Goodbye Suriname

It's my last day here. Stephen left this morning for a 36-hour journey to Trinidad, New York City, and Seattle. I leave tomorrow for an 18-hour trip of Trinidad, Miami, and Chicago. One measure of Suriname's position at the edge of the world is its airport schedule. All flights from Amsterdam and Trinidad (where you catch a flight to anywhere else besides Amsterdam) arrive after midnight; all flights to Trinidad and Amsterdam leave at 6:30 am, which means waking up at 3:45 to arrive at the airport by 4:45 or 5:00 am.

Today after dropping Stephen off, Kevin & I went to Bergendahl, "an ecological and cultural resort" on the Suriname River. We paid to be walk-ins (as opposed to registered guests) and had the breakfast buffet while sitting next to the river. Then we went off to Lake Brokopondo, created by a hydropower dam that powers the bauxite/aluminum industry, and then visited Caroline, a Maarten Luther Kerk member who is Amerindian. We sat in her family's compound eating cassava bread and meeting the Peace Corps volunteers who are staying in their community for 3 months to learn to speak Sranan Tongo before going to assignments in Amerindian communities.

As Stephen pointed out some time ago, the nice thing about Amerindians is they smile. The heavy Dutch emphasis here -- or perhaps the seriously oppressive past of this country -- means almost no one else does smile. They are worse than Swedes.

But here are some links you can see before I leave. Click here for an interesting video of Paramaribo, shot from a car. It has good music, too.

Here's a video on Kevin's house. It's embedded in his Facebook site and I hope you can see it without being his friend.

And finally, a video that asks the question, did the Dutch get a good deal when they graded Manhattan for Suriname? After I posted this on Facebook, a Palestinian friend replied, "I don't know whether to laugh or be offended." Let's just say, it's borderline, but I think it's funny.

By Wednesday I should be in Chicago, reunited with my own computer. How wonderful! I'll keep posting photos, and then the Viajes de Anita will continue in the U.S. Thanks for reading the last few months, forgive my many lapses, and I look forward to seeing you all.

A couple of photos after all

Swimming in a waterfall in Guyana--the water is "tea colored" because of the leaves and bark of the trees nearby. It made us look red!
The ferry from Suriname to Guyana. It's about a 30-minute trip, but it takes all day to line up, handle papers, go through immigration and customs, and then repeat everything on the other side.
A political rally we passed in Coronie, Suriname, for the VHP "elephant" party. More later!

Still here, still posting

On Facebook, Joel M. asked, will you be posting anymore?

Sorry. I should at least reassure you that I wasn't in the small plane that crashed the other day in Suriname, killing all aboard. Nope. I've spent lots of time in cars and on motorboats, but haven't seen a plane for some time.

Suriname holds its elections next Tuesday, the day I leave. There are 30 parties here, mostly aligned along ethnic lines. The orange party with the elephant symbol has mostly Hindustani adherents. The red and white flag is the Indonesian party. Etcetera. Flags are everywhere, and so are motorcades of cars slathered in flags and blasting music and speeches from giant speakers.

Actually, the giant speaker is a species I have encountered everywhere on this trip, from the Mexican birthday party back in March when the walls and floors were throbbing to the giant speakers that are just part of the porch furniture for some families here.

Did I mention in my last post that in Suriname, the main synagogue and the main mosqure stand right next to one another? I have to take a tour of these facilities this week, as well as the main n Hindu temple that stands around the corner from the mosque and synagogue. But mosques and Hindu gods and temples are everywhere in this amazingly ethnically mixed country. Just take a peek at Kevin's neighbors:

• behind him, a Javanese man who is head of customs at the post office; behind and to the right, a Hindu family that seems to own a bus company
  
• next door, an African-Surinamese family that sells sausages on the street and have the most falling-down house on the street. I see some of the residents brushing their teeth and washing their hair outside in the mornings
• across the street, Brazilians, the most recent immigrant group to Suriname and Guyana. They are all gold miners. All day long, cars pull up and honk to visit people. (Because everyone has a fence or gate in front of their home, you have to honk to let people know you are outside. If you are walking, you shout a little or rap your keys on the gate)
  
• next to the Brazilians, what Kevin calls "a combination family" of several ethnic strands
• next door on the other side, five women, all African-Surinamese, and a passel of dogs who sometimes sing together at night (that's what their howling sounds like. They are quickly shushed.)
  
