Monthly Archives: January 2007

More Airplanes (and Jaguars) than Cars

January 2, 2007
Day 461

A jaguar looking back our way.

Craig and I walked to the main road just before dawn to start hitchhiking. We wanted to get to the next town which was 150 K's down the road. We'd still only be halfway to Paramaribo, but we were told that it'd be easy to get a ride once we got to the next town.

It was another long day of waiting. At one point, I thought I heard a car coming. "Only if they've started building cars with jet engines," was Craig's response. Sure enough, it was just an airplane.

Just as we were getting ready to make lunch, Craig happened look down the road and saw something walking across it about 400 meters away. He though it was a jaguar, but I couldn't tell because it was so far away. The animal stopped at the side of the road, so I grabbed my telephoto lens and shot a few pictures. Sure enough, it had the tell-tale spots of a jaguar, the greatest predator of the Amazon, and one of the hardest animals to see.

As long as we had seen the jaguar and it was content to stand on the side of the road, we decided to try to get a bit closer. Slowly, we crept along the side of the road, staying slightly out of its view the entire way. It didn't move away until we were within about 150 meters of it and it slowly walked into the bushes. We kept walking all the way to where it was standing and waited in silence. After a few minutes of standing and waiting, it made a loud rustling noise in the bushes. I was ready with my camera to get a picture of it lunging at us, but Craig let out a huge scream and it ran away. My heart was pounding for the next half hour. I previously had smelled and heard a jaguar in Guyana, but this was my first time actually seeing one, and I still haven't even been eaten!

The rest of the day was filled with uneventful waiting. Once again, not one car passed us the entire day until a truck full of Chinese loggers came up to us looking for mangoes. We helped them get about fifty and they drove us to the turnoff to their camp, a little closer to our goal. However, no other cars came down the road, so we had to give up.

One of the Chinese loggers offered us a ride back to Apoera, and as much as we wanted to try for a ride one more day, we only had enough food left for a meager breakfast, and the fact that there was so little traffic on the road gave us no choice. We had gotten to within 135 K's of the next town, but now we'll have to go all the way back to Apoera, take a boat back to Nickerie, then a bus to Paramaribo, then another bus/hitch to the town, effectively completing a circle around the entire country.

I've Been to Paradise, But I've Never Been to Blanche Marie

January 1, 2007
Day 460

Craig with his peacock bass.

We started the new year with a long conversation with the resort's owner. He seemed to know everything about Suriname. The main topic of conversation was the civil war of the 1980's. It was started over a bank robbery, and eventually led to a series of coups. The situation became so unstable that the Netherlands cut off all relations with Suriname until democracy was returned in 1991.

Later in the morning, I walked around some more and eventually ran into Craig, who was fishing as usual. Just as I saw him, he was pulling in a large peacock bass, one of the treasures of Amazon fishing. The lady working at the resort gave us a big frying pan, some oil, pepper, and soup cubes, and we picked some limes from one of the trees. We fried it up and had a fantastic lunch, the best-tasting fish I've had in a long time. To finish off the holiday meal, we picked some fresh mangoes for dessert.

In the afternoon, we walked all the way back to the house near the main road and set up camp. We want to give hitchhiking to the next town another shot now that the holiday is over and there will likely be more traffic, so we'll get up early again tomorrow to try to make the most of the daylight hours.

Walking to Blanche Marie

December 31, 2006
Day 459

A pet macaw.

We got up early and started walking through the jungle toward the Blanche Marie resort at dawn. We heard the usual birds and monkeys along the way, but we also found a small poisonous snake in the track. The friendly owner greeted us when we got to the resort a few hours later, but we were a little disappointed to find out that we were the only guests.

I walked all around the resort in the afternoon, the highlight being the Blanche Marie waterfall. It wasn't as amazing an experience as Kaieteur Falls, but it still was a beautiful place to visit. Tonight I was exhausted, there was no TV for the New Year's countdown, and nobody to celebrate with, so I was in bed by 9:00. It was the first New Year's in memory where I wasn't even awake at midnight.

The photo album for this entry is here.

The Perils of Hitching

December 30, 2006
Day 458

When we got back to Apoera, we met up once again with Germaine. He was feeling a bit better after his malaria relapse. We bought enough food for a few days and ran into Yohan, the Flemish guy who was on our boat when we first came to Apoera. The four of us walked to the edge of town together, where Craig and I were hoping to hitch a ride to the turnoff to Blanche Marie Falls, about fifty K's up the road.

It got really hot around noon, and Yohan and Germaine got sick of waiting with us, so they walked back into town. There were no trees around to provide shade, no wind, and not a cloud in the sky, so the heat seemed impossible to escape from. I pulled out my tent and made a shelter from the sun using the fly by itself, but it was still too hot even to think.

The only road out of Apoera goes all the way to Paramaribo, the capitol, so Craig and I figured there'd be a fair amount of traffic. However, in seven hours of waiting, not one car passed us. We felt quite dejected and walked back into Apoera figuring we'd have to hang out until after New Year's when there'd likely be more traffic. Spending the holiday in the village as opposed to a resort sounded fine, but we'd already been in the area for a week and were ready to leave.

