bicrom abroad

there are not many places in the world that still let you feel like you are meandering innocently into the unknown, but the guianas still retain that on-edge allure. they appear to be at first glance entirely unique, the forgotten polyglot children of european imperial ambition, nestled out of sight under the shadow of brazil in the distant north eastern corner of south america. surrounded by a sea of spanish and portugese, only in these three thin slivers of land do dutch, french, indians, laotians, indonesians all intermingle, languidly coexisting long after the empires which gave birth to their bizarre, entirely non-geographical, associations have been hastily, guiltily wiped away.
we landed in paramaribo, the capital of surinam, just after midnight on saturday and having negotiated customs and a taxi driver who was not sure exactly which car was his, wandering around shaking his head and waiting to find the vehicle whose lights blinked in acceptance of the elctronic plea of the keyfob he had picked up from somewhere, we crashed in a slightly grotty but passable guesthouse and passed out for the night. after a few sticky hours of sleep we dragged ourselves out of bed to try and catch up on some of the food we had failed to eat during the flight from miami the previous day. unfortunately we were caught, as is so often the case, by the curse of the sunday.
negotiating cyclists undergoing some kind of tour de suriname on the streets of parbo and men brandishing caged songbirds ready to enter into musical battle, we wandered the streets looking for somewhere, anywhere which might provide us with some breakfast. a trip to the waterfront suggested that beer and other boozy delights were apparently fine for 9am on god's own day, but apparently not anything akin to eggs or toast or anything else that heretically nutritious. after a couple of hours helplessly wandering the streets of parbo we gave up the fight, decided to live for a while longer on the cereal bars that we had packed but never thought we would need and went to find a shared taxi to take us to the border with french guiana.
we finally found a genial chap complete with a battered old toyota and resident caged songbird who, following a fairly heated argument with some of his peers in a variety of languages over the alleged theft of a third passenger, finally got us on our way. old though his vehicle may have been it made light work of the primarily dirt track to albina, negotiating the massive potholes, occasional torrential downpours and reservoir-like puddles of mud with ease at between 100 and 120 clicks an hour; we put on our seatbelts for a police checkpoint and for some reason didn't feel like taking them off thereafter. still he got us there in double quick time and, a short canoe ride over the river marking the border later, we found ourselves, bizarrely, in france.
first impressions of french guiana; it really is a departement of france. you don't expect to see the tricolore, let alone the eu flag, fluttering in the humid south american breeze but there they both were, watching over us and taunting our surprise as we clambered onshore. only the french, completely devoid of any kind of postcolonial guilt, still claim chunks of land thousands of miles from their apparent borders as some kind of outer arrondissement. after charming, or amusing, the border control guard with my comedic attempts at french we somehow wangled a free trip into town in the police cruiser, through deserted streets sporting shuttered restaurant windows: curse you sundays (actually sundays are a great day; curse you christianity). having hungrily checked in and finding all of our culinary ambitions thwarted we finally found ourselves at a hole in a wall guarded by a frowning chinese crone who deigned to toss some noodles in our direction to at least let us survive for the few hours until a few more places (hopefully) open for some sunday night steak frites (although the real test of frenchness will be tomorrow morning when the little boulangerie starts vending its wares).
and to think we haven't even done anything yet! tomorrow we head off to hopefully see the turtles coming ashore to lay eggs but the guianas look set to continue throwing up the occasional surprises and metaphorical bumps and scrapes to keep it interesting in the interim.