The ferry crawled up the river as we crossed from Guyana to Suriname. It took over 30 minutes to make it 5km across and upstream to South Drain. Obviously the tide was on its way out!
We were off the ferry quickly and near the front of the (much shorter, but slower) non-Caribbean Community and/or over 60 year old queue. But Sarah took a while to get through as (like at the embassy in Georgetown) the border staff were unaware that Sarah needed a visa (which she had) instead of the more common tourist card (which she didn't). It didn't help that the staff selling the tourist cards DID know that she didn't need one and irritably sent her back to the immigration officers with no further explanation.
It was eventually sorted out and it was moot anyway, as the one minibus headed to the town of Nieuw Nickerie 35km north waited until every last potential passenger had found their way through immigration anyway
The roads in Suriname were narrow but paved and generally smooth, so it didn't take long to get to town. Our driver took us at our word when we said we wanted to go to a cheap hotel. And the owner took us at our word when we said we wanted a cheap room, and gave us a basic room for 75 Suriname dollars (about NZD15) per night. It had a fan, it had a bed it had a bathroom. It didn't have a shower head. And it had only the most pitiful remains of a previously smashed sink. But given that it cost less than half what our cheapest hotel room in Guyana had and was near the centre of town, who was complaining?
Niuew Nickerie a town of perhaps 15,000, is often described as "sleepy." I think this may be a bit of an understatement. At 13:00 on a Tuesday afternoon there was virtually no one on the streets, and perhaps one business in ten was open. And even at that there weren't many particularly exciting looking businesses, except for the banks, which felt much too numerous for a city this size.
Eventually after a lazy siesta that lasted until almost 17:00 we confirmed that this was what everyone else in town was doing as well.
Things had perked up a bit, but our search for a place to eat left us a bit let down when the best we could manage was well done, if slightly boring fried rice and noodle soup.
The next day was better, as we were there early enough to visit the market, which was fun, and have coffee and yummy chicken roti for breakfast.
We spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon trying and failing to find a way out to Bigi Pan, a freshwater lagoon that is a prime gathering place for scarlet ibis and flamingos.
We still finished our time in Nieuw Nickerie pretty satisfactorily though, sitting on the picnic tables on the pretty main street as the sun set, having a few 1L bottles (called Djogos by the Surinamese) of Parbo beer. Parbo is pretty tasty, and I'd venture to say it's the most flavoursome South American adjunct lager I've yet had.
Our fun, sociable evening was capped off with a family coming to share our picnic table while Sarah made Gouda sandwiches and I picked up three each of mini-BBQ sausages and chicken satay skewers from one of the many BBQ carts/trucks/stalls that got busy as the day ended.
The following morning we added to our list of Surinamese cuisines with a fun breakfast at the market, which was an Indonesian/African mash up of chicken curry (complete with sweet-salty anchovies and sambal) on boiled seasoned cassava.
All these cuisines are a result of Suriname's unique ethnic mix, which includes Amerindians, Africans, Indonesians, (mostly northern) east Indians, Chinese, Dutch and a smattering of natives of other Caribbean nations. The religious life of the country is equally diverse, and everyone seems to largely get along pretty well. Indeed, Parbo is famous for its side by side Synagogue and Mosque.
As a Canadian and Torontonian it's interesting to see a functioning multicultural society where the different peoples have been living together for over a century. With a few exceptions there's relatively little mixing between the groups, but most people have a live and let live attitude and/or just can't be bothered going to the trouble of disagreeing with their neighbours.
After our multicultural breakfast we headed to Suriname's capital, Paramaribo, in a shared taxi. We were dropped off right near our AirBnB and immediately taken in hand by our host Ravin, who drove us around the neighbourhood for a tour right after our arrival.
Our room was beautiful. Small, but with a comfy bed, air conditioning, satellite TV (with a bunch of Caribbean channels that provided a fun blend of overseas entertainment and local colour), an attached bathroom and even a small kitchen with a sink, hotplate and fridge.
We actually spent five nights there, doing a mix of sightseeing in the city, lazing around in the AC room and a hammock we put up in the back garden and prepping plus cooking fairly elaborate (under the circumstances) meals.
Parbo (as it's commonly called) is smaller than Georgetown but feels a bit more like a city, as it has a bit more of a centre and a focus that G'town which, outside of the immediate environs of Stabroek market seemed to just sort of sprawl. It also had (just) a few more obvious tourist attractions than Guyana's capital.
