Cap-Haïtien

I came into Cap-Haïtien from the south, on a road that alternated between fresh tarmac and something that had stopped being tarmac sometime in the previous decade. By the time the taxi deposited me on the edge of the city center, I was covered in red dust and completely incapable of caring. The smell of frying food hit first — that specific combination of scotch bonnet and citrus that I’d started associating with Haiti’s version of happiness — and then the city opened up: low painted buildings in faded yellows and blues, iron-railed balconies that looked borrowed from New Orleans, and a harbour where the light at four in the afternoon goes completely soft and gold.

Cap-Haïtien — Cap, as everyone calls it — was once the wealthiest city in the Caribbean. In the French colonial era it was called Le Cap-Français, and you can still feel the residue of that overreaching ambition in the street grid, the crumbling grandeur of the old merchant houses, the way the city was clearly designed with a certain idea of itself in mind. What survived the 1842 earthquake and the revolutions and the decades of neglect is battered and beautiful in equal measure.

The market near the waterfront is where I spent most of my first morning. Not shopping, just moving through it slowly, following the logic of the stalls: spices in one corner, second-hand clothing in another, then a corridor of women selling single-portion meals out of enormous pots — red beans, rice cooked in coconut milk, slabs of fried plantain that had been sitting over coals long enough to develop a particular sweetness. I bought a plate of griot from a woman whose operation consisted of a small charcoal brazier, a stack of plastic plates, and a bottle of pikliz so lethal it had made the man in front of me in line visibly tear up. The pork was perfection: crisp outside, soft through, bitter with the orange marinade.

The thing about Cap is that it functions as the logical base for the Citadelle and the Sans-Souci Palace ruins, and most travelers treat it purely as that — a logistical stop. That is an error. The city repays an extra day or two of wandering: up to the hilltop neighborhood where the views of the bay come suddenly between buildings, down to the waterfront in the early morning when the fishing pirogues are still going out, into the rum bars that open around sunset and don’t seem to have a closing time that anyone enforces. The people here have a particular dryness of humor. I was given directions to a restaurant once, and the directions were: “Walk until you think you’ve gone too far. You have. Come back a little.”

In the evenings the restaurant scene along the hillside streets comes alive in a low-key way — nothing flashy, just plastic chairs and fairy lights and menus handwritten on chalkboards. I ate tassot de cabrit — goat braised then fried until it shredded — twice in three days because the first time I had it I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The Barbancourt rum sours at the bar up the hill were cold and brutal and necessary. The conversations with the owner of my guesthouse, who had lived in Montreal for fifteen years before coming back and couldn’t quite explain why to his own satisfaction, went on longer than I expected.

When to go: December through February is dry and relatively cool in the north. The Fête du Cap falls in February, when the streets fill for several days with music and processions. Avoid September and October entirely — the roads south of the city can become completely unusable in heavy rain.