramic views and enough wrought iron to veil all of New Orleans. On the whole, they have been maintained attentively. Pétionville is peppered with cranny boutiques, gift shops, galleries and passive roadside vendors of wood carvings and abstract goatskin rugs. Most of the more worldly "continental style" restaurants are also resident there; notable are Chez Gerard and La Lanteme. The most extraordinarily luxurious dining room in Haiti, however, belongs to Habitation Leclerc, a uniquely sybaritic walled oasis, originally built by Napoleon's sister, now reached through a raw and raffish outlying neighborhood of Port-auPrince. Hung with splendid chandeliers and French tapestries, the room opens out on two sides to a glamorous maze of lush vegetation, pools, sweeping balustraded terraces and parades of antique statuary. Complexes of elegant private suites each boast their own semi-private swimming pools beneath soaring green geysers of bamboo and palm. But, as always in Haiti, there is more here than meets the eye. Afternoon tea is served in a sundappled garden on lacy white wrought iron tables. A senatorial native waiter in starched jacket and formal black tie hands around "platters of cakes and pours from a silver pot. Actually he is a respected voodoo doctor named Abraham, and the deliciously mysterious tea he pours is a heady, restorative decoction of fresh herbs and roots he brings with him daily. From the jungle-rimmed poolside shadows, another shadow slides, black pinstriped and bowler hatted, dark face masked by darker glasses. This formidable apparition is Mr. Vincent, voodoo high priest and fortune teller par excellence, who, for five dollars, will contemplate your fate. He has been known to allow serious tourist students of voodoo to attend authentic rites in his own domain. Le Peristyle, a sort of nightclub-theater presided over by an extravagantly handsome high priest (a skilled chemist by day), nightly presents a somewhat choreographed voodoo ceremony, complete with possessed performers, bare feet in the flames, and similar black-magic phenomena, for the edification of the transient. The more commercial nightclubs, on irregular schedules, offer loud but watered-down voodoo divertissements, along with dance bands, singers and an occasional footloose international star. Gambling rages late into the night in the accountant's-ink red casino of the Royal Haitian Hotel.

Getting around Haiti can be accomplished in several ways: car rentals, taxis or chauffered cars by day and /or night (the last can become extremely expensive). But get around you must; Haiti's well constructed new highways have opened up magnificent coastal stretches and unsurpassed mountain drives. Among the most alluring beaches are Kyona and Ouanga, slightly more than an hour away from Portau-Prince. Two hours in a car will get you over the mountains to the old coffee port of Jacmel, a sunny slice of Graham Greene featuring the Pension Craft in whose kitchens what is probably the best and most sophisticated Creole food in Haiti is lovingly prepared. If the rains have been in your favor, you may be able to feast on "the caviar of Jacmel," pisquette, a fantastical jumble of minuscule sea creatures, looking like coarse saffron rice and tasting like crayfish gone to heaven. These are caught in the middle of the night by women standing thigh high in the waters where the moonstruck river rushes into the sea. At daybreak the pisquettes are cleaned and hawked door to door. At lunchtime they undergo yet another transformation...a brief toss in butter, garlic, fresh hot peppers and herbs, all in all a dish as unusual, pungent and memorable as Haiti itself.

Haitian Specialties

"Consommé": Not what you'd expect. In Haiti this usually means a rich, thick puree or soup based on aromatic vegetables, meat, seafood, etc.

"Marinade": Again, hardly what you'd expect. Deep-fried fritters or croquettes based on anything from breadfruit to salt fish.

"Djon-djon": Precious dried black mushrooms, principally gathered in the depths of island forests. Used in sauces and to delectably darken "dirty rice."

"Griot": Charcoal grilled chunks of pork served with the ubiquitous...

"Ti Malice": Literally "little malice." A fiery, pickly fresh condiment sauce fueled by hot peppers.

"Tablette Cocoyer": Sweetly chewy dried coconut chips.

Hotels, Restaurants, Nightlife

Getting There: American Airlines' easy direct flights from New York: or Pan American, Air France and Aero Condor from Miami.

Hotels:Approximate winter rates (Dec. 15-Apr 15) for two, modified American plan.

Habitation Leclerc: A uniquely sybaritic Caribbean Eden. Heavy chic, pulsating disco, voodoo drums. $130.00.

Oloffson's: Though Sydney Greenstreet should be ensconced in wicker on the veranda of this famous gingerbread fantasy, you'll probably find a bestselling author. $75.00.

Sans Souci: A flung lemon meringue pie of a Somerset Maugham hotel. $42.00.

El Rancho: The most elegant Petionville hotel, very Hollywood, very '40s. $84.00.

Villa Creole: El Rancho's sleepier, more discreet neighbor. $71.00.

Ibo-Lélé and Montana: Both enjoy aerial views of Port-au-Prince. $55.00 and $42.00.

Ibo, Kyona, Ouanga and other beaches have moderately priced guest quarters.

Restaurants:Approximate prices for a dinner for two with wine.

Chez Gérard: French food in bosky, candlelit pavilions. Good rum sours, garlicky frog legs, bananas flambe. $30.00.

La Lanteme: Dine by the pool in the patio of a private house. Try chicken "djon-djon" or "a la Bruno," and excellent frozen souffle. $30.00.

"Le Gourmet" Chez Gladys: First-rate Haitian specialties including guinea hen, lobster, conch and stuffed land crab. $16.00.

Ti Boucan: Atmospheric, somewhat primitive wharf restaurant. Authentic Haitian "marinades" and beautiful grilled fish and seafood kebobs. $35.00.

Nightlife Casino of the Royal Haitian Hotel: A rhinestone dazzle with all the games you want to play. Le Peristyle: Voodoo rites nightly. The owner is a High Priest.

Each major hotel features a floorshow on a different night.