After a couple days back in Boston, it was time to see British Guyana, Suriname, French Guyana, and Brazil.
This trip would require an intrepid travel buddy. The infrastructure in the region (Brazil excluded) was quite undeveloped, the flights would be in the middle of the night, the heat would be daunting... not everyone gravitates to this type of "vacation." So I did what anyone would do. I reached out to my childhood pediatrician to see if she wanted to join, and she said yes!
Seriously though, my former pediatrician (Hi Dr. Karine!) is still good friends with my family. You may remember her bad-to-the-bone daughter Sophie from my posts about New Zealand. Like any true Australian, she travels extensively and adventurously. Not many people could take multiple weeks off work to travel, but she could... plus, I feel extra safe traveling with doctors, so bingo! Or as they say in Australia, "Dingo."
I booked us a trip exploring the "three Guianas" and tacked a bit of Brazil time on at the end, since as you'll see, the airline schedules in the Guianas are veeeeery sparse, and getting back to the states would require flying out of Brasilia anyway. The first thing to know is about nomenclature: "Guiana" or "Guyana" is an indigenous (Arawak) word that means "land of many waters." Due to classic colonial violence and greed, the once-singular Guiana was conquered by the Dutch and split into multiple territories. Through various wars, consolidations, and empire shifts, we ended up with the following:
The current setup. This area is sometimes referred to as "the forgotten corner" of South America. My travel doctor had no idea where Suriname was.
If you're American, British, or Guyanese, you probably refer to the country in pink as "Guyana," but everyone else in the region calls it "British Guyana." The official language there is English.
Suriname used to be called Dutch Guyana, but the indigenous name won out. "Surinen" is the name of the local indigenous tribe in Arawak. The official language is Dutch.
What I always called "French Guyana" is, once you're in the country, simply referred to as "la Guyane," which of course is just French for Guyana. So two different countries call themselves Guyana, and save the adjective "French" or "British" for the one that they aren't. Got it? Ok.
First things first, British Guyana has the best air access for Americans. You pretty much need to fly into Georgetown if you're coming from the states. Suriname has essentially no air access at all unless you are coming from the Netherlands or another small Caribbean nation like Curaçao. We accessed Suriname by land and by boat.
These are all 18th century colonial outpost countries right on the Caribbean, which makes for some very interesting vibe shifts. On one hand, you have Caribbean beaches, amazing weather, friendly people, and tropical drinks. On the other, pretty much every historical or cultural activity harkens back to atrocious cruelty - sometimes European on native, sometimes European on European. It was very popular in the late 1700s for the "owner" (blegh) European countries, Britain, Netherlands, and France, to use these territories as game pieces. A new treaty requires that you give national territory to another country? Fine, take some of this faraway land that none of our high society cares about. Jails filling up with undesirables? Fine, let's ship them overseas. We're legally obligated to accept refugees? We know just where to put them... (see French Guyana section below).
British Guyana (what we used to just call "Guyana") was our arrival point and first impression of the region. They won independence from Britain in 1966 and have done very well on their own, recently monetizing huge oil reserves. Their tourism jewel is Kaieteur falls, which requires a dodgy 10-seater plane ride to visit.
Once you arrive, you spill gratefully out of the plane, have a barely edible snack that probably should have been better refrigerated, and start a hike to the falls themselves. Even though they did look huge from the air, there's nothing like seeing them up close. L'appel du vide will be very strong so don't get too close.
Naturally this is where I decided to do something I'm only marginally good at that requires going upside down and balancing.
We explored Georgetown a bit and some more of the nature reserves. We learned about a type of sculpture made by locals using sap from the rubber trees: Balata. I snatched up some figurines because I am here for the locally made, non-plastic souvenirs.
See that red bird in the second row? That's the one I got.
At the bustling and anxiety-inducing street market, we saw some somewhat dubious cures for everything from the common cold to cancer. Step right up:
While some tours allow for more inland adventures, ours sent us eastward to Suriname via a short plane ride to Paramaribo and then almost immediately further east to French Guyana in a long, narrow covered boat called a pirogue. We kept Suriname for the end of the trip, but French Guyana was not accessible directly from British Guyana, so we had to go through Suriname anyway.
Pirogue views as seen from the covered part.
