Here I am in Paramaribo, the capital of Suriname with
a cool Spanish girl from Madrid by the name of Patricia.
Suriname is small country inhabited by less than 500,000 people but with huge
gold and bauxite reserves.
On the right are pictures of the Alcoa's operations in Suriname. Alcoa is the world's largest
aluminium producer. FYI,
Bauxite is used primarily to make aluminium.
You should see the size of Alcoa's operation, I mean not a picture like on the left but in real life. It's very intimidating. Especially when you put it in it's geographic
context: hundreds of miles of nothingness, enough to make Samuel Beckett sigh.
One comes accross maybe one or two bushnegroe tribes and then suddenly these
huge machines, reservoirs and noises! Alcoa signed a concession with the state
of Suriname shortly after the country gained independence, obtaining the right to mine an
area of several thousand square kilometres in the event of a major discovery of
bauxite. The company recently discovered bauxite in the middle of the country's
largest "natural reserve park" and the State of Suriname is finding itself on
its knees in front of a mining company, pleading for the right to maintain and
protect its own natural heritage! It's as if the world's been turned upside
down.
Paramaribo is a really cool city. It's got a little Caribbean feel
with a strong Dutch influence.
It's clean, orderly, yet warm and friendly. It's
safe and small, so you can walk around at night yet diverse enough for you not
to feel completely isolated.
Rumour has it that it is in much better state
than Georgetown (capital of Guyana, British Guyana) yet less developed then
Cayenne (which is a DOM a part entiere).
This weekend Patricia and I
rented a 4x4 and took off into the hinterland. Of the 500,000 inhabitants of
Suriname, 95% live near the coast, making Suriname one of the least densely
populated countries in the world (with this in mind it is not surprising that of
all countries, it was colonised by the Dutch).We stayed in a camp right in the middle of the natural
(bauxite) reserve I was telling you about. We spent two nights sleeping in
hammocks.
That was cool, to say the least; since Suriname
is a tropical country, we brought neither sweaters nor blankets. At night we
froze our arses off since the camp was located on a small mountain. What's more,
being right next to a gigantic lake, we needed smart weapons to fight the
armies of mosquitoes and other unidentified flying insects.
Now when I'm talking about a natural reserve, Im talking about
hard-core-long-trunk-Jungle land. OK it's not Amazonia per se, but still Deep
Rainforest with huge (I mean HUGE) spiders (some, the famous bird-spiders, look
like tarantula's but are actually BIGGER), HUMONGOUS snakes, big, dangerous red
ants like the ones you see in documentaries (
), carrying big green leaves in a file, thereby cutting the
path in a dense green line. We also saw some extremely old trees with long
and thin vines just like in "GreyStoke", and incredible birds of all kinds,
parrots who speak Spanish, wood-peckers (like the Walt Disney character
woody-wood pecker, making rather irritating noises) and above all, howling
monkeys. These are monkeys which have been named after their nasty tendency to
howl deep "Ohms" in the mornings and in the evenings. When you hear them, you
think "Oh my God", and it's one of two things:
-1- a group of Buddhist
monks with a portable power generator, a microphone and a 120 watt amplifier
saying "Ohm" in unison
-2- a bunch of howling monkeys
But much to my
surprise, these monkeys were not large gorillas with developed thoraxes, but
rather small red-haired tree-dwelling baboons.
We went on a long walk in the jungle, rested a bit
at a waterfall, listening to the symphonic sounds of the forest. It was truly
amazing. I only regret I didn't have a microphone
to record it on a minidisk player, upload it on the web and
later remix it with a rapid drum sequence, and then dub it "jungle music"
(hahaha)
All the tourists in Suriname (or 90%) are Dutch, and since it's
a nature sort of place they tend to be female (don't ask) and often avoiding
life in Holland by conducting some sort of "research" or statistical survey or
something so you never know what you can find in the forest.
The next
day, after a hot debate on Yugoslavian geopolitics with the hot cook at the camp
our travels took us to "the hunt for the Amerindian tribe". For those who, like
me, did not know anything about Amerindians, the Indians in the Guyanas come
chiefly (ha-ha) from two tribes: Arawak and Carib. We were told that an Arawak
tribe lived somewhere west of the river, in a village called "powaka" so we set
out in search of the Amerindians.
Instead we arrived in some dusty
village inhabited by "bushnegroes". A bushnegroe (in case -like me- you didn't
know) is a descendent of a first generation slave who had both the courage and
the good fortune to escape alive from a Dutch plantation owner in the 17th
century. In those times, the only way for a black man to be free was to run
towards the jungle, so these guys ran into the jungle and continued living
exactly the way they were before being captured. 
This is a good example of what makes Suriname such an interesting place,
since the bushnegroes have maintained their African culture virtually intact, which is
definitely not the case of most Africans today. Anyway I ask a bushnegroe the
way to the Amerindian village and (I am not making this up) he replies "take the
dirt road on the left 32 electricity posts down the road". So we counted thirty
two electricity posts and sure enough, there was a small dirt road. We took it
and it slowly got less and less wide, more and more rough, and before long we
were driving in the jungle. At this point my colleague Patricia is telling me to
turn around, but in my excitement (and I guess overwhelming stupidity) I feel
that we were on the verge of reaching the Indian tribe, I could smell human
presence, and they were probably just 1km more into the bush. Now remember that
I'm driving a 4x4 pick up truck, a little like "Big Foot", that huge blue
American truck with huge wheels which crushes 256 cars a minute, somewhat different from a white polo. The actual dirt
road ended probably a mile or two ago, and I'm running over bushes, small trees,
making my own way through the dense bush, creating a new road network, feeling more North than South american. I'm
expecting to stumble at any moment on a clan of stone age Amerindians smoking ayacuhsa when suddenly the car gets stuck in the mud. We
seriously did not want to find ourselves stranded in the middle of the bush on a
Sunday afternoon...
In the end we decide to turn
around and go back to Paramaribo. Then only miles down the main road we see a
sign "Powaka" and much to our disappointment, the so-called Ameridian tribe resembles
more a Navajo gang of Tupac-listening teenagers drinking Miller
in pick-up trucks larger than mine, rather than "Little wolf running over the sun
smoking weird plants and dancing like a shaman".
Above is a picture of Powaka, a
cultural mecca of the Amerindian civilisation
So we left. Then it was the occasion
for me to prove to Patricia that -on top of my formidable sense of direction- I
was gifted in the art of driving: to cross a river we had to put our car on a
barge and no, I did not drive the pick up truck into the river, thank you very
much. Instead admire my coolness on the barge, as I stepped out of the
car.
On the other side of the river we "found" a
Spanish-Jewish cemetery
dating from the 17th century which took us about
20 seconds to visit. Then we swam in a black river, showed our kangooroos to the locals but that was it: time to
head home.
It is with these memories in
mind that I leave you, beloved ones. I hope they will inspire the same feelings that have inspired me to share them with you today.