• and beyond them, English speakers; a Guyanese husband and Surinamese wife
• and Kevin, from Wisconsin, and Stephen and Anne
  

It's hard to judge, as an outsider, just how deep this diversity goes--whether everyone is truly included in society, whether there are higher classes and lower classes--but to the outsider, it is very impressive!

I read "The Free Negress Elizabeth: Prisoner of Color" by Cynthia McLeod, Suriname's most famous novelist. It tells the story of Elizabeth Samson, the first black woman to be born free (in about 1717), who became one of the richest women in Suriname in the 18th century, owning plantations and slaves, but was spurned by her white peers and couldn't legally marry the man she loved. (You could marry if you were a mulatto, and there were many, very quickly, but not if you were black.) McLeod couldn't research Elizabeth's story until her husband became ambassador to Belgium, because all of the historical archives of pre-independence Suriname are in Holland. When your history is in somebody else's country, you are definitely a colony.

I've also been reading the history of the Lutheran Church of Suriname, and how it morphed from a church of plantation and slave owners to the multiethnic church it is today. Yesterday, visiting an old plantation, and I recognized its owner as the person who contributed the first organ to the Maarten Luther Kerk.

Tonight I'm going to begin reading McLeod's other novel, "The Cost of Sugar," which recaps (says the jacket copy) "the intriguing history of those rabid times (1765-1779) through the eyes of two Jewish step sisters, Elza and Sarith, descendants of the settlers of the 'new Jerusalem of the River,' known today as Jodensavanne, the oldest Jewish settlement in Suriname, which boasts the first synagogue in the Western Hemisphere."

That's the synagogue I hope to visit. This book I'm bringing home, so some of you can read it, too! I am not sure it is available on Amazon.

Despite living in a house with two laptops, I'll wait until I am reunited with my computer next week to start putting up photos. Then you'll see the wonderful trip Stephen and I took to a Guyana rainforest, and all the animals that wander around on the roads in Guyana, and rice drying on the pavement, and mosques where (in Guyana, but not in Suriname) they sing the call to prayer at 4:30 am (audible from the Lutheran camp down the street), and then pictures of typical Caribbean houses, of Paramaribo's downtown wooden buildings, of the song birds people keep as pets here, and of those election flags, and Hindu gods by the freeway, and more.

I leave a week from tomorrow. This week I'm focused on finishing projects for Kevin (writing, organizing, pulling together a conference) and seeing what I haven't seen yet. I'm also trying to arrange a half-day tour of Port of Spain, Trinidad, where I have a 7-hour layover next Tuesday, and organizing my time in Chicago and New York. I'll probably post once or twice more before I leave. Watch for those photos, though. They're gonna be good.

Tagging Along

I started my trip by making all my arrangements myself. I am ending it by tagging along.

Want to tour the port of Paramaribo? Sure. Want to join us on a trip to Guyana? Sure. This week in Suriname, other people have made suggestions, and all I have done is comply or refuse.

I was met at the airport late, late, late Sunday night by Kevin J., friend and former boss who lives here in Suriname and is pastor at the church, Mary C., friend and ELCA colleague I've visited 8 countries with (including Cuba, back in February), and Stephen D., from Holden. Mary was here with another ELCA person on an official delegation trip to the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Suriname (ELKS), so the first round of activities I tagged along with was theirs. The port. A little church in the town of Lelydorp. A Roman Catholic mission in Moengo, in eastern Suriname, where the church might have a youth retreat next fall. A small village of Maroons, or what they call in Dutch "bush negros"--descendants of slaves who escaped and hid in the jungle a couple centuries ago, and are still there.

