Hitchhiking the World: Chap 14 (French Guiana, Suriname, Guyana, Brazil)

---August 12th 2016---

THERE IT WAS: FRENCH!!! After 8 month in Spanish or Portuguese country, never quite understanding anything, I could finally talk with local people and understand them, without concentration. I was back in my native language, but still something was off. After so many month of concentration to communicate, I got used to it, and that lack of misunderstanding seemed wrong. It sounds weird but I needed a little adaptation to get my French flow back.

After checking in the country, I decided to head back toward the river and take the rest of the day off, and enjoy the water. There was a small deck roughly 20ft above the water, and as always, I ran and jumped from it. After a few jumps, I decided to go play tag with the kids (also jumping off the deck).

Once fully refreshed, I headed toward the hill, where the border patrol told me I could sleep without problems. I may not have had problems, but it was far from being as “OK to sleep” as they said. Once my tent up, a first guy came to kick me out of my location. I excused myself saying the Border patrol had told me it would be OK, and managed to get the thumbs up for the night. Just a few minutes after, as I was sowing my pants (again), the police showed up, but once more talking with them got me the permission. And finally, right after sunset, a third person came to pay me visit. Only, he wasn’t here to kick me out, but just stayed surprised to see a Canadian camping in such a weird place.

The next day was my official first day on the road in French Guiana. I waited a small 15min to get my first ride heading to Cayenne. About half of the way there, we got pulled over by the Gendarme, and as they were verifying our paper, another hitchhiker came and asked to get a ride with us, his name was Julien. He had just got out of a two day hike in the middle of the forest, and on his way to Cayenne as well. As we talked, we realised he was getting started on a similar trip I had just came from: hitchhiking South America. He invited me to his friend’s house so we could exchange a few trick for different destinations.

It had been exactly 2 month since my visit in Ushuaia, and by consequence, 2 month I had been trying to contact my parents through Skype. Having internet on a week day and early enough to tell them before the end of day, it was finally time to call them. I was nervous since I had very big news. We talked a little about the last few months. Eventually, my dad asked the question I was waiting for (not literally): “So, when do think you’ll be back?” To my surprise, my answer came with hesitation: “Well that’s the thing, I have a world tour stuck in my head, and I can’t get rid of it. I’ve tried and tried, even using the rougher moments as reason not to, but I can’t imagine otherwise.” Obviously, it was hard for my parents to ear, but as usual, they said they were OK with it. We talk about the implication resulting from such a long trip, and eventually called it a day. What a relief it was. The project was now on the table, and I could start digging deeper into it.

I knew French Guiana was a small country, so knowing I could easily cross its second half in less than a day, I decided to take my time. As I was heading toward Kourou (the French rocket platform), I looked at the different park and trail signed along the road. When I saw a sign telling me to turn left for the Monkey Mountain, I thought it could worth the look. Obviously, I knew the chance of seeing one of them was quite low, but I wanted to walk anyway.

No monkey maybe, but still a nice hike

After a hard 2h walk up and down the hill, with my bag and the tropical heat, I started my route toward St-Laurent. The lady who picked me up wasn’t going too far, and was heading off road to go bird watching. Also inviting me for the night if I wanted, I decided not to rush through the country, and rather enjoy the fauna of the Amazonia; the birds may not have been there, but we still managed to see a caiman.

Having a place for the night also meant a place to be my dirty cloth. Being all refreshed by the shower, I couldn’t bare putting my feet in my shoes, so I left them of the window sill for it to fresh off. A few minutes later, as Cati, my host, went to check on my cloth, she was “surprised” by a huge spider, a mygale spider. Living in the area, she was used to see them, so she through it back in the garden, as for me, I was definitely sad knowing I had just missed it. Fortunately, as I was taking a day off repairing and modifying few of my gears, my host found a few more here and there, hiding in the leaves. Being very docile spiders, they were easy to play with. Needless to say, I was scared at first, but she had no problem sticking her finger down the rolled leaf to try getting her out. As we enjoyed photographing these not so little beasts, I grew more and more comfortable manipulating them and eventually, managed to set my comfort aside and have this tarantula-like spider crawl on my face to get a nice picture of these misunderstood creatures. Do note that not every mygale are friendly, but my host knew which one were ok, and which one weren’t, making this experiment safe.

I can check "have a Mygal walk on ou face" from my bucket list

After a day of relaxation, I got back on the road and started heading toward my next country: Suriname. I wasn’t too sure about how my day was going to go, but it turned out to be the most efficient day in quite a while. By noon, I had reached the border and without too much difficulty, managed to get my visa for Suriname. The main challenge wasn’t to be the visa, but crossing the river between the two countries. To my amazement, not only did I manage to hitch the ferry without difficulty, but the captain seemed pretty thrilled about my plans. And finally, got to hitchhike an impressive 16 cars in one day.

Being a Hollandaise colony, Suriname speaks mostly Dutch, but also English. English may have been a familiar language, but still I had difficulty expressing myself. Over the last month, I had passed from Spanish to Portuguese to French, to now English. But since people would speak in Dutch between them, I constantly had the feeling I was back in Portuguese. Every time I would try to express myself, my brain would pass through a few languages before finally setting on the right one.

