The modern world’s first black-led republic, Haiti boasts a unique culture and an incredible artistic tradition. Its intensely spiritual people are known for their humour and passion, upheld in the face of poverty, civil strife, oppression and urban overpopulation. Their language, dance and music reflect a unique syncopation between the spiritual and material worlds. Haiti is not yet set up for the Club Med crowd, but the open-minded adventurer will find a country whose contradictions will linger in mind, heart and spirit.

June to August (the dry season)

Touring Jacmel’s Victorian gingerbread home Visiting the Musee National in (Port-au-Prince, housing King Christophe’s suicide pistol and a rusty anchor reputed to have been salvaged from Columbus’s Santa Maria Strolling among the Spanish-influenced architecture of Cap-Haitien Shopping at Port-au-Prince’s Marche de Fer (lron Market)-packed with stalls, vendors and piles of fruit, baskets and religious totems Taking the horseback trek to the Bassins Blue-three cobalt-blue pools joined by spectacular cascades

Read Beast of the Haitian Hills by Pierre Marcelin and Philippe Thoby Marclin, a novel about life in the Haitian countryside; the historical novel All Souls Rising by Madison Smartt Bell

Listen to Cuban-Haitian vocal group Desandann or Lody Auguste

Watch Lumumba by acclaimed Haitian director Raoul Peck, or for some classic Hollywood horror from 1932, White Zombie

Eat grillot et pese (pork chops with island bananas) or diri et djondjon (rice and black mushrooms)

Drink rum, the drink of choice

Pas plus mal (no worse than before)-the standard answer to ‘How are you?’

Vodou; zombies; Papa Doc; slave history; racial discord; shanty towns

Orange peels drying on sunny surfaces throughout Cap-Haitien are destined to one day lend their to luxury liqueurs Grand Marnier and Cointreau; actors in enormous papier-mache masks act out parables of good versus evil during Jacmel’s pre-Lent Mardi Gras festivities

Vodou ceremonies are highly developen rituals to pleasure, feed and ultimately summon the lwa through the possession of a human body. Once the drums start, the ceremony has begun. There are usually three drums, the mamman, the segon and the boula. The manman is the largest drum, which the leading drummer beats fiercely with a single stick and one hand. The segon payer provides hypnotic counter-rhythms while the boula drummer plays an even rhythm holding all the others together.