After scooting around turbine parts at the Inselberg station I headed back to Pararé where I hopped onto a tiny project for the bureau that oversees the Nouragues reserve. The mission was to suspend a sign across the Arataie River announcing the park’s Northern boundary and protected status. That boundary is about an hour and a half from the Pararé camp by pirogue and so I got to enjoy my first FG river trip.
En route to the park’s border we stopped at Camp Arataie, a ghost colony an hour north of Pararé by pirogue. The camp was set up to give park access to tourists and school groups in a place more accessible than the two research stations. Camp Arataie’s other and unspoken mission was to leave the areas surrounding the research stations - and the researchers - as unmolested as possible. The camp is beautifully designed and constructed using almost exclusively native materials. And thought the camp is still in good condition it now sits nearly abandoned, another sad monument to French Guiana’s illicit gold trade.
A number of years ago a couple of “clandestines” entered Camp Arataie, killed the two employees present and made off with the camp’s two way radio. As the story goes, authorities were called to a certain location where the two offending Brazilians were found tied to a tree with a note on them. The larger Brazilian gold-mining community assumed that such a murder would encourage France to send in the Gendarme/army en masse. To prevent such an operation the gold mining community served up either the offenders or some sacrificial lambs.
Since then Camp Arataie has been closed to the public, occasionally weed-whacked and treated for termites while the park figured out what to do with the place. In the upper floor of the cafetieria carbet the tin roofing is pock marked and punctured where one of the shot gun blasts rang the closing bell of Camp Arataie.
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