First, administratively, French Guyana is exactly like France in almost every way. The street signs are made from the same material and same font as they are in France. People use euros (and things are very expensive). Guyanese people’s passports are French passports – they literally say “France” on the front. It is one of the DOM-TOM regions. It’s a somewhat popular destination for mainland French vacationers, but the ocean isn’t as pristine as other DOM-TOM regions, so the place wasn’t crawling with tourists. French is the official and pretty much only spoken language.
To get to some pretty water, we took a boat tour to several islands. These were your classic turquoise water, palm trees, awesome islands, with a horror twist – each island served as a jail. Jailhouse security was quite strong, but not really necessary, as the water off the coast was (at least hundreds of years ago, pre-overfishing eras) infested with sharks and piranhas.
Even the “not-so-bad” jail island was awful. We toured the ruins of the jail with a pleasant, joking local guide who took particular delight in mimicking the sound of a guillotine at work. In unbearable heat, we toured cell block after cell block; tiny cells faced a courtyard so that no prisoner could escape the sounds and drama of the executions that would take place there. There were long concrete slabs with what looked like rebar welded to it – hundreds of prisoners would be chained there to sleep. The close quarters, heat, forced labor, and rampant sickness ensured that very, very few prisoners ever left. Our guide told us that about 75% of prisoners died there. Now the walls are crumbling and the doors are all unlocked, but the misery was still palpable. After about 15 minutes I stopped going into the cells, although our cheerful tour guide tried to insist. You could still see the carvings and drawings on the cells from the prisoners over 100 years ago. The movie “papillon” is based on these islands. You can read more about them here.
Awful entrance.
Awful cell block.
Awful cell.
On some islands, nature is trying to cleanse the place.
From the boat, we could also see Devil’s island – another penitentiary designed for a single convict. This is where Alfred Dreyfus was imprisoned from 1895-1899. From Wikipedia:
On 12 March 1895, after a difficult voyage of fifteen days, the ship anchored off the Îles du Salut. Dreyfus stayed one month in prison on Île Royale and was transferred to Devil's Island on 14 April 1895. Apart from his guards, he was the only inhabitant of the island and he stayed in a stone hut 4 by 4 metres (13 ft × 13 ft). Haunted by the risk of escape, the commandant of the prison sentenced him to a hellish life, even though living conditions were already very painful. Dreyfus became sick and shaken by fevers that got worse every year.
Dreyfus was allowed to write on paper numbered and signed. He underwent censorship by the commandant even when he received mail from his wife Lucie, whereby they encouraged each other. On 6 September 1896, the conditions of life for Dreyfus worsened again; he was chained double looped, forcing him to stay in bed motionless with his ankles shackled. This measure was the result of false information of his escape revealed by a British newspaper. For two long months, Dreyfus was plunged into deep despair, convinced that his life would end on this remote island.
The single prisoner’s hut on Devil’s island as seen from the boat; we didn’t go onto the island itself.
Can you imagine being treated so horribly in what we would normally see as an island paradise? So disturbing.
French Guyana’s other main tourist attraction is the Space Center. It’s huge – in fact, it’s so large that it doubles as an animal reserve (strict controls on human access = no hunting = animals flock to it. There is a family of pumas living there, but of course we didn’t see them firsthand). The size requires you to take a bus – you don’t get to meander much on this part of the tour. You just sit, either in an auditorium or a bus. Still, you can see where the European Union launches its space missions from, including getting up close on the launch pads, and sometimes they let you out of the bus near the launchpads. While I don’t have an outsized interest in space exploration, I will say these launchpads are quite remarkable. You can see the vents where all the rocket fire goes out. As you can tell from the previous sentence, I am not the ideal guide for rocket science situations.
Launch pad.
The Orange Phone, where some important person gives the ok to launch.
Also on mainland French Guyana... remember when I said EU countries that might be pressured to take in refugees but don't want to deal with them in Europe might use their overseas territories for the purpose? That's what France is doing. There is a tent city of middle eastern, mostly Syrian, refugees awaiting processing for French asylum claims... in French Guyana.
I obviously didn't want to make them uncomfortable by taking pictures so this one is from far away.
You can read more about this phenomenon here.
