Vacation

Since my time here has been so trying, I decided to take a vacation from my vacation. More to the point, if Philippe get’s me on a contract, instead of simply working I’ll be expected to work and thus won’t have the same flexibility to travel as I do right now. The German team planned to finish up towards the end of November and planned to travel a bit around FG before heading to Europe. They had a pirogue scheduled to pick them up from Pararé with enough room for me. All I had to do was step into the pirogue and poof, instant vacation.

When I returned to Pararé from the Inselberg station a few days prior to our vacation, I learned that Alex’s two assistants (“the Boys”) had rebooked their plane tickets so that they could return to Germany as soon as possible. The boys were at times enthusiastic, well-humoured, adventurous, and at other times sulky, unhelpful and timid. They seemed overwhelmed by the forest, not surprising given their limited travel experience and the fact that one of them had a sting-ray jab its barb through his foot twice on day number three of their adventure. Add to that the grief of being away from their co-dependent relationships and regular bouts of chiggers and they were not the happiest of campers. They more or less got their work done but without much pleasure. Mostly they lived to sun themselves til they looked like tomatoes and for dinners that were composed of meat along with meat, oil, more meat and perhaps some heavy dairy.

The "Boys" on their way to Tomato Land.

The "Boys" wrestle with frozen meat while prepping dinner.

So the Boys hit the road as soon as possible. Alex and I decided to stick to the planned sojourn.

28^th of Nov we were picked up by pirogue and headed north towards the river-side town of Regina. We passed the ghost of Camp Arataie, puttered under the newly hung sign announcing the reserve’s boundaries and then made a left where the Arataie spills into the Aprouague.

As soon as we rounded the bend where the two rivers join we passed a pirogue transporting a few Brazilians and what looked like a whole lot of gasoline. The irony is that at the moment there is a general strike in FG regarding the price of gas. I joked that while most of FG will slowly grind to a halt, the gold miners won’t even notice since they get their gas from Surinam and Brazil. Sure enough, we passed any number of pirogues packed with gasoline drums. One of them was so loaded down that it had bottomed out on the riverbed. A team of Brazilians surrounded the pirogue like pall bearers and was doing its best to heave-ho the craft upstream.

This time of year, bottoming out on the river is easy to do. It essentially hasn’t rained since I got here in early October leaving fields of rocks poking out of the river and many other lurking just beneath the surface. During the rainy season a pirogue going full tilt with a sizable motor can get from Parare to Regina in two and a half hours. Threading carefully between rocks, the journey took us five hours and I didn’t regret a minute of it.

From Regina we got a ride to in the back of a work van used by the National Forest Office. We were lumped into the rear like any other piece of equipment and wisked away to the CNRS house in Matoury where we remain, penned in by the general strike.