When we got back to Germaine's place, we ran into Yohan again. Craig borrowed his bike for a quick spin around town. Five minutes later, he was back shouting at me to pack my stuff up. He found us a ride to Blanche Marie! A few minutes later, a government truck picked us up and drove us to the turnoff point.

Just off the main road was a shack where a drunken security guard was staying. He had been cooped up in the shack all alone for two months, and his boss was finally coming to pick him up, so I guess he started celebrating a little early. He showed us a room where we could lock all of our excess gear, so we didn't have to resort to stashing it in the jungle as was our original plan. Shortly thereafter, his boss showed up and took him away, but not before letting off a ton of fireworks. We still had to walk seventeen K's to get to the resort, so we camped early underneath the veranda.

Another Day in Siparuta

December 29, 2006
Day 457

Bamboo Raft Experiment Day 4

We spent another full day in Siparuta. A lot of interesting people came and talked to us, including the captain (mayor) of the village. One guy invited us to go fishing with him in his boat in the afternoon, but he didn't show up. He returned later in the evening with a bagful of bananas and oranges as an apology.

Craig caught some more big piranhas for us, and we learned about a kid in the village who recently lost three fingers to the vicious fish. His mom was cleaning a fish, so there were guts in the water, and her kid was splashing around in the water, which attracted a huge piranha. Before anyone saw it coming, it had bitten off the boy's index, middle, and ring fingers. Today I made sure to be extra careful when handling the piranhas as a result.

Several people assured us today that two boats for sure would pass the village in the middle of the night. For insurance, I decided to sleep on the jetty so I could signal any incoming boat with my head lamp well before it passed us. About 2:00 AM, a boat came toward us. I flashed my light at it over and over again, but for some reason, it didn't stop. The boats don't normally stop at Siparuta, so I really had my work cut out for me. A few hours later, the second boat came, and thankfully it stopped.

The boat, known as the "Washabo Boat," was much shorter and narrower than the boat we originally road in on. It was so overloaded with people and cargo, there was barely enough room on it to sit, let alone lay down. On top of that, the overloaded boat constantly swayed violently back and forth. At one point, we went around a corner, the boat leaned to the right, and never corrected itself. The boat had to stop and everyone had to move as far to the left as possible for it to stand straight again. It was a bit scary for me, but we made it back in one piece shortly after dawn.

Large Guyanese Piranha

December 28, 2006
Day 456

Bamboo Raft Experiment Day 3

The Siparuta welcome sign.

We awoke in the small Guyanese village of Siparuta. We learned that there would be a boat passing in the middle of the night, so we spent the day chilling out. It's a picturesque place with lots of mangoes and cashews to munch on. Being in Guyana, there's no electricity in town, so it's a much quieter place than Apoera. Craig went fishing from the huge jetty and caught two large piranha, so we had no problem getting dinner despite being back in Guyana with only Suriname money.

The only thing we were told about the timing of tonight's boat was that it would pass about twelve hours after the afternoon's low tide, but as far as we knew, it could've passed us at any time of the night. As it turned out, no boat came all night, so we would have to wait another day to try to leave Siparuta.

The photo album for this entry is here.

Made it (Almost)!

December 27, 2006
Day 455

Bamboo Raft Experiment Day 2

The canal.

Craig and I got up at 4:00 and checked the river. Sure enough, the tide was just starting to go out. We quickly packed up and left. Once again, we slowly drifted down the river under the crystal-clear nighttime sky. We got to Wakay at about 9:00, just before low tide.

Wakay is a government-run outpost at the end of a canal that goes all the way back to Nickerie. This time of year, it rains enough that the huge rice fields get enough water on their own, so the machinery used to pump the water from the river into the canal wasn't running. Still, we had a few hours to kill, so the friendly employee showed us the site. We had to go back and forth between the living quarters on a tractor because of the vicious attack dogs that protected it. We got a little bit of sleep, cooked all of our food, and stuck around until 3:00, when we got on the tied-up raft and waited for the water to change direction.

The rest of the day consisted of a lot of slow drifting. We had two paddles with us, but it's much more difficult to paddle a raft than a canoe because of the greater surface area and the logs sticking out of the sides. In a bamboo raft, you're really at the mercy of the river.

From the advice given at Wakay, we thought we'd easily make it to Siparuta, but that didn't turn out to be the case. At dark, we knew we only had a couple hours left with the tide on our side, so we tried to find any sign of civilization. Eventually, we spotted three large sand banks, where ships load up with sand to be turned into concrete and sold. We made it there after what seemed like an eternity, but then we got caught in an eddy and started going backwards. As far as we knew, we could've been going backwards because the tide changed though, so we paddled out to the center of the river, and sure enough we started moving in the right direction again. However, we were so far out that we couldn't paddle back to the shore in time to make it to the sand banks, so we had no choice but to continue.

