January 29-31, 2007
Day 488-490
This morning I said goodbye to Alina, who hosted me in Kourou. She was a great host who was very helpful in showing me around the area and setting me up with a tour of the rocket facility. Her boyfriend Greg and his friend (an Al Roker lookalike) drove us into Cayenne on their way to work.
Craig and I spent the morning in Cayenne. We walked up to the fort at the top of the city, but we had to scale a barbed wire fence to get there. Next, we went to the main museum in town. Everything was in French, but most of it just had old stuffed animals anyway, so language wasn't important. Later, we checked out the 500 gift shops and crackheads in the center of town. At one point, we saw a guy openly smoking crack right in front of the police department. The Lonely Planet guidebook says that Cayenne is one of the most pleasant capitol cities in all of South America, but it sure didn't seem that way. Despite the small population of maybe 50,000 people, it had way too many drug addicts for my taste.
In the afternoon, Philip and Elise, who we met on St. Joseph's Island, picked us up and drove us back to their pad. There, we met up once again Jason and Meghan and their other roommates Sandrine and Yannick. They had a nice pad with a veranda to camp under, a swimming pool, and a garden, which Craig immediately took it upon himself to clean thoroughly. We stayed at the house a few days and had lots of fun times. Everyone living there is young and has high ambitions for traveling around South America and the rest of the world. Staying with Alina and her friends, then moving on to the Americans' house was a great way to end my epic journey through the Guianas.
