Suriname, South America's Hidden Treasure
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THE road to Atjoni got more interesting as the wind grew stronger, making the surrounding ceiba trees of the Surinamese jungle murmur with whispers of an impending storm. We were hours into the country's interior when we came across a solitary hunter. He had a shotgun slung from his shoulder and a machete sheathed at his waist. We stopped to talk. After brief introductions, things became complicated.
Asked about his luck so far in stalking that day's prey, he laughed and said a few words in Saramaka, the language of his Maroon people, who are descended from slaves who escaped into Suriname's jungles. Sensing our inability to get by in Saramaka, he switched to Dutch, pointing at a nearby tree where he had just spotted some movement, laughed again and said, "boom kip," which literally means "tree chicken." Our blank stares prompted him to switch languages yet again, this time to Sranan Tongo, the extraordinarily playful Creole language that borrows from English, Dutch and Portuguese and is Suriname's lingua franca. "Legwana," he said, and finally we understood that he meant iguana. He then explained that he was after something a bit more satisfying, some "pingo" (wild boar), perhaps, or "hei," a coveted forest rodent called paca in English. With a broad smile, he waved us on our way down that jungle road to Atjoni, a crossing at a bend of the Suriname River.
Just 500,000 people live in Suriname, a country on South America's northeastern shoulder about the size of Florida, but the variety of cultures they represent rivals those of much larger countries. The official language is Dutch, in a nod to Suriname's past as a colony of the Netherlands, but on the streets of Paramaribo, the capital, one hears, in addition to Sranan Tongo, languages like Hindi and Javanese. Chinese characters decorate signs on casinos and corner stores. Motorized rickshaws called tuk-tuks speed past mosques and Hindu temples, giving Suriname a vaguely Asian feel. (With a name that rhymes with Vietnam, Hollywood seems to prefer it this way: the movie "The Silence of the Lambs" seems to suggest that Suriname is in Asia.) Suriname's obscurity and charm, in an age in which frontiers seem to melt away at the click of a mouse, proves that there are still corners of the world that can provide surprise and adventure, even a bit of awe.
Indeed, when I told friends where my wife, Carolina, and I were headed for a brief vacation, I received the oddest reactions. One related a tale from a London newsroom in which an esteemed news organization's South America correspondent called his editor upon arriving in Paramaribo, only to hear a voice bark from the other end of the line, "What the hell are you doing in Africa?" Another recommended a book in preparation for my trip, "Bush Master: Into the Jungles of Dutch Guiana," by the adventurer Nicol Smith (as if the title was not enough, the book's preposterous jacket description reads, "An authentic hair-raising account of voodooism, wild adventure, three-fingered men and tropical terrors.") Perhaps the best reaction came from Boris Muñoz, a friend from Caracas with a highly cultivated sense of irony who is one of Venezuela's most respected journalists. "Does Suriname actually exist?" he asked me. "I know of only one other person who has said he has been there."
First Published September 18, 2011 12:00 am