There was the Catholic cathedral, like G'Town's St. George's, built qalmost entirely of wood but in a different style and mostly unpainted. Alongside the fact that it was a large Catholic church in a Dutch colony, the differences between it and St. George's seemed entirely consistent with the differences in the cities that housed them.
And comprising and surrounding most of the core of Parbo was almost all wooden colonial architecture. It was pretty stuff, but in many cases had gone beyond "decaying prettily" to just "decaying." Though there were individual streets (mostly filled with professional, government or NGO offices) that were really lovely.
Much of the rest of the city was a bit rough looking, but it had a lovely life to it. The main street was packed with small independent, mostly Chinese run jewelry stores. Down near the riverfront was the main market. One section was packed with east Indian and Indonesian (or Javanese as they're called in Suriname) fruit and vegetable sellers. In the next hall over, Maroon (the descendants of escaped African slaves) and the occasional Amerindian salespeople sold herbs, spices, carved calabashes, cassava flour and other goods from the interior of the country. A lot of the fruit and veggies were (as at Stabroek) a bit pricey, but some of the things in season (pomelos, eggplant, long beans and galangal) were great deals.
Many of these featured in the two meals we prepared for ourselves, Ravin and other guests he had at his home while we stayed. On our second night we made quesadillas, tam som (Thai green mango salad, prepared with some of the huge mangos off the tree in Ravin's back yard), and a Chinese bitter melon stir-fry. On our final night we cooked for six and made more tam som (take advantage of the readily available fresh ingredients!)) plus an eggplant mussaman curry. On the first night we also pulled out a bottle of rum we'd brought from Guyana. All Guyanese rum is barrel aged (or it can't be sold as rum) and even the cheapest (5 year old bottles for about NZD8) is quite good. Sweet, molasses-y with scents of vanilla and smoke. Interestingly, Suriname makes rum too (a bit more expensive and not as good as the Guyanese stuff) but doesn't actually have a domestic sugarcane industry, so the raw materials have to be imported.
We also ate plenty of the fabulous roti from the shop just down the road that Ravin had recommended. Whether with spiced potato and long beans or with chicken it was great!)
On one day we took the city bus to the distant suburb of Leonsberg, hoping to take a boat across to the town/former Dutch Fort at Nieuw Amsterdam. Unfortunately there wasn't another soul there looking to go across, so we would e had to charter an entire 19 seat boat ourselves. Instead we sat at a riverside warung (Indonesian cafe/food stall) and had a lunch of mee goreng with BBQ chicken. Then back in town we Limed (a Caribbean English word meaning relaxed, chilled out, hung around) with the slowly building crowd at the drinks stalls alongside the Suriname River near the market.
Another day, early on Sunday morning, Ravin drove us into the central city (apparently buses are very infrequent on Sundays). Our first stop was the Chinese market where the stalls sold bok choy, Chinese cabbage, roasted duck and even Canadian Sausage. And vendors prepared you tiao (long thin fried dough sticks), bao ze (steamed buns), dim sum and other Chinese breakfast treats. Given my almost non-existent Dutch language skills, I ordered breakfast at one of the stalls in Mandarin, which the young lady frying the spring onion pancakes and her father next door found quite a/bemusing.
After the market we went to the square in front of the presidential palace in search of some bird racing. Not what it sounds like but at least equally unusual, Guyanese bird racing involves groups of men bringing their prized pet songbirds (usually finches) together and pitting them against one another to see which utters a predetermined number of chirps first. It's a big deal, with many bets placed on the competition and prize birds selling for up to USD2500. It's due to this that you would commonly see men walking the streets (or taking buses or riding motorcycles) in Guyana or Suriname with a bird cage hanging from their hand.
Sarah first learned of the practice by reading an article about birds being smuggled in to the US so the Guyanese community there could continue the practice in New York!
Unfortunately this was one of the very few cloudy days we experienced in Suriname, and apparently the birds need the sun to sing at their best, so there were only a half dozen bird owners scattered around the square looking for challengers and we didn't see any actual races.
Of course the vast majority of Suriname's land (and most of what tourists come for) is in the sparsely populated, jungle-covered interior, away from the 100km or so wide coastal plain. And it would be a shame to leave without seeing at least a bit of it.
Fortunately Ravin is lover of the jungle as well, and he takes guests out on short trips, partly as a service to them but mostly because it gives him an excuse to get out there himself.
On Tuesday afternoon we got in his car and drove past the airport to the end of the paved road (interestingly, the airport has been in its present location for over 60 years. It was originally constructed as a military airfield during WW2 to supply and defend Suriname's bauxite production, which was the allies' primary source of aluminium ore).
