Guyana, Surinam, French Guiana: Tales of a contented conquistador
On a whistle-stop tour of the lesser explored countries of Guyana, Surinam and French Guiana, Chris Moss may not have found the legendary El Dorado – but he did have adventures aplenty.
A maze of wide, deep rivers has slowed down development in the region, but also kept the Guianas greener and cleaner than any other region in South America Photo: ALAMY
Little wonder I had slept through El Dorado. We had flown from London to Amsterdam to Caracas, then to Bolívar on the Orinoco river, and then taken a small plane and a motorboat to get to Angel Falls. I climbed a mountain, took a photo of the waterfall and then went to bed in a hammock.
Next day it was back in the boat and on to another mono-prop. By the time we got on the night bus, I was too weary to be thinking about gold. I only found out we had passed through a town bearing that mythical name when I woke up in the Brazilian city of Boa Vista – which Evelyn Waugh, arriving there in 1932 after an arduous overland trip, had complained wasn't as pleasant as Paris.
There were probably easier ways to get to Guyana, but, according to my guide, Chris Parrott, who was on his fourth trip to the region, that wasn't the point. "It has always been an adventure. Logistics are tricky and discomfort is part of the package and, in any case, to do the Guianas and Angel Falls in one trip you can only come here for about two months of the year because of the weather – it's usually either too dry or too wet."
Chris, co-founder and director of Journey Latin America (JLA), had gone back to his roots. "I came here back in 1975. My overriding memories of that trip are rain, rain, rain – and kids playing cricket in it – and of using a converted military plane to get around. It's easier now, but even the bridge from Brazil into Guyana only opened in 2009."
Last year was JLA's 30th anniversary. Chris wanted to do something special to celebrate it. "I decided to become a tour leader again. When the talk turned to pioneering, I said I'd prove a trip to the three Guianas could be done."
Over two decades, I had been to every other South American country, and at last here was a three-week tour to Guyana, Surinam and French Guiana. They were – are – the three oddballs of Latin American history, where Spanish and Portuguese aren't official languages, where the Hispanic liberators San Martin and Bolívar hadn't helped out, and where you have cricket creases, space rockets and rice and beans instead of football, siestas and empanadas. All of us in the group of 16 well-travelled adventurers – aged between about 30 and 70 – had our own reasons for going. For one it was butterflies and birds. Another was fascinated by Devil's Island. For me it was a new world in the now very familiar New World and a tour – albeit a whistle-stop one – was like a conquest.
Guyana
We took a mini bus from Boa Vista and soon crossed the new road at the border – which looped over itself to deposit us on the left-hand side. A reggae remix of Auld Lang Syne welcomed our group to a town called Lethem. The heat and humidity and the plane-less airstrip were generic Latin America.
But a sign advertising "El Dorado" – a prize-winning Guyanese rum – and lots of rainbow-coloured Rasta hats told me I was in Guyana. A bunch of guys sat under a mango tree at the bus station said "hello", and they said it in English, with a Caribbean creole twang.
Our first stop was Atta Rainforest Lodge, a jungle retreat in the 500,000-acre Iwokrama wilderness reserve. Around the simple chalets strolled tall crested currasows, rooting for insects. Blue Morpho butterflies perched on branches. A red-rumpled agouti (a rodent like a big guinea pig crossed with a squirrel) scuttled up the path as I set out on a canopy walk. These were the flashes of colour trying to get themselves noticed in the dense jungle; otherwise, everything was bottle, emerald, lime, racing or some other shade of green.
Just south of the lodge, I saw the country's most iconic hue – the bright orange of the Guianan cock-of-the-rock. He looked like the sort of bird a child might come up with in crayoning class: a big, odd-shaped head; beady eyes; and feathers a shade of orange somewhere between easyJet and Satsuma.
Climbing up into the hills the next day I could see a lot more of the savannah and, blue in the distance, the Kanuku mountain range. Chris said it was an ancient formation blessed with some of the most pristine wilderness on earth. As always when on a tour, I wanted to stray off the itinerary and go and see these magical-sounding mountains – but it was not to be. We had a schedule to keep, things to tick off.
