We are failures

A three-hour drive from Kourou, where the road ends, sits the beachside Awala Yalimopo nature reserve.  The town itself isn’t much to look at: a restaurant that never opened, a local museum, and unimpressive surf the color of olives sitting out in the sun too long.  Yet, every April to June, giant leatherback turtles that can grow up to 600kg, come here to lay their eggs.   From June to September, the eggs hatch and the newborns struggle out to sea.  When we arrived, we saw plenty of rubbery, white shells resembling broken ping pong balls scattered all over the beach and we planned to spend the whole afternoon watching and waiting to catch a glimpse of the cute little buggers.  And wait we did.  Six hours later the sun had set and mosquitoes were making Tia’s neck look like a dartboard so we decided to give up and head back to our car.

We did, however, make another little friend on the beach.  A puppy, apparently the offspring of one of the numerous strays we passed, came crawling out of the brush toward us, tripped, and nearly collapsed onto the sand.  His eyes were impossibly forlorn and he couldn’t even muster the energy to approach us in search of food.  On the one hand, we wondered what to do, where to take him, whether we should worry about scabies (Claudia!), and how to explain him to anyone in a language where we could barely order food.  On the other hand, here was a puppy who was clearly weak and clearly didn’t have anyone looking after him.  We were torn.  We fed him cashews and water, wandered up and down the beach, and eventually came up with a plan to take him to the auberge we were staying at where the owner (a.k.a. Tarzan) was known for taking care of abused, exotic animals.  By the time we went to fetch him, though, it was dark and there was no sign of him anywhere.  We searched around the nearby area but he had disappeared completely.

We slept restlessly that night and both admitted to thinking of him in silence for the first hour after we awoke.  We kicked ourselves for missing our chance to help and now Bernard (Tia had named him sometime during the course of the day) was gone with little chance of surviving on his own.  We resolved to drive the bumpy two hours back to Awala Yalimopo.  We picked up dog food and a box to hold him in on our way there, confident we would find him now that it was day again.

We wish we could tell you that we had, that Bernard is living happily among the other animals at Tarzan’s auberge…  An entire afternoon of combing up and down the beach, Tia calling his name plaintively while I whistled, yielded no sign of him.  In a strange twist of fate, our exhaustive search for Bernard actually led us to two baby turtles struggling to free themselves from their sandy nests.  They both had a long way to go – one of them was near dead – and we were able to put them into the ocean and watch them swim away. 

Seeing baby turtles hatch in the wild has been on our wish list for quite some time, but seeing them without finding Bernard made for a bittersweet day.

Kourou, we have a problem

Juan might have you believe he was “cool” back in the day, but he probably hasn’t told you that he also played Dungeons & Dragons and Star Wars role-playing games until high school.  So, take it from me, Juan fit right in at the Kourou space center.  He posed like a five-year old opening presents in front of the countdown clock, understood references to Star Trek, even in French, and laughed along with everyone else when our guide alluded to the French cartoon, Asterix.   The entire 3 ½ hour tour was conducted in French and even Juan’s enthusiasm couldn’t compensate for the fact that we understood next to nothing.  Two-thirds of the world’s commercial satellites are launched from Kourou, so we sort of expected a futuristic metropolis made of some indefinable, faintly luminescent material put together into structures that defied the laws of physics.  Instead, we were met by corrugated metal, vinyl, and concrete blocks with mustard yellow and fire engine red trim that looked like they were built in the Soviet Union in the early 80s.  We probably should have skipped the tour and just settled for visiting the space museum…

Lucky for us, Kourou is also the jumping off point for visits to Ile du Salut, a group of three islands where prisoners were sent from the French mainland from 1852 to 1947.  We took a catamaran to and from the island, stayed in old guard’s quarters, visited the children’s cemetery (where do they bury the adults??), and ate prison food (okay, it was a real restaurant but the food tasted a bit like it would have been suitable for prisoners).  There isn’t much swimming – the shark-infested waters are partly what made it such an attractive setting for a prison – so we got a bit bored in the two days we were there.  Still, ironic that a site of such suffering is now a place that people wish to escape to.

Mais si, your rooster is tres handsome

After six weeks in Brazil, we finally got another stamp in our passports: French Guiana.  We flew into Cayenne on a Saturday and pretty much everything was closed.  Somehow it is our luck to always land in former French colonies on holidays when nothing is open (ask us sometime about Christmas at McDonalds in New Caledonia).  We meandered listlessly until we found an open Asian grocery (no surprise there) and survived on cheese and crackers until some intrepid Guyanese opened their restaurants for dinner.

The next day we went to the Surinamese embassy to sort out visas and wandered around the city.  Seeing little more than a small metal rooster on an obelisk we wisely decided to hit the road and explore the rest of the country.  After 96 hours on buses in Brazil, it was incredibly exciting to learn that renting a car was a necessity in French Guiana.   We drove southwest in our trusty Panda to the Laotian village, Cacao (1986 Panda Fiats are not equipped to handle Juan’s driving on potholed, jungle roads, by the way).  Right off the main road, our lodge, Quimbe Koe, offered hammock spaces for €12 a pop and served a delicious meal of spring rolls and Asian spiced chicken with rice.  Yum!

We slept in open air hammocks cocooned with mosquito nets and actually found it more pleasant than most of the indoor beds where we ended up bitten much more.  The next morning, we ventured into the French Amazon for a 3-hour hike (there was no way the entire 18km walk was happening with 50 lb. backpacks).  The rainforest was full of brilliant, fist-sized, blue butterflies, neon-colored geckos and enormous bee/horsefly monstrosities that could bite through clothes.  Sadly, we also came across a butterfly hunter seeking once-living trinkets to sell to tourists.  Camera and first-world indignance in hand, we briefly considered turning him into the authorities before we decided it probably isn’t illegal (oh, and he had a machete).