The Haitian Border

After visiting Lago Enriquillo, our little group pushed on to the Haitian border. We had heard there was an open-air market of sorts in a kind of duty-free zone and thought it might be worth taking a look. I had visions of orderly stalls with people selling handicrafts.

Nope.

Mostly the duty free zone catered to organizations purchasing large quantities of staples like rice and cooking oil. We saw what appeared to be missionary buses stocking up on supplies:

R was able to purchase a couple of bottles of Haitian rum (which turned out to be quite good):

And the border guards were quite accommodating. Our friends hadn't brought their passports with them (not really expecting a jaunt into Haiti), so we approached the border patrol and asked if it would be okay to go through the gate. "All American?" he asked. When we assured him that yes, we were all US citizens, he shrugged and basically said, "Go ahead." We were a bit shocked by his laissez faire attitude, but weren't about to argue. When we were leaving I tried to surreptitiously take a photo of these guards. When I enlarged the photo later, it was apparent they knew what was going on the entire time:

He's waving.

After buying a single can of Pringles for the road from one of the vendors, we began driving back to the hotel via the road south of the lake, and came upon a gorgeous view of the valley.

Lovely.

And then we drove through a charming little village, La Lista, and stopped to buy beer.

Unbeknownst to us, La Lista is a woodworking village!

...with little stalls of fresh fruit ...

... and lovely flowers ...

...and did I mention woodworking?

I loved this little village. The people were very nice and I was tempted to purchase a rocking chair in all of the available sizes. 

We drove through tunnels of trees,

and ended up in a little out-of-the-way place called Polo Magnetico, where an optical illusion makes it seem that your car is rolling uphill when it's in neutral. We found a little shop that sold organic locally-grown coffee, had a lively conversation with a bunch of Dominican men regarding the best way to get back to the road to Barahona, and finally made it to the hotel for dinner.

A really lovely day!