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...

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.

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.