The 15th-century Treaty of Tordesillas famously divided South America, leaving Portugal much of what would become Brazil, and leaving Spain the rest. Somehow, along the way, the French muscled their way in to grab a foothold. Make that a toehold: French Guiana today makes up just 0.5 percent of the continent and 0.06 percent of its population, yet accounts for, in my estimation, 99 percent of its baguette consumption.
Though it may be small — about the size of South Carolina — French Guiana is unique and uniquely weird. It’s still an overseas department of France, making it the only stretch of the Amazon that’s in the euro zone. Beyond that rain forest, things get even less predictable: Its main tourist attractions are decaying prisons from its days as a penal colony, six-foot-long leatherback sea turtles that come ashore to lay their eggs in the sand, and a space center that launches satellites into orbit for everyone from the Kazakh government to American companies.
It also has some friendly residents — and if you’re like me, you might need their help. It can be expensive place to travel — in part because it’s in the euro zone, and in part because of the lack of public transportation — and it’s not exactly easy to get to. You can fly from New York to Paris and back in the time it would take you to make the roundabout trip to the capital of Cayenne. And traveling there is bafflingly, if charmingly, old school: Most lodging cannot be booked on online travel sites, which tend to ignore this corner of the globe. The official tourism website, tourisme-guyane.com, is useful, but you’ll also need a guidebook, and the pickings are (literally) slim: I used this Footprint Focus guide to the region, which devotes all of 16 pages to French Guiana.
GUYANA
SURINAME
VENEZUELA
FRENCH GUIANA
AMAPÁ
Natal
BRAZIL
Amazon
Brasília
PERU
BOLIVIA
Rio de
Janeiro
PARAGUAY
ARGENTINA
400 MILES
2014 World Cup stadiums
English is not widely spoken, as most tourists come from metropolitan France or are “metros” already living in Guyane. In addition to these European French, the population includes Native Americans and native-born Creoles along with loads of immigrants from Brazil, Suriname and the Caribbean. There’s even a group of Hmong refugees.
En route to the World Cup in Brazil, I arrived in French Guiana in a canoe called a pirogue, crossing the Maroni River from Suriname to the former prison town of St.-Laurent-du-Maroni. As tends to happen to me in France, my visit coincided with a holiday, complicating just about everything. There were also no taxis at the port, so I started walking the half-mile or so into town in the stifling midday heat. Drenched in sweat and lugging camera equipment, I must have made such a pathetic sight that a car soon pulled over next to me and a friendly face said “Vous allez ou?”
Where was I going? Off to find a rental car, since public transportation in French Guiana was rumored (correctly) to be nearly nonexistent. I climbed in and met Gediel, a civil engineer, and Paulo, a young construction worker. Both were Brazilian-born, a relief for me as my Portuguese beats my French any day.
I don’t know what I would have done without them. First, they took me to the city’s two car rental agencies; both were closed for the holiday. Then they found me a hotel, the mediocre Hôtel Star, which at 65 euros was a ripoff but I was still thankful; all the places I had emailed in advance were full. (Their first choice, the lovely La Tentiaire, was also full.)
Paulo offered to show me around the town, which, though dead on the holiday, had an extraordinary collection of colonial buildings, mostly still in use, even though the 19th-century prison, St. Laurent’s original raison d’être, closed in 1946. (Some of the prison buildings have been renovated and are used as offices and art spaces.)
Since almost every restaurant was also closed, I treated him to a terrible Chinese meal, and we plotted how I might make the 30 or so mile drive to Hattes Beach to see leatherback turtles that night. His initial plan was to take me on his motorbike, but that seemed risky. Then he had an idea: His two daughters had never seen the turtles, and he knew someone with a car who might drive us there and stick around — for a price.
It wasn’t cheap: 80 euros (about $110) after considerable bargaining. I ponied up for the all-night excursion, justifying it for three reasons: I had saved at least as much by not renting a car; Paulo was excited about bringing his daughters to see the turtles for the first time, and I owed him; and it was that or sit in the Hôtel Star all night.
