Blogs from Paramaribo, Suriname, South America
January 11th 2012
I have a bit of a lie in until about 10am, I’m feeling a bit better but still have the sniffles and sneezing. My nose is looking and feeling like a pork scratching. Realising its my only full day with Nancy as she is leaving tomorrow I better crack on! We all drive to town which is about 20 mins away. We meet two more of her cousins Diego and a girl who’s name I have forgotten and her little boy. We eat some nice dutch cinnamon, butter and sugar pancakes and cinnamon toast and then head to Nancy’s great grandmas house. This is the first time she has met her, she is 95! While we are there she is smoking a pipe, drinking rum and cooking. I hope I can live like that if/when I ... read more
Day 1 - Leaving The UK - Arriving Suriname
Published: January 18th 2012South America » Suriname » Paramaribo
January 10th 2012
It is actually Friday the 13thof January that I am writing this I have been caught up until now. The real adventure has now started so I need to keep a track of what has been going on! I have taken about 200 pics aleady but can't get them off my camera at the moment. As soon as I do they will be uploaded. So I departed London Heathrow Terminal 4 at 8.40am. I’d only had 2 hours sleep prior to the hour and half drive to airport (thank you Linda for dropping me) so I was knackered. I was already feeling a bit run down but by the time I got on the plane I was dying (such a drama queen lol!) 45 minutes later I arrived at Schiphol Airport Amsterdam. I have to say ... read more
January 5th 2012
Hello everyone, it has been a while since I wrote a blog! Some of you knew already, last October I won a return ticket of Insel Air. They organized a photo-competition on Facebook. I had a choice from each and every destination they fly to. Obviously I wasn't going to choose a nearby destination. I chose for Suriname, which is the furthest they fly to, after the USA. Since mid-2011 I started to think about Suriname again because last time I was there was in mid-2004 and I really wanted to go again. Surinam is a country in northeastern South America. It used to be part of the Dutch Kingdom, until 1975, therefore Curaçao still has ties with the country. It has around 500 000 people and it's capital is Paramaribo. It's sparsely populated, most people ... read more
May 21st 2011
"The same evening we went into town. Along the streets we see beautiful wooden houses and high palms. Remarkable is that they lack any glass in the windows. I have to adapt to the food. Only the papaja's (a kind of fruit) are very delicious. The beer (Parbo = Amstel) is sold in one liter bottles: Djogo's. Everywhere are whores. This night I will sleep for the first time under a mosquitonet." I write this in my diary on Friday 13th of december 1968. I was then 21 years old. Now I am 63 and I am again in Paramaribo. The beautiful wooden houses, the high palms and the djogo's are still there, but the whores have disappeared, together with the TRIS-(Troepenmacht in Suriname) soldiers, the boys who served in Suriname, which was a Dutch colony ... read more
April 28th 2011
Well perhaps not sweating to the oldies at the moment, but definitely sweating a lot. In addition to the very North American behavior of moving from air conditioned building to air conditioned building, we have adopted a few Surinamese practices for handling the heat. To Wit: two, or sometimes three showers per day to cool off, men going shirtless around the home in the evening (not particularly pretty, but effective), and women going, shall we say 'alfresco', under their summer dresses. Yesterday we used the pool at a downtown hotel for a few hours, and it saved us. Today, we stayed put and did a few things around Astrid's house in the morning and are checking out a mall with an internet cafe this afternoon. The Carnival of Wellness Later we are going to watch a ... read more
April 26th 2011
Today we went right into the heat of the day to get to an amazing butterfly garden near the city. This place breeds exotic butterflies for sale to butterfly gardens in the US and Eurpope. Pretty neat place. Unfortunately, I can't share photos of it because we just bought a new memory card for the camera, and the card with the photos is in Pauline's purse, and not here with me in the camera. (foiled again). The one photo we have on the new card is of the sign for an english bookstore. I am sharing it because it is going to be our saviour here. You see, Abbey ran out of english books to read some time ago, and she doesn't have a lot to do on her own when we're around Astrid's house in ... read more
April 24th 2011
Still touring around Parimaribo. Our host, Astrid must have pulled in a lot of favors, because everywhere we go, there is somebody who has been lined up to feed us. Yesterday her sister and brother in law took us to the pool at a local fitness club, then to a Javanese restaurant. Lovely. Abbey and their daughter Priscilla are cooking plans for a sleepover this week. Whoever called this the 'rainy season' was WAY OFF BASE. It has been hot, and muggy for four days, and at times opressive. It dipped down to 28 Celsius by 8:30 tonight, and that's about as bearable as it gets. We considered changing flights to come back a few days early but decided to just 'suck it up buttercup', and see all we can here before we leave. Am writing ... read more
April 21st 2011
Sorry for the recent radio silence. The travel day to Suriname was a long one, and mostly without problems. Maybe more on that later. The main thing is that we are on the ground, and visiting with our friend Astrid MacDonald, who lives south of Parimaribo. We met Astrid 15 years ago when Sue Holloway and the late Murray Kocis asked us to host her through an organization called Canadian Crossroads. She lived with us for three months, and we thoroughly tortured her with various activities in the cold fall weather. Now it's her turn for revenge. Despite this supposedly being the rainy season, we haven't had any appreciable rain in the last two days, and have instead been met with unbelievable, unrelenting heat. Our first full day, yesterday, started nice enough, but around nine in ... read more
August 15th 2009
Due to our late arrival we would need to catch up on some sleep before seeing Paramaribo. As time for us is beginning to run out we only really had one week to spend in the Guyanas. We were already up against it because we could only fly into Suriname - flying into French Guiana would have been the logical route. However the only international flights to Cayenne are from Paris and classed as a domestic flight. This logistical problem means that we would have to move quickly if we were to visit French Guiana, due to the fact that we would be doubling back on ourselves. More time issues have also come to light for the last segment of our trip here - getting from Guyana back to Venezuela is near impossible. The two countries ... read more
August 2nd 2009
The flight to Paramaribo from Belem was late by 15 minutes, and I noticed I was the sole backpacker, most were Brazilians and of course Surinamese. Weird when we got in the plane all the stewardesses were wearing masks, I felt like entering a hospital. later on they sprayed some perfume disinfectant stuff. While on flight they distributed forms to fill up for customs and immigrations, suddenly there were commotions, people getting up and huddling, I got curious, then I realized they were Brazilian laborers and like in school, they are copying each other's information, granted the forms were in Surinamese(Dutch)/English not in Portuguese, I think some cant read and write. This continued on until we landed, only an hour 45 flight. Everyone is trying to be the 1st out of the plane, cant understand why, ... read more
