Le Marché de Cayenne

 I haven’t figured out why but the market in Cayenne, the capital of French Guiana is one of my favorite markets we’ve seen in months of back roads travel in South America. It’s part outdoors and part indoors spread over a city block.

Most often when we’ve gone to market the vendors are the producers, workers and farmers but here in Cayenne the vendors are all that as well as Vietnamese, Laotians, whites and Afro-Caribbeans, which gives the market an unusually vibrant varied selling market. We had lots of fun with Layne yelling for me to translate prices much to the amusement of bystanders.

I don’t wear hats, but if I did: 

We got some appetizers to go to make dinner at our air bnb. France colonized Vietnam (Indochina) until 1954 when they were trounced at Dien Bien Fu and gave up which made room for the US to have a go. Consequently there is plenty of southeast Asian influence here. 

There is a Laotian Hmong community in Guiana for the sane reason and we plan to visit them Sunday when they have their own market in the town of Cacao. A touch of Laos won’t hurt. 

How we found parking I don’t know but we saw a space in an alley and dived in. After all this time we don’t get too easily intimated when it comes to parking GANNET2 in small spaces. The space in front of the van was occupied when we arrived but we got in anyway. 

The rest of Cayenne is not so interesting unfortunately though there are a few large imposing buildings in the heart of old town. 

From the market we decided to have lunch at the high end across town at La Villa which Layne said was highly rated. We liked it. 

Fish croquettes. 

Fish soup. We shared each course.

Fried red snapper.

Beef bourguignon on rice. 

Layne had chocolate…

While I had vanilla and hazelnut. 

Coffee and a hundred dollar check. It was a splurge and we enjoyed it with a bottle of Viognier. This is France after all. We left Rusty at home as he had shown no interest in coming with us. We turned off the a/c and left the door open. He was in his favorite spot: 

We are in France so we wanted  to check it out.  We spent $17 for dinner at the market so we cross between aspects of the culture.