Blogs from Suriname, South America

I got up about 9am. Boyke came and picked me up about 11am. He showed me around Brokopondo central with a local boy called Shabba. We went to see Sally at work. She works in the office of the local school. I also met Timothy who is from Connecticut in the states and turned out to be from the same area that I did camp America about 9 years ago, small world hey! He came toSurinamewith the peace corp a US government aid but he now works at the school and lives in the next village. He said I am the first person fromEnglandhe has met inSuriname. Unfortunately, if you don’t know people from here it’s unlikely be a place you would visit which is a shame because it is beautiful and the people are so ... read more

I’m up early about 10.30am as the kids are up and about. Zuwena comes and picks us about 1pm, luckily I’m not hanging! We go into town to see Nancy’s gran and Zuwena’s mum. We find out that Nancy’s flight is delayed. Zuwena's mum heard it on the radio but we don’t know how long for. We were supposed to go and buy some souvenirs for Nancy to take home but the hangover and lack of sleep kicks in so we go home. They have some nice I love SU T shirts here I’m gonna try and get some before I leave, maybe post them back to England. We’ve not had the chance to get to an internet café ( they call them cyber cafes) and there are not many around. Wi fi seems non existent ... read more

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

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

June 2011. It was time to wander. A month before, I had been reading about Columbia, thinking I wanted to go back to South America. Late one night, I was playing around with ideas in that part of the world. For some reason, I started reading about the capitol of Guyana, Georgetown. I thought for a minute. What did I know about this country? The answer was almost nothing. I did know a little. Most people have heard of the Jamestown cult murders in the 1970s. My father has an amazing hobby of hunting for and finding antique bottles in the mangroves where he lives in South Florida. He knows bottle dealers in a few places in the Caribbean, one guy he knows lives in Guyana. The bottles my father has bought from him come wrapped ... read more

So here is the exciting story you've all been waiting for... The title gives it away a bit... It all starts on my first day in Georgetown. In fact, it started months earlier, when I'd e-mailed the Suriname embassy about getting a visa (the only country in Latin America I needed one for) and had received a reply saying I just needed to turn up at the embassy in Georgetown and they would do all the paperwork there and then. So on the afternoon I'd got to Georgetown, after my first shower in 3 days, I headed straight for the embassy. I figured civil servants are the same all over the world and they wouldn't be open too late, so I hurried and got there at 3.15pm. Upon arrival, I breathed a sigh of relief when ... read more

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