Salon :: Tech & Business

Ask the pilot: If I've flown into the Port-au-Prince airport, does that mean I've been to Haiti? What, exactly, constitutes a trip to another country?

Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 1999 <P>"Sorry, it's too dangerous," says the driver. <P>To the best of my knowledge and experience, Port-au-Prince is the only place in the world this side of Baghdad where a cabbie will refuse a $20 bill to take a pilot into town for a quick, drive-through tour. Where else? Maybe Monrovia, Liberia, or Freetown, Sierra Leone, during the wars in those countries. <P>With nothing else to do I wander the apron. Behind our dormant jet a row of scarred, treeless hills bake in the noon heat, raped of their wood and foliage for firewood by a million hungry Haitians. The island of Hispaniola is shared in an east-west split by Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The border between these countries is one of the few national demarcations clearly visible from 35,000 feet -- the Dominican Republic's green tropical carpet abutting a Haitian death-scape of denuded hillsides the color of sawdust. <p>...</p><img src="http://feeds.salon.com/~r/salon/tech/~4/218612368" height="1" width="1"/>

Comments