I hate beyotches but love turtles!

May 5, 2012:  After a bus and few boat transfers, my friend Jason and I made it to the worn house of a man we arranged to take us to beaches of Matapica on the Atlantic Ocean – the endangered leatherback sea turtle delivery room.  Dropping into his unstable feeling boat that seemed to have a weight capacity of 3 anorexic men, we powered and pushed the boat through the swamps to our campsite.

While taking a extended walk along the beach, I saw many poorly filled turtle delivery craters, hoping that later in the evening we would be lucky enough to spot leatherbacks.  I have never seen one 3-dimensionally – not even at a zoo or watching cartoons, only in photos. According to National Geographic, these turtles are the largest turtles in the world at a length up to 8.5 feet (2.6 meters) and a weighing in around 2,050 pounds (916 kilograms).  Please note that a 1968 Volkswagen Beetle automobile comes in at a mere 1,900 pounds (861 kilograms).

At dusk the wind had eventually come to complete stop and so did everything else.  No more waves breaking on the beach, no more movement of the plants or trees…every became extremely, quiet.  Then it came…buzz, buzz.  Buzzzzzzzz, buzz - buuuuuzz, buzz.  Buzz buzz buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz buzz, buuuuzz buzz and a buzzzzzzzzzz – we were being attacked!  The initial strike by a squadron of female mosquitoes hit us hard…they  stormed the beach in greater numbers than the entire Chinese army.

As I retreated toward our boat, I began to quickly fight back, bathing myself with poisonous chemicals.  Carnage built up on my skin and clothing of the mosquitoes who were too slow to dodge my mammoth hands.  While powering into the heart of the Mosquito army, I tried to keep every inch of skin covered, sitting there wearing my hooded rain jacket and pants on as I was taking a forced piercing whenever the tiniest piece of skin would exposed itself.  I shouldn’t be whining since my friend sat miserably in his shorts and short sleeve shirt slapping the beewillickers out of himself as Ed Norton did in the film Fight Club. He might have been classified as mentally insane by an inexperienced psychologist, but Jason was not crazy…it was more so just a case of poor packing fueled by his hated for women mosquitoes.

With our current objective to locate caiman, though it didn’t matter to me if we saw any caiman – I have seen enough caiman over these past few years. Anyhow, I was more into paddling around the swamp in almost total darkness and sadly hoping to being an eye-witness to a nonlife threatening caiman catching mishap. 

The mosquitoes did not let up and continued to be unbelievably aggressive the entire night.   After almost 3 years of lugging around a head net for facial protection against mosquitoes and with today being perhaps the only day in which I would not have felt not stupid wearing it…can you guess on which day didn’t I have it?

By the end of the night, I saw a leatherback turtle stuck in the mud and even a green turtle laying some eggs.  The green turtles are smaller than the leatherback turtle but still really large.  They can grow up to 5 feet (1.5 meters) long and weigh up to 690 pounds (315 kilograms).  Standing above her, I wonder how they would taste if you fried one of her freshly laid eggs that she was burying?  Are they even edible?  With a less than one percent survival rate to reach adulthood…what is one measly scrambled green turtle egg?  It makes me curious that if supposedly almost everything tastes like chicken…would a green turtle egg also taste like chicken?

In morning I was tired after a night of buzzing mosquitoes sounding as if they were all inside my hammock, feeling as if my entire backside of the hammock can now be effectively used as a strainer from all the micro sized holes that were created from the monster beyotches who stabbed me in the back with their girly parts – scientifically these girly parts are called her mandibles and the maxillae - not boobies.  Where could all of the blood sucking vampires have gone to hide this morning?  Like the once world famous magician David Copperfield, they all seemed to somehow magically disappear.  As Brownsberg National Reserve provided me with the best sighting of insects, Matapica has  by far has been the best place to spot the most aggressive mosquitoes in South America. 

