Time just seems to get away from me and I just realized that it's been almost a month since my last post. In my defense - nothing has been new. Work, school, sleep... Wash, rinse, repeat. Christmas concert is only a week away and then I will have some of my life back!
One thing worth blogging about though is our recent trip to French Guyana. French Guyana is this amazing slice of Europe in South America. It's part of France and it has the shopping, beaches and food to prove it. It was amazing; we never wanted to come back.
We arrived there on Thursday around noon after a couple hours drive to the border and then a quick ferry ride, all of which was perfectly legal. You can enter illegally, but we didn't. We arrive at the car rental agency and Jenn gets us organized and gets us a car while the rest of us entertain the gentleman working there. We're about to get keys and go when he says that they only have manual transmission cars. All of my trip buddies just look at each other because none of them can drive a stick; luckily I can (Thank you Linda). So we get the keys and we start off.
We arrived at our hammock hut (Kalawachi) outside of Kourou several hours later. We went in to Kourou and drove around a bit, determined to find the beach. The beach in Kourou was a slight disappointment. But we did find the McDonald's, a Super U and an amazing bakery! We picnicked that night by a fountain in the city square. A Super U is this amazing French grocery store, basically like American ones, but with better bread and cheese.
The French have this fondness for traffic circles that I do not share, especially when we went into Cayenne the next day. To get into Cayenne there were about 5 roundabouts. They were less nerve wracking the longer you drove them, but they still suck. This trip to Cayenne was all about shopping and eating. We sat in this cafe and had quiche, cafe au lait and various other French foods. We set out to find the beach in the afternoon, which was an interesting experience of left turns. The ocean had to be there somewhere. We finally did find it and as we were coming down over the hill with our belongings we could see it. It was fantastic. Light sand, warm water. I forgot how much I missed the ocean. We really only stayed for an hour, but we went back for most of the next day. We played the next day in the waves for several hours, got a tan (or burnt in my case)and just enjoyed being there.
Our last day in French G we hung out at the hammock hut which is also a museum about the different types of Indians in the area. They had gotten together to preserve their culture. The man who helped build it was there and he gave us a tour and was really nice. He didn't really speak that much English but we did okay with communication. After our morning visit with him we headed back to Saint Laurent to catch the ferry.
We arrived in Saint Laurent early so we toured around the prison transit camp for while. The French used to use French G as a prison, there are some famous islands off the coast that were used as jails.
All was going well until we headed to the ferry and someone informed us that it wasn't running. We managed to get our passports stamped and get a little boat to Suriname anyway. All perfectly legal, albeit a bit sketchy.
All in all it was pretty magnifique!! French food, french shopping and french beaches.