No more hitchhiking on the right side of the street; at least until Brazil

My first ride in the country was a bit scary as the guy driving the car was most certainly on high as hell on weed, and drove me through a very poor neighbourhood of a poor town of a poor country, with wasn’t too comforting. Just after getting out of the car, I asked for some direction to cut across the country using the back road and was told: “But you’ll get killed.” Obviously, my plans changed, and decided to stay on main road. Later that same day, as I was walking in a small village, looking for a place to sleep, two young gangster-looking kids came to me and asked me what I was doing. When I told them I was trying to walk through town, they replied: “Well, just be sure to walk fast, you don’t want to be walking in the dark over here.”

Suriname was off to a bad start, and I didn’t want to take too much risk, so as I saw a police car on a side road, I decided to ask them for help. The two police in uniform didn’t want to do nothing, but the third one, off duty for the night, invited me to stay at one of her friend’s house.

My first day may not have been too nice, but I didn’t want to give up on Suriname, so I decided to head south and visit the Brokopongo Lake. I barely had to try hitchhiking. It took me a few cars, but none needed more than 10min wait. The day flew by, and I got into more and more cars. The more I would hitchhike, the more comfortable I felt in Suriname.

Having reached the river between Suriname and Guyana by night fall, I had no hitchhiking to do in the morning to reach the ferry. I started asking around to hitchhike the ferry, but nothing seemed to work; they couldn’t care less about my trip. Thankfully, as I was getting on the boat, a car pulled over and called me. They had seem me the day before but couldn’t help me out, so having another opportunity, they gave me a few buck, not knowing I needed some to pay for the ferry.

The other shore was another reality. If Suriname got me nervous, Guyana got me scared. To start with, there were no cars, only taxis. Then, I started walking across town, but never saw the end; the town kept on going and going, but I also felt hatred between the black (in majority) and the white (I was the only one in town). Things weren’t looking good for me, but I kept on going and eventually, got to Georgetown. Not wanting to sleep homeless style, I asked the lady who picked me up if I could through my tent on her property. I didn’t know, but she worked in a B&B (Rainforest B&B - http://www.rainforestbbguy.com/index.html). She told me that if I could give two hours of volunteering at the zoo, I could have a room with a bed. I obviously accepted, and just like promised, in the morning, I gave her my morning.

Still having the afternoon ahead of me, I decided to start my descent toward Brazil. I started walking across town, but the neighbourhood I had to cross didn’t feel too nice, so I started flagging the truck passing by, but couldn’t get any to stop either. Finally, a taxi preceding one of the trucks stopped and invited me aboard. I was now out of town. From there, I got a truck, but just a few kilometers later, he got pulled over by the police officer for speeding. The driver told me it was better for me to try hitchhiking until everything was set, so I got out, and walked toward a good spot to stand. As I passed in front of the police officer, I got flagged. I walked toward them thinking I was doing something wrong, but instead, one of the police asked me if I wanted is help to get a ride. I barely had the time to except, that a truck was pulled over, and I was in; destination Lethem.

The first 150km were pretty smooth and eventless, but once on the outskirt of Linden, the truck stopped. The driver got out, and came to see me, asking me where I was going. When I said I was heading toward Brazil, he told to wait a little bit as his son prepared me a seat using the bags of soap they were delivering. I didn’t really know why they stopped and prepared me a comfortable place to sit, but it didn’t took too long before I got the answer; we had 450km of dirt road. Not only was it a long dirt road, but it turned out to be the worst dirt road I had yet travelled on. The truck, an old army truck, shook in all direction not stopping for nothing. After a few hours shacking left and right, the Sun went to bed, and so did I. I changed the soap bag setup to make myself a bed and tried sleeping. Sleeping seemed impossible as I kept on hitting my head on the ground. At around midnight, the truck stopped and I finally got my “night” of sleep, (until 4am). We drove through the break of dawn, up to a river. I asked where we were thinking we were getting close to Lethem, but we weren’t even half way. Averaging at 20km/h, we drove all day. It took us over 22h to cross the small 450km. I surely enjoyed that ride.

Yeah, 450km of this kind of road, not too relaxing when you sleeping in a moving truck

Once in Lethem, I offered my help to unload the truck and in exchange, I could sleep in the back of the truck, since rain was coming. We unloaded the truck, jumped in the river to wash off, they invited me to join them for supper and we finally setup camp in the truck.

The next morning, once up and running, I was offered a ride to the border, checked out of the country, checked in Brazil, and within just three rides, I crossed from Guyana to Boa Vista to the Venezuela border, where I was offered to sleep in the garage of my last ride.

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Country's Statistics

French Guiana

Number of nights : 4

Numbers of days on the road: 12

Percentage of invitation at night : 50%

Overall waiting time : 3h

Average wait : 12min

Longest wait : 50min

Male vs female : 79% male – 14% female – 7% mixed

Total amount of rides : 14

Average spending per day : +18,07$/day