We’ve been on the road over two years now, and it’s gone pretty well, all things considered. For instance, we nearly always rely on public transportation. But then we met the Guianas.
Guianas Travel: You Can’t Get There From Here
To say that travel without a car is hard in the Guianas is an understatement. We struggled with nearly every aspect of getting around. And in at least one case, we failed completely. We tried to make plans before we got to the Guianas and we were successful – with some persistence – in arranging a few individual tours. For the rest, we assumed that once on the ground there, we would be fine. Wrong!
To begin with, going from one city to another in a single day was often impossible, even from capital to capital. In talking to people we discovered that it’s because there is not much travel between these countries. Each seems much more intimately attached to its European counterpart. The flights reflect this: it is easier to go to Paris from Cayenne than it is to go to Paramaribo. Likewise, it’s easier to get from Paramaribo to Amsterdam than it is to get to Cayenne. There are flights from Georgetown to Paramaribo, but that’s about it.
Ground transportation from Suriname to Guyana involves a bus, then a ferry, then another bus. But the individual parts don’t always coordinate well with one another. The single daily ferry from Guyana to Suriname leaves at 11:30 a.m. Which means you need to catch a bus from Georgetown at 5:30 a.m. And, of course, that bus is usually full.
Then there are occasional problems with visas. It was easy enough, and cheap enough, to fly from Georgetown to Paramaribo. We needed a visa for Suriname, and an on-line search assured us that we could get the visa in Paramaribo. Imagine our surprise when the gentleman behind the counter in Georgetown said that he could not check us in without a visa. He did suggest we could get one on our phones, but that was hardly easy, and we were racing against the clock.
Once we got them – half an hour before boarding(!) – he told us he needed a paper copy. No doubt because he was sick of us, and because we looked so pathetic, he offered to print them for us. Which took far longer than you can possibly imagine. This entire process wasn’t nearly as much fun as we’ve made it sound here. When we landed in Paramaribo we saw the booths where you could get the needed visa – but they had been closed some time ago, and no one had ever bothered to update the website.
Guianas Transportation: Or from Here Either
When we were in Cayenne, we were keen to get to Kourou, where the European Space Agency is. (Most people aren’t aware that this place sends more satellites into space than anywhere else in the world.) It’s only about 90 km (56 mi) from Cayenne. We had heard there was a direct bus, but didn’t have the number. So we went to the tourist office where a very helpful person told us that we could take the number 5 bus from Cayenne and it would bring us straight to the spaceport. When she brought out the timetables, it turned out that the bus ran only two times a day: one got us there five hours before the tour, the other half an hour after it started.
No problem, she said: we could take a taxi. We could splurge on that, we thought. Wrong again: the taxi was €140 one-way! So we decided to take the early bus. She directed us to the city’s transportation centre, to ‘check on the buses’. There another very helpful man told us that the number 5 was not running. Today, we asked? No, he said, it no longer runs at all. But, he added helpfully, we could take the number 7. Ah, would that bring us to the spaceport? No: it would take us to a neighbouring town, from which we could take a – you guessed it – taxi. Neither of these two people had much sense of how we might get back.
So, if we were travel in the Guianas again, would we rent a car? Sure, but even that’s not a complete solution, since the roads are not great, and many of the places you would want to go in the interior cannot be reached by car. We couldn’t have driven to any of the most amazing places places we saw. For those we needed to travel by river and, in at least one case, airplane. But if you want to explore one of the cities and its surroundings, a car does make sense.
Money: It’s Like Being in Europe, 20 Years Ago
The distances between the capitals of the Guianas are not all that great, but it’s nevertheless necessary to use a different currency in each. This is a much less serious problem, but it was kind of a pain. In Guyana (where they use the Guyanese dollar (US$1 = 200, £1 = 265), everyone wants cash, including most tour operators and hotels. You can’t get the currency in advance, and the ATM in the airport doesn’t take most U.S. or European cards. Not a problem, perhaps, except that in the entire city of Georgetown we were able to find only a single bank (Scotia) that would accept our cards.
Suriname uses its own dollar (US$1 = 32, £1 = 40). There was less of a focus on cash, which is good because we spent a full morning going to every ATM we could find in Paramaribo (ten of them, from six different banks), but none would give us money. In a last-ditch attempt we tried one we had previously been to, asked for the equivalent of US$150 and did not ask for a receipt. Miraculously, it worked. (Perhaps we shouldn’t have been asking for a receipt all along?)
Cayenne uses the Euro and cards are widespread, so no troubles there. And all in all, money issues were a minor annoyance rather than a serious problem.
So we have learned quite a useful number of things about practical matters in our visit to the Guianas. It’s not clear that we’ll ever have the chance to use them, since we’re not likely to return. But perhaps our experiences can make yours a lot more pleasant. Our main advice is to forget the map: rather than thinking you are in South America, and overland travel is possible, consider the Guianas to be part of the Caribbean, and don’t expect to visit them all in a single trip, unless you have a lot of time and a lot of patience.
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