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.