What I do to see zoo quality wildlife amazes me.  It is extremely rewarding, but the mosquitoes this trip reminded me that there is more behind a photo than that of the subject itself.  It is the uncapturable moments and feeling that swirl inside of me that an electronic device can not record.  Last night those mosquitoes tested my mental strength and I can truthfully say that, they won.

I hate beyotches but love turtles!

Two White Men and a Funeral

April 30, 2012:  An evening while staying along the Suriname River we were invited to a party for a corpse  we never met, nor did man who invited us – in short…we were funeral crashers.  It took over an hour to get to this village, traveling somewhere on a long boat, hiking somewhere and then transferring to another boat going somewhere.  I am glad I didn’t lose the group I went with since I would have had the most difficult time asking someone for directions to, somewhere. 

While sitting at an extended picnic like table in some sort of logged community center that served beer from a small opening in the wall, a random man from Guyana came over to talk to me.  Sitting awkwardly close, he would finish every sentence with “Man” and every other sentence making this “pff pff pff” noise such as Hannibal Lector made in film “Silence of the Lambs” when he said “I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.”  It sort of freaked me out as did my friend, Jason - as he so conveniently excluded himself from our conversation. 

The music started at 2am…only a mere 3 hours behind schedule.  I was sadly exhausted and ready to go back to the lodge before midnight.  Standing outside around all of the table clothed wearing woman, I felt as if I was drugged and could barely stay horizontal from exhaustion. 
The music did not encourage the typical mourning dancing (is there even a designated mourning dance?) or even the chaperoned catholic school sort of dancing…it was wining (aka dry humping while vertical).  A strange act to pull off while in public around kids, ancient aging adults and those in actually in mourning.  Learning how to do it while in Trinidad visiting a friend of mine for Carnival, I had a little experience practicing on her Mom, Aunt and her.  Standing around, fighting to stay awake, a few girls crept closer in their table cloth-like clothing, backing up into me for me to hump them – I mean to wine them like a South American street dog.  Wining tip:  While wining, make sure your pockets are empty.  I so awkwardly had a head lamp in my front pocket – so awkward...

Leaving to go back to the village at 4:16am our drunken group included a drunken boat driver suffering from impaired vision.   He had no need for that headlamp I carried around all night or any light for that matter – he did a great job going down the foggy dark river.  He wasn’t concerned since I am quite sure they don’t have breathalyzers in this part of the Amazon.

The next day we headed farther up the Suriname River racking up some more kilometers.  The deeper we powered up the Suriname River on the local super stretched long boat, the more interesting the people watching became.  Women were getting a little National Geographic-like as they began to lose their tops exposing their gargantuan utters that almost touched their ankles while the younger people seemed to not see the purpose to wear anything.  On the stairs of the river banks, the women were busy washing piles upon piles of dishes and what minimal clothes they might have had.  They perfected the skills of balancing big plastic buckets with dishes stacked so high it was as if I was watching a street show without the need to toss change in some sort of cup or dirty receptacle.

By the end of our brief exploration up the Suriname River and its communities, I counted 52 bites on my legs plus 1 on my frankfurter.  Perhaps a bath in DEET is necessary for future explorations. 

To...Somewhere

April 30, 2012:  When standing  on the side of the road with Jason in a small unpopulated area, I waved down anything with 4 wheels going in our direction.  From one vehicle to the next, we hopscotched to the  end of the road at the riverbank of the Suriname River.  

On our journey here, very few people spoke English.  If I knew Dutch or one of the many other indigenous languages that flooded this region, it would have been easier, but not as...interesting.  The plan was to go up to the Suriname River for a few days, spending the night wherever we could - preferably in a small Amerindian or Moroon villages.  Tossing our bags onto a riverboat, off we went to...somewhere. 

The Bible never said anything about God ingesting hallucinogens

April 30, 2012:  The past week was all about pulling knowledge from the brains of several agents working with Paramaribo tour companies and then ultimately dodging them and their exuberant costs for their hand held trips into the Amazon jungle, going freestyle.

