a1809: 1807: Furcy-Seguin road (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Gilles Hudicourt <hudic@videotron.ca>

This post brought back nice memories.  I hiked across with three friends in
1977 when I was 16.  The road had not been made yet.  It was made in the
eighties by a Catholic Priest in Kenskoff called Pere Sicot.  Before going,
we had to go to the Petion-Ville Caserne and get permission from the Army,
why, I don't know.  We spent the night in Furcy where we were dropped off in
a car, and began the trek early the next morning.  We kept going up and
down, then back up and down again.  The people we asked about how long we
had to go always said we were almost there.  We would then walk around a
bend, just to see a huge ravine, that the path led into, followed by a steep
hill where the path went after coming out of the other side of the ravine.
I remember name like "Morne Drouette" and "Morne Ti Po Kan".  We were
sweating profusely and painfully made our way with our backpacks but were
constantly being overtaken by 12 year girls and their mothers, both with
huge and heavy produce baskets on their heads.  "Excuse'm oui" they would
say as they passed us.  We made it to the top of "Morne Kajak" sometime
around noon, a six hour walk.  Once there, you're on the top of the Seguin
plateau .  There is still a long walk from there, but its mostly flat,
meadows with yellow flowers and green grass, pine forest, and soemthing
unusual in Hait, very little population.  When we got to Seguin, the small
army
detachment that was there was expecting us.  They looked at our army letter
and waved us on.  We went to the market and ate but the "marchand" there
were so happy to see the city boys, they refused payment for the food.  We
then continued our hike toward Marigot, on the south coast of Haiti.
Eventually we got a ride on a huge 10 wheeled Mack truck loaded with pine
planks from the pine forest.  It was getting dark by then.  We were sitting
on the top of the planks, with
about 20 other people.  For hours, we went slower than a walking person
since someone had to walk in front of the truck clearing boulders out of the
way.  The road was barely larger than the truck and there was a dark ravine
to one side. Later on, after we had gained some
speed in a wooded area, the truck hit the overhanging branch of a Mango tree
and a huge snake fell on the truck.  There was a moment of panic when it
would disappear for several minutes as we looked for it and screams would be
heard every time someone spotted it again.  It was finally spotted against a
Clairin
barrel and pushed overboard with a stick.  We arrived in Marigot in the
middle of the night and fell asleep right there on top of the truck after it
parked on the market square.  At Sun up, a soldier came to fetch us from the
truck's top to tell us we had neglected to sign in at the police station.
Again, we were expected.  One thing the Haitian Army did seem to have in
those days was communications.
We took another tapo tap truck along the south coast all the way to Jacmel
to
complete our Journey. The beach there was beautiful.  "La Jacmelienne" hotel
that sits right on th ebeach had not been built yet.  I still have a few
Kodachrome slides of that trip
somewhere in the bottom of my "Mountain Maid" mahogany trunk.
The second time I took the Seguin road was around 1983.  Pere Sicot had just
made the road from Furcy to Seguin.  It was called the Seguin road.  "Road"
is not exactly what it was.  Basically, a bulldozer had made its way to
Seguin and back, pushing whatever was in front of it out of the way.  I
guess some rock had also been blasted.  At one point I saw a embranchment of
the road that went deep down into the ravine.  I inquired about it and was
told that at that point the bull had gone over the side and had been forced
to built a road to make its way back to the top.  Just hearsay, but there it
was in front of me.  That bull operator was a brave man is all I can say.
Anyway, with two friends, I rented a small Daihatsu Jeep, spent the night in
Furcy and drove from Furcy to Seguin and
back in one day.  It was the most interesting jeep ride I will ever have in
my life.  Much of the vegetation from my earlier trip 6 years before had
already vanished.
I did the trip one last time around 1987, this time on a 600cc Yamaha enduro
bike.  The "road" had by then been washed out and even for the bike I was
using, it was a most difficult ride during which I took several spills in
the rocky areas.
However, this time it seemed like a much shorter journey, the round trip
from Petion-Ville to Seguin being made in about 6 or 8 hours, I'm no longer
sure.