After a few km of dusty, rusty gravel road we turned again, this time to a narrow track through dense jungle vegetation. Ten minutes later we'd arrived.
The camp was one of the more rustic examples of the sort of places that are popular holiday spots for the Surinamese. As there aren't really any nice beaches on their Caribbean coast, they commonly go on holiday to camps/holiday parks in the jungle near rivers or creeks with good swimming spots. But as school holidays had ended a couple of weeks previously and it was a the middle of the week we had it all to ourselves.
We went for lengthy swims in the cola coloured creek. I walked up and down it a few hundred metres in either direction to see more of the jungle. It was never more than about chest deep, and its temperature was perfectly refreshing.
We didn't see tons in the way of wildlife, but there were some large (1-1.2m long) lizards, large (8-10cm long) blue-black wasps (relatives of the tarantula hawk apparently!), and a variety of hummingbirds.
It wasn't 100% idyllic, as the owner of the camp was doing some selective logging on his land deeper in the forest. And we still weren't that far from the airport. Plus we were also not that far from a Suriname Army firing range. So at various times we had the sounds of a chainsaw/jet engines/artillery to contend with, but despite all that it was still pretty pleasant most of the time sitting (and later sleeping) in our hammocks beneath the thatched roof of our shelter.
Ravin made us a delicious fish curry for dinner over a wood fire.
Even moreso than in the city, being in the jungle on the equator means that come sunset at 18:00 or so, it's time for bed.
We all climbed in to our hammocks, with me having to re-sling mine a bit later as I'd underestimated the mosquito menace (there were very few back in Parbo) and needed to put up my mosquito net (Sarah, perennial primary mosquito victim had sensibly set hers up straight away).
We spent some more hammock and swimming time the following morning, but eventually Ravin had to return to the city to welcome other guests.
Amongst our fellow guests on the final night were Amun (SP?) and Sasha (also SP?), a Canadian couple and Julien, a young Frenchman. It's not often I meet people whose travel stories really amaze me, but I was kind of jealous of Juliens's plans to yacht-hitch from Suriname to Cuba. And Amun's travel experiences, particularly in Africa often left me wide-eyed, shaking my head and/or laughing (e.g. avoiding a bribe demanded at a West African border for having a right-hand drive vehicle by pulling out a toolkit and proceeding to "swap it to the other side," a process which would take longer than the border officer's shift.) The Guyanas do have something of a tourism industry (especially in Suriname and French Guiana, which have regular direct flights from the Netherlands and France respectively) but independent travel in the region is still very much the domain of fairly adventurous, hardy souls.
Our hardiness was put to a minor test the next morning when Sasha, Amun, Sarah and I all woke at 04:00 for our onward journeys. They were headed to Guyana by share taxi. We were going into the city (driven there by Ravin!) to get the bus to Albina and the French Guiana border. Not that the bus left that early. Just that we wanted to buy tickets for the first government bus of the day. The government buses in Suriname are heavily subsidised. The 2.5hr, 200km journey to Albina cost SRD8.50, or about NZD1.70, compared to SRD40 for a private bus. But tickets aren't sold until a few hours before departure and demand is high. So we got to watch sunrise and the city coming to life, shops opening, commuters eating breakfast, traffic appearing, from our seats in the tiny but busy terminal.
Rural Suriname to the east of Parbo was a contrast to the large, corporate rice plantations near the Guyanese border and the tidy, prosperous villages near the city. There was almost nothing there. The well paved road pushed through jungle with very occasional towns a ways off the road interrupting it.
Albina was a rough but friendly enough place. Trucks stood in the middle of the few major streets being unloaded by forklifts, goods destined for French Guiana. Almost immediately on disembarking canoe drivers were offering us rides across the river. We decided to walk down the few hundred metres to the border post and find a boat after we'd dealt with those formalities.
The one other foreigner (and the only other one doing border formalities... most locals just come and go between the border towns at will) was an Argentinian Hare Krishna missionary. The boatman wanted to charge us each SRD30 for the trip (we'd been told on the bus it should be 15) but Sarah and I settled on 40 in notes plus a big handful of coins which were all the Surinamese money we had left (except for a few souvenirs: the oddities of a coin labelled 250 cents and a square, round edged, copper five cent piece).
Five breezy and relaxing minutes on the 25 foot motorized canoe and we were across the Marowijne river and at the border post on the east bank. Complete with Tricouleur flying above and gendarmes checking our passports and welcoming us to France. You got the impression that this place was going to be a bit different.
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