The bus experience itself is relatively pleasant, with comfortable seats, an early lunch, and an onboard toilet with paper. It can be a little dirty, with food particles moldering in window crevices, but the views from the second-story level seats are unique to the usual modes of travel in Haiti. Caribe confiscates your passport before you board and handles the border crossing stamps for you, eventually returning it to you someway between the border and your final destination. They don't tell you this before hand, so it's quite nerve-wracking the first few times. Unfortunately, now my Haiti tourist card says I'm a male Dominican. I can only hope there is a similar lack of attention to detail when I leave the country.
While I don't have extensive experience crossing country borders, I imagine the southern crossing between Haiti and the DR to be one of the most ineffectual and depressing. There is a whole economy staffed by dusty, poorly dressed children at this border, composed of shoe cleaning, beverage hawking, and the selling of phone cards, sunglasses, and perfectly pressed, plastic-wrapped men's shirts. As well, there are children or amputees holding out their hand to you, attempting to make eye contact and mumbling in petulant tones. It's really unpleasant to pretend to ignore them and then not yell at them, "Stop making me feel like a jerk!" Then of course you feel guilty because you suspect they are not pretending to be poor or hungry or homeless. I haven't seen anyone give them money for doing nothing, but I imagine if one did, you would suddenly be besieged by the whole crowd of sadness. It is easier to say no to all than attempt to make value judgments. All in all, a painful experience.
The shoe-shiners tote around an old paint or coffee can and a crude toolbox with reused soda bottles filled with black stuff, white stuff, and red ocher stuff, as well as rags. They use the can as a seat when they clean or shine people's shoes. If you wear leather shoes, you can scarcely avoid their attention, but they will also insist they can clean mesh sneakers too.
All the while, both sides go through the bureaucratic motions of national security. For once, I can say the Haitian version was better, though still bewildering. Everyone filed out of the bus and slowly realized there was a line snaking into the only nearby building. Seemingly random people are offering to change money, with their calling card a big wad of cash. On both sides you wait in this queue until you get to the little window, hand them whatever you think they might want, sometimes they keep it, sometimes they don't, and then you get back on the bus, get off the bus and join another line. Later you realize this line was to inspect your luggage, but the inspection was so cursory and the method so unofficial and the smell of urine inside the building so distracting that you didn't realize it. The smell of urine was on the Dominican side, along with disturbing puddles of liquid, largest of course right at the little window. Sometimes there would be a funny juxtaposition of people leaning over this puddle to hand over their papers with the Haitian rules of queuing. In Haiti, a person is not in line unless they are physically touching the person in front of them, sometimes with what seems like their entire body. If they were to let a space exist of a foot or so, someone would promptly take the invitation to cut them in line!
The further you get into the Dominican Republic, the villages appear less poor, the countryside green, and the mountains forested. The further away from Haiti you go, the more you realize that Haiti lives as if there will be no tomorrow. Plastic bottles and Styrofoam take out containers clog and ferment in every body of water, colored milky by runoff from the degraded landscape. A few miles is all it takes to see that it could be different.
I had a great view from the very front of the bus, but the glare made all my pictures terrible.
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