bicrom abroad

one of the gallic foibles that the french have imported to this little corner of the world is a predilection for driving on what is clearly the wrong side of the road, so it was with some trepidation that we went to pick up our little rental car on monday morning. i have driven, almost exclusively successfully, in the states before, but had tackled its long straight roads in an automatic. our only option this time around was a manual, confusing enough when some haphazard french production line worker had, distracted by a baguette no doubt, placed the steering wheel on the wrong side of the car but even trickier given that both of our cars in cayman being automatics has made clutches and gearsticks start to feel a little alien. still, after a few hairy first gear moments on the generally well maintained but often perilously narrow roads of st laurent the wife, in an archimedean moment of revelation, came up with the invaluable aphorism "tighty righty loopy lefty" which we both recited religiously on approaching any turning. protected by this mantra we fended off the temptation to turn into oncoming traffic, grabbed some passable pains aux chocolates from the local boulangerie and headed off into the wilds in claude (the clio).
the road to mana continued to highlight the extravagant coalition of contradictions that make up french guiana. the roads are generally well maintained, as you would expect french roads to be. the tarmac fell away however not to sedate european hedgerows but intense red clay, flanked by brooding jungle through which wandered sleepy children who looked like they had just arrived from senegal or cote d'ivoire. one of the stranger things about this place is the apparent lack of genetic mingling. whilst africans and laotians happily crack beers together outside the local supermarche there are virtually no mixed race people or children that we have seen (albeit we have not made it out to cayenne, which may be a little more multicultural). people are very happy to live side by side, but the intercultural relationships do not seem to extend beyond that.
we were trekking out to a tiny hamlet called awala yalimapo in the hope of seeing the giant leatherback turtles come on shore to lay their eggs. these fabulous creatures are sadly endangered but plage des hattes, a stunning beach spoiled only by the murky brown water lapping the sand, is the best place in the world to see them come ashore. annoyingly, as we pulled up to the beach at around midday it became apparent that the day was going to be a blazer, the sun shooing away the clouds as it scorched down on us below. usually a good thing but terrible for turtle watching, as they only dare to leave their watery sanctuary when it is cool (indeed usually only by cover of darkness). after a few hours napping in claude we headed down to the beach and waited. and waited. and then waited some more. all around the shore was evidence of disturbed sand hiding hundreds of turtle eggs, but noone seemed to be keen to come up on a monday.
the truth was, and whilst neither of us said it aloud we both knew it to be true, seeing any turtle, let alone a giant leatherback, was by no means guaranteed: if anything, given that this was at the tail end of the season and we were restricted to the hours in which our eyes could see, a sighting was positively unlikely. the turtles make no concessions to the time and money spent by us getting here (inconsiderate) and their scarcity meant that it would take a massive slice of luck, even on this beach, to see one.
as we were both maintaining our game faces and getting increasingly internally gloomier, a hundred metres or so down the beach i saw a massive black mass spat out of the water, suddenly present on the sand. we scurried over and there she was; lauren the leatherback. speckled pink head, tired looking eyes, suitably leathery back and simply huge. even vicki wasn't interested in the camera, so stunning was this incredible leviathan. we watched her struggle painfully up the shore, her flippers so elegant in the water floundering helplessly on dry land, and start to dig a pit in which to lay. watching her was like a window back in time; her ancestors, lauren personally maybe, could have been coming to this beach for hundreds of years, drawn by instinct unaltered by the human world. there is something almost unevolved about these creatures (i suppose their cousins which evolved dragged themselves out of the water, decided they quite liked it and grew some feet): you could imagine them laying eggs on this beach keeping a weather eye out for dinosaurs.
after a while it got too dark to see and we left lauren to it. we got up at sunrise and saw the tracks of a few more leatherbacks that had come ashore under cover of darkness, and even saw a tiny little baby turtle shuffling centimetre by centimetre across the sand into the ocean (we formed it a guard of honour to protect it from prying dogs and circling birds). on returning to the beach later that evening we waited in hopeless anticipation but nothing else came up. which in a bizarre way only made our encounter the previous night more special, the realisation that these turtles really do come ashore rarely, particularly with any remnants of sun in the sky, and that to have witnessed one so intimately was a unique and fortunate experience.
back then to surinam before heading off to guyana. this is a holiday which in many ways is hard work rather than pure enjoyment: seeing lauren however has already made it all worthwhile.