We finally saw the lights of Siparuta and started heading there. However, the fiasco in the eddy consumed so much precious time that the tide was already starting to come back in. It was very frustrating because we were within 300 meters of our goal but couldn't get there. We were just about to look for a spot on the shore to tie up and wait for six hours when a boat full of Dutch tourists passed us. The raft was starting to fall apart, so we thought it best to flag them down. They already knew all about us from the gossip on the river and gladly drove us the short distance to shore. We didn't quite make it as far as we wanted to, but it was still an interesting way to go down the river. Now we just had to figure out how to get back to Apoera.

The photo album for this entry is here.

Slow Raft Floating

December 26, 2006
Day 454

Bamboo Raft Experiment Day 1

The idea of building a raft being fresh in Craig's mind after the Kaieteur experiment, he thought we should try again on the Corentine River, this time using bamboo as the material. Germaine scrounged up some machetes from his relatives and the three of us spent the morning chopping down bamboo trees in preparation for building the raft. Bamboo is better for building a raft than most wood because not only is it light and hollow, but it's also compartmentalized, so if part of it cracks open and gets flooded, the rest will still remain airtight.

After a few hours, everyone in the village was watching us and calling us crazy. In the end, some of them actually helped us chop, and someone even found some Styrofoam to put underneath. We bought 200 meters of thin rope, cut it up, and tied the pieces together. Eventually, we had something resembling a raft.

We had to hurry because the Corentine empties into the ocean relatively close to Apoera, so its current is directed by the tides. We went back to Germaine's for some final packing (I only took waterproof stuff, and nothing of any value), and were ready to go just as the tide started going out at 3:00. We were told that it would take one tide to get to Wakay, one more to Siparuta, and two more to get to the next town, beyond which the river gets to wide and choppy to support a bamboo raft. Of course, we knew that none of the time estimates would be even remotely accurate because nobody doing the guessing had ever gone down the river on a bamboo raft, so we'll just have to play it by ear.

Germaine, Craig, and I jumped on the raft with our minimal gear, and this time it only sank an inch or two before stopping. A bunch of kids watched us leave, and soon the village returned to normal after the morning's excitement. The raft moved very slowly at first, but then it picked up speed. We passed Washabo and got to Hog Landing (the last village with road access) just before dark. Progress was slow, but at least it was progress. Unfortunately, Germaine was feeling too sick from his malaria to continue, so he went back to Apoera. Craig and I will have to get up early to catch the next tide down the river.

Christmas in Apoera

December 23-25, 2006
Day 451-453

When the sun came up on the way to Apoera, I was surprised to see that the drunks, along with everyone else on the boat, actually were being quiet. Then I found out the reason why: one of the drunken teens passed out on the roof of the boat and rolled off in the middle of the night, and the captain didn't find out until this morning. Nobody said much else, but his chances of surviving didn't seem good. The somber crowd slowly disembarked the boat after explaining what had happened to the police.

Germain walked us through the village to his uncle's house. We met the residents, who seemed happy to have us camp there. The three of us set up our tents under the house. After being there a few minutes, the news had spread that the guy who fell off our boat was found alive by another boat that came up the river this morning. He had somehow managed to hold onto a tree in his underpants and shout loud enough for the ship to hear him. Suddenly, the festivities were back on again.

Apoera is much more modern than the villages I have visited elsewhere in South America. It has cobblestoned roads, running water, electricity, and even a cell phone tower. Still, the modern conveniences often meant loud noise all day long. Several houses constantly blasted music so I could always hear at least two different songs at once. Even worse were the fireworks. Kids and adults alike competed all day and night in trying to blow up larges pieces of the Earth in the name of Christmas. Don't get me wrong, I actually like loud music and fireworks, just not 24 hours a day, everywhere I go. The noise only becomes an issue when I can't escape from it.

There wasn't much to do around town, so we spent most of our time meeting the locals, checking out the Christmas parties, and going to a soccer game in the neighboring village of Washabo. We also met a guy named Kurt who runs the local snake exporting business. He has anywhere from ten to one hundred snakes at his house at any given time, waiting to be driven to Paramaribo for sale. We stopped by and checked out his green tree snakes, among others. They were quite beautiful, but proved to be dangerous when one of them started constricting Kurt's arm.

The photo album for this entry is here.

A Crowded Boat Ride

December 22, 2006
Day 450

Today we took the boat up the Corentine to Apoera. With Christmas just around the corner, it was very crowded with teenagers going home. With not an inch to spare, it wasn't very enjoyable. It got worse when it started pouring rain as soon as we left. I covered myself with plastic, but still got pretty wet. The old leaky tarp hanging above our heads did almost no good.

During the trip, Craig and I met a local guy named Germaine, who was on his way home from his logging job. He was pretty weak after barely surviving a bad case of malaria, saved only by his youth (21 years) and his fitness (he can run 10 K's in 32 minutes), and he was still in good spirits. He told us we could camp under his uncle's house, so we should have a good spot to spend Christmas.

There wasn't even enough space on the boat to lay down, but I piled some stuff behind me and managed to clear enough room to lay on my side in the fetal position under my plastic in the rain. The real issue was that there were several kids drinking and being rowdy next to me most of the night. Talking to them only seemed to make them louder and inspired them to shoot off more fireworks, so I just pretended I was in a happy place and finally got a little shuteye.