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?

By Patrick Smith

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© Patrick Smith

A sign at Victoria Falls Bridge, which crosses the Zambezi River between Zimbabwe and Zambia.

Jan. 18, 2008 | Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 1999

"Sorry, it's too dangerous," says the driver.

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.

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.

In front of the terminal, men ride by on donkeys and women balance baskets atop their heads. Somebody has started a cooking fire on the sidewalk. Haiti is the poorest country in the entire Western Hemisphere, and I can see more squalor along the airport perimeter than I saw in almost three weeks in the depths of southern Africa.

I notice a pair of large white drums being unloaded from our airplane. Something doesn't look right -- crew-member intuition -- and concerned that we'd accidentally transported some kind of hazardous material, I ask a loader if he knows what the barrels contain. A forklift carries them to a corner of a ramshackle warehouse, and three skinny helpers pry off the heavy plastic lids. What's revealed is a tangled white mass of what appears to be string cheese floating in water. A vague, quiveringly rotten smell rises from the liquid. The forklift driver sticks his hand in and gives the ugly congealment a churn. "For sausage," he answers. What we're looking at, it turns out, is a barrel full of intestines -- casings bound for some horrible Haitian factory to be stuffed with meat. Why the casings need to be imported while the meat itself is apparently on hand, I can't say, but somebody found it necessary to pay the shipping costs and customs duties to fly a hundred gallons of intestines from Miami to Port-au-Prince.

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The story above is cut from the manuscript of a book I've been hoping to sell -- a memoir of sorts that I've titled "Half the Fun." It describes an afternoon several years ago, when I was a cargo pilot for DHL. The setting is the Port-au-Prince airport in Haiti -- a country I've never been to.

Wait, you say, hold on a minute. How could I have been to the Port-au-Prince airport but not to Haiti? Well, exactly that: I have indeed flown into the Port-au-Prince airport several times. But as far as I'm concerned, seeing that I never set foot outside the terminal, I have not been to Haiti.

The issue here is what, exactly, constitutes a visit to another country. Making that determination can be tricky, and those who travel a lot will occasionally wrestle with this quandary. When your plane stops for refueling or you spend the evening at an airport hotel, does that count?

Where to draw the line is ultimately up to the traveler; it's more about "feel" than any technical definition of a border crossing. But there should be a certain, if ineffable standard -- along the lines of that you-know-it-when-you-see-it definition of pornography.

According to my own criteria, a passport stamp alone doesn't cut it. At the very least, a person must spend a token amount of time -- though not necessarily an overnight -- beyond the airport and its immediate environs. For instance, in addition to the example of Haiti, back when I flew cargo planes, I stopped for refueling on three or four occasions in Guatemala City. But I never had time to venture beyond the terminal. On the pin-studded map that hangs in the dining room of my apartment, there was no pin for Guatemala.

Next page: If a citizen of Japan visits Guam, has he been to the United States?