Guyana's capital has more old, wooden houses than any city I've visited, and has a dilapidated, melancholy air that reminded me of Havana. In the tepid ponds of the city's main park were manatees and a caiman and a humidity that wrapped itself around you like a coat; Georgetown, a former plantation settlement built on floodplains, seemed vulnerable, as if the sea might come in at any moment and reclaim it; if the jungle didn't arrive first, that is.
Despite having some open drains where there should have been pavements, it's a great city for walking. I paid my respects at the Bourda Cricket Club ground. I explored the Starbroek market, treading carefully on broken floorboards through which I could see the flowing Demerara river. I visited the local museum – a brilliant, chaotic assortment of stuff, with the governor's old Rolls parked beside a cabinet containing a half-stuffed boa constrictor. I finished my tour with a trip to the Castellani House art gallery, where several paintings told of a struggle with the relentless greenery of the jungle.
When I left the gallery a storm was arriving from the interior. Georgetown looked like a study in Gothic tropical. I beat a path through the ramshackle suburbs and made for a jazz bar where I got to try that award-winning rum.
Surinam
"Guianas" means "land of flowing waters" in the native Taino language, and on the road from Georgetown into Surinam we crossed a lot of them. The maze of wide, deep rivers has slowed down development in the region, but also kept the Guianas greener and cleaner than any other region in South America.
The Dutch, of course, know more about water management than most, and once we had crossed the border – at a place called South Drain – the roads were smooth. There were Dutch-style churches raised on stilts to prevent any flood damage. There were sleeping policemen to slow us down, too. Later, in the suburbs of the capital, Paramaribo, came modern factories and Chinese supermarkets, swastika-bearing Hindu temples and mosques topped by crescent moons. It seemed the Dutch had shipped in people from all over the colonies, and now the Surinamese had developed industries to employ them.
Beside Fort Zeelandia (formerly Fort Willoughby, built by British colonists in 1651) Paramaribo contains some fine examples of Surinamese architecture: white clapperboard houses with red zinc rooftops, Demerara shutters (angled to house blocks of ice that cooled the incoming sea breezes), picket-style fencing and ornate gables.
Unesco World Heritage status and funds from Conservation International have encouraged Paramaribo's municipal authorities to protect its buildings. The old town and the waterfront are full of carefully preserved colonial mansions now occupied by government ministries. After Georgetown, there was something rather solid and safe-looking about Paramaribo. There was a stylish European-style café selling real espressos. It was all quite posh.
To the south was a shoddier, more modern district, better for shopping and getting a sense of the rich mixture of Surinam's people – Maroons and Creoles, Indonesians and Chinese, French and Dutch. On a hyperactive shopping street I bought a parrot-green Surinam football shirt – Clarence Seedorf, Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink and many other footballing stars were born in this far-flung former colony, but opted to play for Holland.
I stayed in Paramaribo for only a weekend, but got the impression of a confident city. On the Saturday night there was a gig at the St Peter and St Paul cathedral, which was being inaugurated after renovations. The atmosphere was part church fete, part pop concert, with a boy band playing trumpets, pinafored hostesses dispensing canapés, and lots of grandees from Surinam and across the Dutch Caribbean in attendance, including a cardinal and his rich-looking white friends from the Antilles. Surinam has been independent since 1975, but in matters of church and state de blanken still seem to hold sway.
But civilised, stylish Paramaribo is an exception to the rule in Surinam. A striking map in my hotel showed the country from space – a dot of light on the coast and then nothing but darkness. In his The Discovery of Guiana, published in 1596, Walter Raleigh remarked, "[Guiana] hath the strongest situation of any region under the sun, and is environed with impassable mountains on every side." He noted, with some satisfaction, the repeated and futile attempts by the Spaniards to "attempt" the Guianas. During his first voyage, in 1595, Raleigh was assured by natives that "the golden parts" of Guiana lay deep in the dark interior. Twenty years later, James I gave his support for a second voyage to find El Dorado. The expedition failed and Raleigh went to the scaffold.
