exerpt from

Haiti: check in to Hotel Vodou
Anita Mason

The Oloffson was part of my reason for going to Haiti. Hollywood stars used to stay there. Graham Greene wrote about it in The Comedians. It's now a bit dilapidated, but I didn't mind. The hotel is owned by Richard Morse, whom I wanted to meet.

Richard Morse is the son of a Haitian dancer and an American professor. He looks like an ageing hippie. His vodou rock band RAM plays deafeningly in the bar every Thursday night. He told me, with relish, the story of how he came to be the Oloffson's proprietor as the result of a conversation in the back of a taxi with a houngan (vodou priest). Later, he admitted that he had acquired it from his brother-in-law. "But that's the Western version of how I got it."

Vodou was everywhere in the Oloffson: plaster figures of loa (vodou gods), sculptures, sequined flags. Going to my room every night I passed Erzulie, goddess of love, all in pink in a flowerbed. Morse is himself a houngan, and in our first conversation asked me if I believed in God. We chatted about the Gnostic gospels and related matters while my toast cooled on the table. He showed me a hieroglyphic text, which he had translated into English, that had been dictated to a Haitian woman in trance by the spirit of the pharaoh Rameses. He didn't quite know what to make of it. Neither did I.

I nevertheless guessed that Richard Morse was a shrewd operator in the real world when he needed to be. In the political violence that followed the fall of Jean-Claude 'Baby Doc' Duvalier in 1986, RAM's songs often carried a message that implicitly criticised the dictatorship. More than once, on the stage, Morse had to face down a gunman. And he kept the Oloffson going, somehow, a refuge from the chaos and a place where visiting journalists could stay and exchange information.

Journalists still stay, when Haiti is in the news. So do artists, musicians, writers and the kind of people who enjoy drifting around the Caribbean. It is addictive: I meant to spend five days there but it turned into 10, because it was the perfect place to come back to. You could read on the veranda or look out over the tropical garden to downtown Port-au-Prince; you could drink rum punch in the bar and talk.

posted on telegraph.co.uk