bicrom abroad

after another encounter with the friendliest border guards in the world at the french guaianese border, giving me another lift into town in their cruiser so that i could pick up the surinamese tourist card required to reenter the country, we set off across the sludgy marowijne river on wednesday morning en route to paramaribo. the three hour minivan journey was not without event, most notably discovering that our co-passenger in the front seat had the very seventeenth century ailment of syphillis and my darling wife having a slight incident in a roadside toilet (that incident being getting locked in it for ten minutes), but we still arrived in parbo in relatively good nick.
parbo is not, if being perfectly honest, one of the world's great capital cities. it is tiny for starters, and does not pack much into its streets. still we spent an enjoyable afternoon mooching around in the sunshine looking at the wooden buildings, some pristinely whitewashed others in varying states of neglect, most of which look like they have been shipped in from the set of a western: we were half expecting to bump into some busty wenches loitering for business from passing cowboys. still, this was very much the sleepy rather than the wild west, and we are flying to georgetown tomorrow (having chickened out of the all day bus ride) to cross the final guyana off our list: let's see how the brits stand up as colonialists compared to the french and the dutch...