January 17, 2007
Day 476
After breakfast I walked around Maripasoula to try to find the visitor's center only to find out that it didn't exist. I learned that most tourists who come here go to a lodge about thirty minutes up the river. I was able to find the owner of that lodge, but he told me that it was currently full of military doing their training so tourists couldn't visit it. The entire tourism industry here is based on that lodge, so there was nothing more for us to do but wait until tomorrow when we could get a boat back to Saint Laurant. We hung out in the gazebo in the pouring rain all afternoon and met some interesting locals who all seemed to be involved in some semi-legal mining operation.
This trip appears to have been a mistake but I'm actually surprised it hasn't happened yet in the Guyanas. So few tourists come here, and there is so little information about these countries, you just have to go somewhere and hope it works out for the best. And until now, it has.
