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Comment by David Paul Appell on July 15, 2010 at 2:15pm

Another interesting sign of life up north (east of Gonaives), mentioned in the Herald this week:

New Road Ushers in Trade Boom for Area in Haiti

"...six months after the Jan. 12 earthquake killed 300,000, left 1.5 million homeless and paralyzed much of the country, the stretch of blacktop that fuels the market and snakes through northeastern Haiti has the hopes of a nation riding on it.

...regional boosters see the road as the backbone of a tourist route that will whisk visitors to colonial castles, pristine beaches and picturesque villages seen only by the heartiest of travelers.

It used to take cargo trucks eight hours to make the 44-mile trip from Cap-Haitien, the northeast's economic and cultural hub, he said. Now, that trip takes less than two hours, and the streets of Ouanaminthe are jammed with buses and trucks from villages once considered far-flung.

As the route slices through undeveloped savannas and plantain fields it also puts some of Haiti's most prized tourist destinations within reach. Less than an hour from the Dominican Republic is the port city of Fort Liberté, which features French-designed strongholds that date back to the 1700s. Closer to Cap-Haitien is the spectacular hilltop citadel of Laferriére, a UNESCO World Heritage site, and the ruins of the Sans-Souci Palace -- built by Haitian revolutionary hero and one-time emperor of the Kingdom of Northern Haiti, Henri Christophe. ``These forts can become part of a tourist circuit,'' Boulos explained, ``with tourists arriving through Cap-Haitien or making the two-hour drive from the Dominican Republic.''

Haiti saw just 800,000 tourists in 2008 and growth has been stunted by lack of infrastructure, including hotels. The earthquake wiped out almost half of Port-au-Prince's estimated 1,621 hotel rooms.

The new road allows Haiti to piggyback on the more than 60,300 rooms available in the Dominican Republic and poach some of the 4 million tourists that visit there every year...

That would just be the beginning. U.N. Special Envoy Bill Clinton said once Cap-Haitien's airport is expanded, the case can be made for building roads to connect the city to the beach resort of Labadee.

``We can get new resorts built there,'' Clinton told The Miami Herald. ``I can get donors' funds to help build housing around the resorts for the people who will work there.''

Comment by David Paul Appell on June 30, 2010 at 10:47am

An interesting and encouraging bit of tourism news from Haiti I spotted in today's Miami Herald: the Oasis Hotel project in Petionville (an outlying part of Port-au-Prince) is back on track with a $7.5 million loan from a World Bank agency and is now scheduled to open in November 2011. It's supposed to be a chic, South-Beach-style resort with 132 rooms.

Comment by Wendy Capra on February 10, 2010 at 9:47am

Hope everyone has sent a little something in to help Haiti recover from the earthquake!

Comment by EnLinea Media on January 24, 2010 at 3:05pm

This weekend, the Tripatini blog asks the question: Could Tourism Help Save Haiti?

Comment by Sheila O'Connor on January 23, 2010 at 8:02pm

I wrote a piece on a local San Francisco charity helping Haiti (which it has been doing since 2000) and how they see the looting going on there. Feel free to check it out.
http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-29076-SF-World-Travel-Examiner~y...