Meeting an Australian with a natural born talent for drinking and cheating at Yahtzee, we 1st traveled to Brownsberg Nature Reserve.  This place held a collection of pretty much eventless, bland, calorie whacking trails while sleeping in an open shelter where we were able to hang our hammocks.

Even though the trails did not hold much excitement during the day, in the wee hours of the night, the assortment of insects, reptiles, spiders, poisonous snake and amphibians loitering around made the nature reserve one the most interesting free roaming collection of living creatures I have seen in South America.  The moths were spectacular, looking as if God ingested a batch of hallucinogens and forgot about his original guidelines on how these insects were going to appear - showing what you can do with lots of power and a chemically altered imagination.  Messing up so badly with some of these life forms and not wanting to erase what he has done, he decided to hide them in the Amazon with the hope that nobody in their right mind would see them… 

During my 4 day stay on the reserve, I was a successful paparazzi of insects, capturing over 725 moments including video footage of a murderous lizard stalking my leafy looking muti-legged subject before executing him.  Life as a human can be miserable at times but life as an insect is possibly one of the top 10 miserable lives on the planet. 

Wanted Part-Time: Two large butt cheeks

April 22, 2012:  Ringing the door bell outside a tall gated compound at a not that early 8:15am, I woke up the woman living inside.  Letting me into her compound and giving me the speech that if anything breaks I will have to pay for it, I handed over my driver’s license and signed a paper that contained a variety of linked letters creating words…in Dutch - meaning absolutely nothing to me except for that signing it would get me the bike.

My first stop was the boat dock so that I could cross the Suriname River.  Since not many people were traveling today, I had to wait for the boat to fill up with other paying bodies.  The boatman offered to take me at an inflated “white boy” express rate.  Let the unwanted negotiation games begin, I thought.  I managed to get a 25% discount (more than half the cost of a meal at Burger King) but still too expensive for a mangy backpacker.

Deciding to wait a little bit longer I was afraid to leave thinking as soon as I left, a bunch of people would show up seconds later to share the cost.  So every 5 minutes, I would say 5 more minutes and then another 5 more minutes and another and another, with this time munching cycle continuing to take more and more of the day away from me.  I intended to log a large number of kilometers to reach my time imperative extraction point at a location far far away.  So when  nobody magically appeared, I asked the boat driver if it is possible to ride over this bridge I saw in the distance.  He lifted his shoulders and said he didn’t know – the #@$% he didn’t.  Using my keen sense to point out a liar in languages I don’t speak, I left.  Too bad my superpowers are not as good with detecting lies escaping the lips of a beautiful woman’s mouth – or maybe, most of the time I do know…it is just that I don’t want to know.

Many thousands of circular leg motions helped make it possible for me reach Peperpot to see former slave plantations and a National Reserve where the birds were so loud, that it sounded as if I walked in at some voice amplified mega-grade schools recess.  It was great hearing all of the birds, it is just too bad I couldn’t see many of them since these super mosquitoes were shredding me whenever I would make an extended stop. 
 
My last stop of the day was in town of Nieuw Amsterdam – not knowing I was riding all this distance to see a fort till I actually got there.  Dehydrated and malnourished, it made it difficult for me to walk around in a straight line – a unfortunate common practice for me.

Needing a liter or two of soda to pour down my throat before heading to the shore to start the negotiation process for a boat back to Paramaribo, I visited a Chinese Grocery store.  Here I strangely felt an instant connection with the Chinese woman behind the counter ringing me up.  Maybe it was because she too didn’t speak Dutch well or just that we were both, foreigners.