Suriname was saved for last (well, and then Brazil, but that was just part of the going-home tour, not the Guyanas tour). As you’ll recall, this is the Dutch Guyana, and hence the only Guyana in which I relied heavily on English translators who could have possibly used a little more practice. It turns out, though, that lots of French Guyanese families vacation in Suriname due to the proximity and cheaper prices, so I heard quite a bit of French.
Live for stuff like this.
The colonial Dutch houses could be charming...
... or straight out of a horror movie, depending on level of upkeep.
We were booked in one of the nicer downtown Paramaribo hotels (Ramada princess), which was highly rated but still not wonderful. It was on the crazy busy main street with a tiny scrap of a sidewalk separating you unloading your suitcase from huge industrial trucks zooming by. The interior was under construction (pretty much every building seemed to be under construction) and there were quite a few tarps where walls should have been. Still, the room was comfortable and countries have to grow, so no worries.
The hotel staff in Paramaribo told us that we needed to pay for another night since our flight was super late (like 3am) and we wouldn’t be leaving until around 10pm on our checkout day. Totally fine and reasonable, should have been in the planning document, but ok. So we stay another night, then pack, and head to the airport (over 2 hour drive very late at night). The airport was… deserted. No travelers, no airline employees, not even a security guard. There was a screen that had a few flights on it… the next one was in three days. Keeping our driver close so as not to be abandoned in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night, I frantically pulled out the new itinerary. Yes, we were definitely supposed to be here now… Slowly, painfully, I retrieved the original itinerary and saw the issue. The tour organizer had made the classic blunder of telling us to show up for a flight at 3am on, say, August 18, “early” at 11pm… on August 18. Which is, of course, almost a full day after the flight left. I was speechless. The only thing to do was to go back to the hotel (a loooong 2 hours), feverishly book new tickets and hotel nights, and wait for the soonest flight, which was 3 days away. I got a partial refund from the company, but it wasn’t even close to what needed to be paid in new flights and hotel fees. I also realized that the woman was telling her employees that it was my mistake. After he got off the phone with her, our driver said to us, “Wow! Too bad you got the dates wrong, huh?” I was livid, but hey, what am I gonna do, keep fighting until everyone knows their coworker effed up? I let it go.
We made the best of our miserable forced layover, and even managed to have a magical moment in a Surinamese park. Dr. Karine and I were frolicking, with some dignified reserve, on the seesaws and merry-go-round in the park. This is one of the places I heard a lot of French, and deduced that a lot of the families here were from French Guyana, and happily I could understand them.
Anyway, I had been pushing Dr. K. on the merry-go-round for a bit when the energy in the park changed. The children who had been playing on their own shifted from playing to silently surveilling: someone with slightly larger muscles and substantial momentum-inducing body mass was pushing the merry-go-round and it had not escaped their notice. They wanted in. It started with an adorable duo of 6 year olds who, in the most polite French you’ve ever heard, asked, “Madame, will you push us too?” Once they got a yes, the rest of the kids came running over and picked out their spots.
Again, dignified reserve reigns supreme.
Me: "Are we ready?"
Them, adorably: "Yes!"
Me: "Ok, here we go!"
We also saw a very, very hot but very pleasant butterfly tour. Did you know Suriname exports butterflies? Weird, right?
So we finally made it out of Suriname. Luckily we had planned to be in Brazil for 5 days, so the 3 day pushback still enabled us to get a little bit of Brazil time and still take our original flights from Brazil to the states. We were in Brasilia, which is apparently kind of the equivalent of visiting Ohio and saying you’ve been to the U.S., but I still found it awesome. We walked several kilometers a day (shout out to Dr. K., exceeding my cardio health with a 40 year age gap). One day, out of our hotel and near a monument, we stumbled upon some incredibly talented Capoeira athletes. They weren’t buskers; it was a group of people from local gyms who happened to be performing. It. Was. Awesome.
Brasilia presented a drastic difference from the Guyanas. 6 and 7 lane highways, long stretches of fields between huge monuments… we definitely weren’t in crumbling dirt road territory anymore. Here we mostly relaxed and tried to recover from our stressful time in Suriname. We even hunted down the best acai bowl in Brasilia, which is very deserving of the accolade.
Even with the airport snafu, we had an amazing time and would still do this tour again – just make sure sure sure any changed itineraries still accurately reflect your flight details.
Here is the company we used, with mixed results as you know. Let me know if you go!