The trip to Guyana starts in an hour and a half. The Lutheran Church in Guyana is having its annual convention. Kevin and two other people from ELKS are attending. Stephen and I will attend for one day and then go off by boat and bus for a trip to Marshall Falls. Guyana and Suriname are in a large delta. There are many rivers to cross, so to speak. It will be hot, buggy, but beautiful, we hope, and next Tuesday we rejoin our colleagues for a ride back to Suriname.

To get to Guyana, we will drive to the town of Niewe Nykerie and stay in an orphanage. Tomorrow we take the ferry to Guyana. There is only one a day. Then we go to Georgetown. Then our trip to the interior. Then back to Georgetown and Skeldon, where there is a Lutheran retreat center, for a night, and then back on the ferry to Suriname.

This week has been lots of rushing around; next week I'll start settling in here. But some initial impressions:

Suriname was fought over by the Dutch and English for a long time. To resolve the dispute, they swapped two colonial possessions. Holland took Suriname; the British took Manhattan. Suriname is independent today, but they still speak Dutch. Just today I took my miniature Spanish dictionary out of my backpack. I'm unlikely to need it this month.

People here are Indian, black, European. Hindu temples, Muslim mosques, and Christian churches are everywhere. On one street, the Jewish synagogue stands next to a mosque. These are very elaborate buildings. I'll post photos next week.

So far I've eaten Indonesian food, Chinese food, and Surinamese food, and even cooked my own dish of curried eggplant with peanuts. All delicious. The beer is good, and the juice. We mix tamarind concentrate with water, ice, and freshly squeezed lime. Yummy!

Kevin has to remember to drive on the left side of the road, but he did that for many years in Papua New Guinea, so that's no problem. I'm glad I'm not driving.

And it's extremely hot, and rains several times a day.

More next week, when I get back from Guyana. Meanwhile, click HERE for a map of Guyana and Suriname, two countries tucked into the "lost coast" of South America.

A $95 stomachache and a 50-cent bus ride

Greetings from Isla Mujeres, finally!

Somewhere along the road from Guatemala to Mexico I got, for the first time in my 2 months on the road, a terrible bug. Food? Everything I ate was in packages, including the delicious fruit paleta in Belize. Germs from some surface, like a bathroom? Could be. Anyhow, about halfway through our long journey across two borders (Guatemala-Belize and Belize-Mexico) I knew I was in trouble, and when we arrived in Chetumal, Mexico, at 6:00 pm, I knew I couldn't make it to Tulum. Having done little research on Chetumal, the only hotel I knew of was a Holiday Inn. After weeks of home stays and the occasional $10 a night hospedaje, my encounter with US prices was shocking. But $95 bought me 12 hours of sleep and access to clean water and a bathroom, which was pretty much all I needed. Those soft sheets and extra pillows felt wonderful.

Since I couldn't figure out what caused this, I tossed out all the crackers I had been carrying, plus my water bottle, and even my toothbrush. Yesterday morning I bought water, juice and a new toothbrush from stores around the hotel before catching the bus to Cancun. Mexican buses are very big and comfortable and my last six hours passed more easily than the 10 hours on the direct but rudimentary shuttle...and I didn't have to drag my stuff across any borders.

Arriving at Cancun at 4:30, I put my experience with Mexican living to work by ignoring the taxi line and crossing Avenida Tulum to where the local buses called rutas stop. I found the one that said "Puerto Juarez" and paid 5 and a half pesos to take it to the boat dock that takes you to Isla Mujeres. By 5:30 I was on the island and settled into my little room at Steve Broin's Casa Sirena, where my main objective is to swim and relax and rest up for Sunday, when I fly from Cancun to Miami to Trinidad and Tobago to Paramaribo, Suriname, arriving a little after midnight. After all my activities in Guatemala--visiting dozens of churches, climbing temples and a volcano, cruising up rivers and across lakes, sharing little microbuses with Guatemalans and tourbuses with internationals--I need to do nothing, in a lovely place!