We arrived as midnight approached, and hit the beach with flashlights. The moon was out, and so was a cursed cloud of mosquitoes and a lot of skittering crabs, but where were the turtles? Andrieli, Paulo’s wife, urged patience — though Brazilian-born, she had grown up in French Guiana and seen the turtles many times. Evidence of them was everywhere, she noted, in the amazingly tractorlike tracks in the sand, leading from the water to a huge dent where the turtle had buried her eggs.
Finally, about an hour in, we spotted one. Or rather, we spotted a crowd of French people gathering at the edge of the sand. As we got closer, we saw what they did: a turtle nearly six feet long performing the amazing, awkward, painstaking task of digging a hole with her flippers. It took at least half an hour before she stopped digging and started laying her eggs, dozens of shiny white orbs we could just catch a glimpse of at the bottom of the hole.
It took a while, and by the time she was done, Paulo was scaling a palm tree to get coconuts for his young daughters, who were up way past their bedtime. Like a clumsy kid making a snow angel, the turtle swept her flippers back and forth to fill in the hole, lumbered back to the water and disappeared into the surf. (Sometime in August, two-inch babies will emerge from the sand and instinctually head back to the ocean.)
The next morning, I went back to the prison for the formal tour, which allows access to some of the more gruesome areas, like solitary confinement cells that once held the infamous Papillon, played by Steve McQueen in the1973 movie. They are full of graffiti and rough artwork; on the stone floor in one, in the death row section, a prisoner had painstakingly carved “Adieu Maman.”
The tour was in French, so I zoned in and out. But when I heard the guide say “guillotine,” I was suddenly back in AP exam form. There was only one guillotine available in the land, he said, and it had to be transported back and forth from Cayenne by rail. Prisoners readily volunteered for the post-execution task of picking up the deceased’s severed head, holding it up by the ears for the rest of the prisoners to see, and declaring “In the name of the Republic, justice is done!”
One prison was enough, so I decided to skip French Guiana’s most famous attraction, the Îles de Salut, on islands off the city of Kourou. (The most famous, Devil’s Island, was for a time the involuntary home of Alfred Dreyfus.) Instead, I decided to tour the Centre Spatial Guyanais in Kourou. The kind workers at the St. Laurent tourist office helped me reserve a room at an apart-hotel called Le Gros Bec (68.90 euros) and figured out how the heck I could get to Kourou without a car. Answer: Samuel Cramer, who worked in the office, was driving there that afternoon and would take me for 15 euros.
Though my transportation woes continued in Kourou, yet another local came to my rescue. How would I get to the space center the next morning? Muriel Lançon, the English-speaking owner of Le Gros Bec, asked one of her guests — who happened to work at the station — to take me to work with him. The tour (free, reservations required) includes a look at mission control and launch sites and was also in French, but one guide spoke English and gave a side narration to me and two Englishmen who were the only non-French visitors I met the whole time. (They were also on their way to the World Cup.)
I finally reached Cayenne, the capital, the evening before I had to leave for Brazil. A shame, since I was looking forward to a day as a South American flâneur, taking advantage of Cayenne’s cafes and pleasant streets.
Cayenne was the only place I had been able to reserve a room, $66 for a completely renovated apartment owned by a couple named Sylviane and Michel. It was in an intriguing neighborhood: working-class, with a diverse population that included Haitians, Dominicans and puppies. Well, just one puppy, 3 months old and very cute, tied up in the courtyard my apartment shared with the owner’s mother. Baguettes were available not from boulangeries but from the Chinese-run grocery stores that are ubiquitous in French Guiana.
Yet again, my transportation problems were solved with local kindness. Michel picked me up from the minimalist bus station, where I arrived in a shared van from Kourou (arranged by Mme. Lançon), and even invited me to dinner that night. We went to Les Palmistes, an elegant colonial residence turned bar and pizzeria on a palm-filled square in the center of town. I had the Campanola, a pie with lardons and round slices of goat cheese, which struck me as just perfect: a sort-of-French dish in place that is sort of France.
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