Cayenne And It’s Past

French Guiana is a strange place, an anomaly in the 21st century, a piece of France in South America,  and  it feels completely immune to the mystical realism that writers attribute to the rest of the Latin American continent. It has a population of 300,000 French citizens and what struck me as an oddly high proportion of whites where I had expected a colonial infrastructure imposed on a vibrant local population. 

I thought French Guiana would be a more colonial structure as seen on the streets, what I found instead was a piece of South America inhabited by actual people from France, and that I wasn’t expecting.

Five hundred years ago France sent convicts to populate this terrible climate, a place where you got assorted fevers and died or if you survived you could grow food, fell timber and mine gold with subtitles of sweat.   The indigenous population was pushed back to the jungle with the casual brutality of the age and an oddly provincial French lifestyle seems to have become the norm.   

So unlike British Guyana or Dutch Guyana which grew into independence, France hung on to their piece of jungle. The explanation given is that France lost Algeria in the early 1960s to a ferocious demand for self determination which wrecked France’s budding rocket testing facilities in the desert so casting around for a new location for rocket testing and launching facilities they settled on their largely uninhabited chunk of South America. 

And into this jungle they poured money and people. Nowadays 300,000 people live in this overseas department and just like their Guyanese neighbors they all live close to the coast, in this land of no beach access while the interior is mostly forgotten.  

Cayenne, the capital is a largely unremarkable city of 65,000 people living in grid pattern of dowdy drab functional buildings in what could be any French provincial city.  

Outside the market this could be anywhere France with about as much tropical flair as Calais or Lyons or take your pick of any provincial town in the “France of the metropole” as they describe the mother country. 

I have a secret conviction they pay people in gold bullion here as the prices are so high ordinary mortals, like say two retired American civil servants can’t afford to visit here much less settle here were we so inclined. 

A Costco style roast chicken sold whole from a food truck in the parking lot of the Carrefour supermarket is eighteen dollars and we were in a line of people waiting to buy.

Gasoline is eye wateringly expensive at $8:27 a gallon and diesel about $7:60 a gallon and yet this tiny population does nothing but drive. Traffic jams are spectacular especially the commutes in and out of Cayenne but at any time of day you can find yourself idling precious fuel while stuck in a line to nowhere in particular.

But if you don’t have your own wheels, car scooter or most popular is the electric bicycle, the only public transit you’ll find is around the city.  

You catch glimpses of New Orleans in Cayenne’s streets architecture but there is none of the flair of New Orleans, that sense of possibility produced by popular literature of vampires and voodoo and other nonsense that makes a trip to the Crescent City feel like something more than jazz and beignets. Cayenne is a functional administrative center. 

Layne the indefatigable found a museum downtown that laid out a  little of the history of this place.

They brought Europe with them of course, the formal furniture designed for a temperate climate. 

Brick building was a huge industry in the 19th century and they put convicts to work making bricks to build the prisons as well. 

Once a year a Justice of the peace held court in the border at St Laurent du Maroní where the convicts were held along the river bank. This photo shows the local detainees crowding the courthouse as the judge gets the docket up to date. You get the feeling that without prisons French Guiana wouldn’t have stood a chance against the encroachment of the jungle. 

There’s history here, important people, solid buildings, law and justice just like anywhere.  

Sugar cane production:

The masters’ tableware: 

The slaves tableware. 

The artwork of making miniatures inside coconut shells. 

Freedom in 1838 brought new population to Guiana as former slaves decided they would rather retreat to the interior and make their own communities among the local tribes. 

And they made art and their descendants still do. 

We spent a couple of hours pondering this small colorful corner of the city.  I mused on how much it reminded me of New Orleans and the woman in charge laughed pointing out the same roots in a similar climate. 

I have read about protests in Guiana where as in France public dissatisfaction spills over into public protest very easily. There is a feeling that wealth is t trickling down fast enough and that opportunity is stifled here in Guiana. 

One can’t discount protestors feelings when you are an outside observer but I don’t know how they judge these things. I suppose compared to France of the Metropole Guiana could do better but compared to its neighbors Guiana is doing quite well economically. It’s not to say there isn’t poverty and some of it is quite visible but French Guiana is a cut above its neighbors on the development index.  

As a visitor in a camper van I appreciate the roads which aren’t perfect but they aren’t terrible.  If you can pay there are all facilities here including public open spaces, picnic areas and the safety of wild camping for those that want to sleep in their vehicles. 

We braved the heat and tried to sleep while parked at the Dreyfus Tower in Kourou and felt quite safe.  We slept outside Sinnamary also and it is only the internet going humidity that drives us into air conditioned rooms. 

We spent a week in this anomaly in South America, time to gain impressions and resolve nothing.  I found it fascinating. 

We had stuff to see and culture to absorb in our short week in the country. 

Paradoxically our phones quit on us for a very long day.  This happened once before in Quito, the capital of Ecuador when Verizon’s international service went down and we got a taste of how travel used to be. This time our phones stopped working for almost twenty four hours but we’ve covered some ground in the past couple of years so we just kept on keeping on and figured service would be restored. And indeed it was so here is my page up and running again after a bit of a gap. Stuff happens.  Even in French Guiana…