A U.N. tank had just struck our vehicle and we were escorted back to the base. The soldiers were Chilean, which meant my Spanish wasn’t so useless. They offered us food and water as they repaired the damage to our seasoned S.U.V. When we got back on the road it was easy to see why the UN drove tanks in this region. The roads were decimated by years of forgotten promises of foreign aid and of neglect from corrupt officials. We were driving with one mission in mind, to follow the footsteps of Wade Davis, the Canadian ethnobotanist and author of The Serpent in the Rainbow. Davis’ mission differed from our own but what drove us to Haiti was similar, and that was the desire to seek the unknown. We were in search of the Haitian vodou (also written as voodoo) culture that we had only read about in…