“There is a spirit that lives in the water.” By this point I’ve pretty much checked out completely. John and I are standing in front of Bassin Zim, this beautiful turquoise waterfall in the middle of Haiti. We hopped on motorcycles in the morning and traversed half the country in order to check it out and take a swim. Now our guide is telling us that we can’t get in because the water will eat us.

At this point, I feel like a kid whose parents took him to a candy shop and said, “You can look at all these other kids eating candy, but you can’t have any.” Then his dad leans down to him with a leering smile and says, “It’ll rot your teeth.”

Still emotionally distraught, I follow the guide up to the cave at the top of the waterfall. He talks about the voodoo hieroglyphics inscribed on the walls, and all the ceremonies that take place there. All the while bats fluttered around us. Well, fluttered isn’t the right word; the bats were piercing the air around us, licking their lips, hungry for American blood. I imagined myself as Bruce Wayne when he first discovers his bat-cave, but even in my imagination I was still deathly afraid of the rodents.

In the cave, the water rushed past our feet then fell over a ledge and into a pool. From there the water hop-scotched to three other baths, each lapping over the next like one of those infinity pools, except these housed a man-eating waterfall. The guide kept pulling me back from the edge, but that was probably because I kept joking about jumping in.

On the walk down, I threw in quick bits about me being a lifeguard and believing that God would protect us from any evil spirit. All the while knowing that it wasn’t as much an evil spirit that caused deaths as it was a very powerful waterfall mixed with ignorant tourists.

Anyways, we were privileged to see this amazing waterfall and tour some the Haitian countryside. I thought I’d give you a picture of what our little excursion was like. In the end, I ended up diving into the water out of reach from the “demon-falls”, my friends close at my heels.