The wacko on the third floor

My lovely hospedaje in Panajachel last weekend had one odd resident: a man in his 60s from Canada, a self-published author with all the usual chips on his self-published shoulder about why no academic or mainstream publisher would take his book, why the UBC library wouldn't buy it, why credentials shouldn't matter when you're brilliant, etc. While I was cavorting around Lago Atitlàn, he was watching tv all day in his room, emerging at night to confide his self-published woes as I drank beer on the sofa, or to search the Vancouver Craig`s list for a room to rent when he got home. Whenever that would be. I think the owners of Hospedaje El Viajero were torn between asking him to leave and praying his indecision would tide them over the bajòn or low season.

Today the oddball watching tv in her room was me, at the Posada Tayazal in Flores, Guatemala, way up in the northern jungles. (Click here for a google map.) I did go out for breakfast and the internet this morning, and emerged for an ice cream around 2:00 pm, but otherwise watched Guatemalan tv and weird US movies until supper time. Travelers have to pay even when they feel like doing nothing, and I felt like doing nothing today, in a charming town. (Just for the record, I watched the very fascinating Spanish-produced but English-language political movie Land of the Blind with Donald Sutherland, who I cannot resist, and You Kill Me with Ben Kingsley and Owen Wilson's brother Luke, which I would like to see again. And since, you remember from my last post, the only other gringo in Santa Cruz de Quichè was a young Mormon missionary, you won't be surprised to find out that the BYU network is right there among the evangelical stations.)

I needed to rest, after my strenuous weekend on the group tour to Tikal. There were 21 of us, mostly very young Germans, plus a Canadian, a Scot, a Brit, a Quebeçois, and four Americans, including one St. Olaf grad who knows Micah M, Alex. During my ELCA staff years I assisted with several delegations of middleaged Lutherans visiting Central and Latin America so I know what a task it is to balance everyone's needs and desires. Victor, our host and a teacher at Tecùn Umàn, my Spanish school in Antigua, made a heroic effort.

A blow-by-blow account would bore you to tears, but of the many kilometers we covered between Friday at 4:00 am and Sunday at 2:30 when I left the group, the jungle ruins of the Mayan city of Tikal were the best. (Click here for images that don't begin to convey the grandeur I saw and felt.) Starting at 6:15 am, when the animals are still active and the intense heat and humidity of the Petèn hasn't kicked in yet, we wandered through jungle and had a picnic breakfast among the ruins and climbed temples as our bilingual guide Walter explained the significance of what we were seeing. The ruins at Tikal are used for the kinds of Mayan rituals I witnessed last weekend in Chichicastenango (chickens, incense, and coca cola, you remember) and overheard on Thursday morning at Utatlàn in the Quichè (chanting, and all the remaining buildings and caves there are blackened with smoke from rituals), so the big temples have large and active circular altars at their feet. I think it was the way the temples poke out from the canopy that was so affecting, plus the cumulative effect of learning so much about Mayan culture through visits to Tikal, Monte Alban near Oaxaca (on a mesa rather than in a jungle) and Chichen Itza (not as mysterious and powerful or remote as Tikal).

Also great: the tour, picnic, and hot sulphur baths along the beautiful Rio Dulce, the charming town of Flores, and the time I spent dining and hanging out with my little cadre of minivan companions. Most disappointing: the surprisingly seedy coastal town of Livingston, Guatemala, where the Afro-Caribbean Garifùna population live. Had I gone to any effort to visit it on my own, I would have burst into tears of disappointment upon arrival.

