Well, they’re both things we saw in French Guiana. Beyond that, though we’re not quite sure either – though tour companies (including the one we took) regularly combine them. So, after our time in Suriname, we went, by minibus, boat, and taxi to visit the last of the Guyanas.
Galibi
Galibi is a Carib village in Suriname, accessible only by boat, and it’s where we spent our turtle-watching night. This time, our accommodations included real beds, electricity (yay for fans!) only in the evenings, and communal showers elsewhere. And the village itself was beautiful, right near a lovely beach and with tons of flowers and birds. Also, a guy with a sloth, who was seeking beer-money in exchange for allowing people to take their picture with it.
Turtles
This was the big draw, not surprisingly: the chance to see leatherback and other turtles lay their eggs in the middle of the night. And we had only one chance. Luckily, our splendid guide (the same one from our first jungle trip in Suriname) came through for us. (Regular light upsets these hard-working turtles, which is why our pictures are in red light.) It took us a while to find a turtle and then we found another. We were also lucky enough to see the turtle make her way back to the water, slow and awkward until she plunged into the water and disappeared under out boat (below).
Guianese Prison Camps
Guiana is famous for its prisons, and not in a good way. Once the French abolished slavery (1848), they had a whole lot of land to be worked and no people to do it. The British and Dutch, in a similar situation, resorted to indentured servitude, but Napoleon decided to use prison labour. This also solved the problem of prison overcrowding in France. Repeat offenders, usually for crimes like vagrancy and theft, sentenced to hard labour, put on boats, and sent west. Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, on the Marowijne river bordering Guiana and Suriname, was the receiving point. These prisoners built the majority of the buildings in town.
With (apparently) no sense of irony, the French sent the most serious offenders to the Îles du Salut (Salvation Islands), where, provided with farming implements and seeds, they fended for themselves. Political prisoners also often went there too.
The various prison camps were in operation for just about a hundred years, from 1854 to 1946, and about 70,000 men in all lived in them, the vast majority of them men of colour.
One of those men was Henri Charrière (1906-1973), aka Papillon. The story of his several alleged escapes from the inescapable islands is excellent reading/viewing, even if not much of it is true (watch the classic!). During our visit to the museum in Cayenne, there was an exhibition of paintings by Francis Lagrange (1900-1964) in the 1940s, portraying daily life in the Guianese penal colony where he was sent for forgery. The paintings are noteworthy for their unsentimental detail. But Lagrange also wrote a book claiming that the life of an inmate was not actually very difficult. It’s not surprising, then, that many think the paintings were done to appeal to popular opinions about the prisons.
It’s clear – as Lagrange says in his book – that escaping from the prisons on the mainland was not actually all that difficult; many of the inmates went on voyages to the interior, or worked in various towns. But staying escaped, he said, that was the hard part!
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