On Saturday we went to a full moon party in someone's garden in Remire Montjoly, a town in the Cayenne area. The garden backed onto the beach, the moon was bright and everybody danced for hours to zouk, reggae and Michael Jackson, so much that the floor shook.
On Sunday, myself and most of the other Cayenne area language assistants went to the beach in Montjoly to play football and swim, and then had a meal at the house of Kayla and Tom who live right by the sea there.
On Tuesday, I went on a road trip to St Laurent with Kayla, and some people she'd met at the market a few days earlier- Greg, who is Guianese and his two friends who were visiting. Because of the density of the forest, most of Guyane's cities are along the coast, surrounded by tropical savannah and enormous rivers. There's one big long road that goes through a lot of the towns and that stretches from St. Laurent du Maroni to the west, at the boarder with Surinam, to St Georges on the Oyapock river; the boarder with Brazil in the east.
Our first stop was Sinnamary, which seemed like a quiet, calm town. On the edge of the river, a few fishermen were checking their nets in their boats and trees along the river bank had weird birds nests hanging like straw bags from the branches.
Next was Irracoubo, where a checkpoint meant having our passports passed to a gendarme, who gave them back without really looking. We stopped for a meal in one of the only restaurants in this town famous for its beautiful church (which we didn't look at). Our meal was delicious creole food- for a car full of veggies, that meant rice, beans and various salad things dressed in horseraddish. I drunk cherry juice- but these were tropical cherries, nothing like you find in the UK.
We detoured from the main road to St Laurent, following the road along the coast to Mana- a small town that apparently grows a lot of rice- you could see the empty paddies from the road.
Mana the in mid afternoon heat- beautiful, quiet and mostly closed. We saw flowers that were more pink than you could possible imagine, and had a wander through streets of creole style painted wooden buildings. Then we drove to Awala Yalimopo- Amerindian community at the mouth of the huge Maroni river. We got out at the Plage des Hattes- a famous breading site for leatherback turtles. From the beach you could see a line of white waves where the currents of the Atlantic ocean and the Maroni river meet.
We drove the potholed road on to St Laurent. Slash and burn agricultural practices and the heat of the dry season meant scorched patches of grasslands - the fires carry on until they reach the edge of the green forest, which they can't burn into. Here there was produce for sale in little shelters along the sides of the road, people living in tiny wooden houses, children swinging in hammocks in carbets.
Finally we arrived in St Laurent du Maroni in the late afternoon, and wandered round the old transport prison. When Guyane was still a colonial destination for prisoners of metropolitan France, many would arrive here. Lots of the buildings are made from brick and were built by prisoners. We left the town to go look at Guyane's only remaining rum distillery, (one of the people we were with works in his family owned distillery in Martinique) and then returned to the banks of the Maroni to eat a meal at the Charbonniere, a lively part of town with a dodgy reputation. All along the water edge hunderds of pirogues come and go, ferrying people and goods across the Maroni to Albina in Surinam.
I travelled back to Cayenne with Bianca, another assistant who is from Arizona. Both of us were exhausted - the people giving us our ride to the capital were driving a plush 4x4 and the journey that had taken the whole day to get there took only a two and a half hours on the way back, most of which I was asleep for.
Very soon I will write about the rest of my week which has been eventful enough that it needs to be split up.
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