Making it to my extraction point, a boat sat there waiting for others.   Perfect timing, I thought.  Getting to the balancing beam that was being used as a dock, I slung the bike on my back and sprinted doing a circuslike balancing act.  Just seconds before reaching the boat that had space for me, the man next to him signs him to pull away.  Why!?  The man who pushed the other boat off, then so kindly informed me of his gargantuan “rob me with a smile” fee to go across.  Okay, it was getting late and I sensed that he felt as if he had me.  Little he knew that I was a man with once again, the luxury of time and that I would rather have low crawled on broken glass naked than pay him.

Over an hour went by and it was still just me waiting.  When a different boat did pull into the planks dropping off passengers, I tried to jump on it but was denied boarding his boat after the other boatman said something to him.  That was until the man waiting for me to break down and pay his fee had to briefly pull away to let another boat in.  The guy that just denied me access on his boat quickly ran to the front of the boat as he was pulling away and wanted to know how much I would pay him.  Making it a price that would be worth the potential argument with the other boatman, I was granted permission to come aboard as he rooster tailed me across the river.
 

People with big butts have it made on long bike rides like this.  By the end of the day, my buttocks hurt so bad that I had to shift my weight on the seat from right butt bone to left butt bone.  I rode my bike from 8:45am till about 4:15pm…that is a lot for someone with not much meat on their cheeks.  Clearly I need to eat more candy, ice cream and sweets if I ever want to see my full potential as a long distance bicycle rider.  As for now…wanted part-time:  Two large butt cheeks.

"You think your bleep (aka shit) don't stink, don't you?"

April 21, 2012:  I somehow made it to the capital of Suriname alive and physically unscathed but a mental wreck.  A church authenticated miracle seems to happens here everyday in the Guianas if you make it to your destination unharmed when using public transportation.  A few uncorrupted police officers with a few radar guns could possibly substantially decrease the number of injured and/or dead bodies that litter the sides of the roadways every year. 

Exiting Guyana, immigration didn’t seem to notice the date of my entry stamp.  If so, he just might have seen that I overstayed my visit.  I probably could have made it across the border into Suriname if I had given him a Justin Bieber notebook with my photo pasted in it, name spelt in Crayons and a colorfully dated Hello Kitty stamp in the visa section on one of the back pages.  All that time, work and a legally enforced donation to the Guyanese government for an unnoted “hall pass.”

The fraternity row like streets of old town Paramaribo in Suriname is a refreshing change from the capital of Guyana.  Here I am no longer dodging the fecal bombs that were planted daily if not hourly by some of the drunken mindless homeless people who didn’t have access to a excrement deposit point - which would benefit everyone, giving them an option/opportunity to conveniently direct  their leaky parts in privacy. 

A porcelain toilet is a great underappreciated luxury and depending on the country, its function and looks can be an interesting subject to write or talk about.  Suriname has been unfortunately been influenced by an invention from a possible European Coprophiliac (a person  with an absorbing interest in feces or filth) who created an external siphon jet toilet.  Wikipedia defines it as, “A German style reverse flush toilet which holds the excrement out of the water. This could be to make inspection easier, to reduce splashing, or just tradition. It greatly increases associated odor and may require a brushing after use.”  Yes…there is more.  Wikipedia also states, “This reverse design prevents the occurrence of any splash-up which commonly happens when fecal matter plunges into the standing water in the standard designs (although substantial deposits may cause splash-up problems of their own). The disadvantage is that it also increases the associated odor and may require the use of a brush to remove bits of feces that may have "skid-marked" on the shelf.”

My biggest issue with the external siphon jet toilet is that it can severely limit the time to perform toilet-time activities such as the joy of reading, browsing pictureless magazines, planning future outings and or getting a leg numbing new high game score on some portable electronic gaming device. 

That was a lot of toilet information.  Wikipedia has been a great source of information to me when traveling.  It helps minimize some potentially strange questions over the years. 
I have had someone tell me before, “You think your bleep (aka: shit) don’t stink, don’t you?”  Ummm…I might have said “no” in my teen year, but now…I can confidently say that…it does, it really really does.