Heart of Larkness

*Mid-February

Rasping cicadas...the discordant shrieking of a forest-full of birds...I sprawl listlessly, comatose in the heat; it's 85 degrees and 100% humidity at 9am; I am stranded in suburbs with small children...  There is a part of France with with a dark, brutal history: originally a penal colony, French Guiana is where they brought enslaved Africans, dumped and subsequently organized forced labor for thousands of criminals -- or just people they didn't like -- and killed off the native people by design and disease.

Welcome to spring break!  (Mid-winter break?)  One of Jean-François's daughters, along with her husband and two sons, recently began a three-year contract in Cayenne, adjacent to the Amazon rainforest.  And because I will do stupid shit in the name of love (See: letting a guy's yappy dog lick my face; recording a dozen tracks of myself campily singing the word "wasabi;" crossing frozen rivers the condition of whose ice is highly questionable), I bought an expensive plane ticket in order to pretty much be steamed alive.

We alternated several days visiting family with a couple ventures into the semi-wild.  Despite the words "abandon all hope ye who enter here" on loop in my head, we managed several hours of squishing through mud and gnarled roots to see the ruins of prison camps.  That, friends, is the, uh, main tourist attraction.  For you fellow history fans, we slept in an old holding pen within view of the island where Alfred Dreyfus was jailed(!).  To really get that You-Are-There experience, we camped with hammocks, basic provisions, and not enough drinking water.

By far the best part of the trip was the fruit.  Pineapple, melon, mango, guava, rambutan, bananas -- and a green papaya salad/condiment made with garlic, lime juice, and mild pepper.  We bought dried bananas, which were like little sticks of banana-bread-jerky.

It was also the end of Carnaval.  We caught the penultimate parade, a perfect mix of local social clubs and businesses and a few guest appearances by Brazilian marching bands.  A phalanx of all ages beat on oil-barrel-like drums, with lines of sparkly, beplumed dancers.  Sometimes the rhythms of two groups became unwittingly syncopated as the parade slowed and everyone condensed.  This was one of the rare occasions that I awoke from my overheated stupor and moved enthusiastically under the equatorial sun.

We found a wheelbarrow to overturn and weight with rocks to secure our food from monkeys; we made it all the way until after breakfast before having to yell at them, Jean-François pounding his chest like a gorilla

A nighttime jungle walk included snakes, toads, sloths, and the tiniest frog I've ever seen

We went on a boat to look for caimans (alligators, more or less) in the marsh

industrious leaf cutter ants

tropical Dickensian workhouse

(lower-right corner)

Lolling around and reading won out over hiking in the hot mosquitoey rain