Most dangerous: the high-speed nighttime trip UP the Rio Dulce in two launches with no proper running lights, in which Victor stood in the prow of my lancha shining his flashlight from bank to bank so the captain could find the channel. To get us through that 45-minute journey, I alternated between saying prayers, saying goodbye to all of you, and trying to visualize being safely in bed. Even the most secular of my companions later said, "Yes, I was praying, too." This was the first time that Mexico and Guatemala's laissez-faire, we're-counting-on-you-not-to-fall-off-this-70-meter-tall-ancient-temple approach to tourism was too laissez-faire for me.

When the group left Rio Dulce to drive back to Antigua, I got a first-class bus back to Flores for two nights. Very rich people fly into Flores for the day to visit Tikal (the flights leave at 4:30 am so that they can enjoy the early-morning jungle, too). Everyone else has traveled hundreds of kilometers by bus or car. Most of them are very young. Some of the kids I saw in the Internet café today WERE children. Where are their parents? One was gushing, on Skype, about her inspiring meeting with a young Israeli girl who is hitchhiking around Central America selling her jewelry. Where are HER parents?? Me, I was upstairs watching movies and updating my journal. Now I am listening to a young American man talk to his parents ("Hi, I'm in Guatemala, in Flores... just because I wanted to...I took a van...five hours...it was cool, check it out on the internet when you get a chance...I called the bank and they haven't fixed my credit, so I am out of money until I get to Belize...can you help?")

After two months, I really have run out of energy. Fortunately this day of mindless rest is preparing me for tomorrow's final push in a shuttle across Belize to Chetumal. (Guatemala has a whole alternate transportation for tourists. It's uncomfortably like the Israeli-only system of highways in Palestine.) Then I will switch to a Mexican bus to Tulum, where I will spend one night and do my best to swim in a cenote. (Click here to find out what that is.) And then Wednesday I arrive in Isla Mujeres and dedicate myself to resting up with host Steve Broin before I get the plane to Suriname! Expect my next post to sound like Margaritaville. Meanwhile, I am sure I can watch another movie before I leave at 7:30 am tomorrow morning.

From the Mayan highlands to the Mayan jungle

Just a note to say I have returned to Antigua from Santa Cruz de Quichè and tonight at 4:00 am will be picked up by a tour group leaving for a 3-day visit to the Tikal ruins in the jungle of the Petèn and then the Caribbean community of Livingston, home to Guatemala's black population, called the Garafuna.

After arranging so much of my travel myself, and worrying about how to get from community A to community B on a microbus (no chicken buses, because they go too fast and fall off cliffs, but microbuses are exciting in a different kind of way, picking up and dropping off passengers every few hundred yards and occasionally getting 27 people into a space we might use for 8 or 9), I am thrilled that my only responsibility is to show up for the next few days. Places I am going between now and Sunday include:

• the ruins at Quirigia
• Lago de Izabel and an old pirate castle
• Tikal, massive Mayan ruins in the jungle
• the Petèn town of Flores
• the town of Rio Dulce
• a 2 or 3-hour journey up the Rio Dulce to...
• Livingston, where I think they actually speak English, on the Caribbean coast, opposite Belice

It's funny to go from a community in which the only other gringo I saw was a Mormon missionary to a tour group with 18 other multinational tourists.

Tonight I am staying in a hostel, in a coed dorm room in which I am sure to be the oldest person, but it's already 7:20 and I will be gone by 4:00 am, so I am sure my middle-aged vibe will not disturb anyone too much. Why pay a lot for less than a whole night of sleep?

I saw and learned a little more about Mayan rituals in the Quichè and look forward to really immersing myself in this culture in Tikal. I asked Santos, Gloria Kanu's Ki'che husband, whether Mayans are making as much as westerners are of 12/2010, when the 5,125-year cycle in the Mayan Long Count calendar comes to an end. "Well, they don't say much, and they don't think that the world will end that day, but yes, they believe something significant will happen," he told me.