The Surinamese commemorate Raleigh's exploits at Raleighvallen – Raleigh Falls – a nature reserve in that interior. Too far off our coastal route to visit, it was yet another place I had to limit myself to dreaming about. If El Dorado sustained the adventurers of the past, the notion of wonder keeps the contemporary traveller going; I began to hatch plans to come back to Surinam and explore the places where no light was shining.
We travelled along another highway following signs for "Frans-Guyana". Just short of the border – another river crossing, this time by motor canoe – I swapped my Guyanese and Surinamese dollars for euros. I felt as though we were getting closer to home, which was comforting and discomfiting at the same time; what on earth was a colony still doing in the right-hand corner of South America?
French Guiana
"Liberte, Égalité, Fraternité" was stencilled on the side of a small government building five minutes' walk from the border post at Le Juliette. Two minutes' walk away was the transportation camp of St Laurent du Marconi. This huge prison processed 70,000 convicted criminals and political prisoners between 1852 and 1953. Weather-beaten signs hinted at the life – of sorts – lived by the inmates.
"Cuisine" was visible above the door of an oxblood-coloured building. Another sign pointed towards the guillotine. There was a dining room, a library, a lavatory, a bathing area, a clothing store and an anthropometric centre, where convicts' brains and physiognomies were measured by doctors trying to devise a scientific profile of criminality.
After a walk around the camp – there were no other visitors during the hour or so we spent there – I strolled over to a boulangerie to get a quiche. It was delicious, the best snack I'd eaten in the Guianas. There was further evidence of French influence: good roads; smart buses; EU flags and "F" registration plates; Tricolores on official buildings; Renaults and Citroëns.
A two-hour bus trip to the east was Kourou, the town where Ariane rockets are launched. A Milton Keynes kind of place, it is a strange and unharmonious conurbation dumped in the Guyanese jungle. I went on a tour of the launch pads and control rooms, but we weren't allowed anywhere near the one rocket being prepared for flight as it was already fuelled and off limits to all but key personnel.
Kourou was also the departure point for the second – and, often, final – stage in the human horror that started in St Laurent. In the morning we took a boat out to the prisons of Iles du Salut. As the haze cleared, three islands came into view. To our left was Île Royale, where the administration buildings were located, and to our right Île Saint-Joseph, where the main prison was built. Beyond these, barely visible as you approach by sea – and in any case closed to visitors because of poor moorings – was Île du Diable (Devil's Island), reserved for political prisoners.
We began with a walk up to the ruins of Île Saint-Joseph, atop a low hill. The yellow-orange paintwork was distressed after half a century of exposure to sea breezes, and thick lianas and tree-roots had invaded the site. The iron bars in cell windows were rusty but still unbending; the inhumanly tiny cells were open to the sky.
On Île Royale I saw the solitary confinement cells, bereft of natural light. In the entrance to the prison chapel were postcards of paintings by Frank Lagrange, a convict who had applied his forging talents to art. In a series of vividly painted tableaux, he showed convicts arriving in shackles, being put to work breaking stones, getting into fistfights, trying to escape and being recaptured. From the northern side of the island I had my fill of Devil's Island, imagining solitary Dreyfus eking out his days in the 1890s. The juxtaposition of the architecture of incarceration and the turquoise sea was like a sick joke.
A memorable day ended with a memorable meal back on the mainland. At a strip-lit restaurant called Le Flamengo, the specialities were local game, including peccary, armadillo, iguana and capybara. I had armadillo and chips, and John ordered paca and chips – paca turned out to be another rodent, and its meat was tender with a rich, gamy flavour. Armadillo was nice, too, but the armoured feet got stuck between my teeth.
Cayenne, just along the coast from Kourou, was a synthesis of Georgetown's shabby gentility and Paramaribo's wealthy European veneer. There was an elegant bar-café opposite the palm gardens, where I spent an indolent afternoon. People-watching revealed that the Cayennaise dress less smartly than the Georgetowners – proof they were fully paid-up members of Europe – and also that Cayenne boasted more beggars than the other two capitals.
Almost opposite was the Musée Départemental, home to a tiny display of artefacts relating to slavery and an impressive collection of butterflies and other insects – and the originals of Lagrange's paintings.
On my way back from the café, I noticed a sign for El Dorado. In my beginning was my end. I'd slept through it, drunk it, read about it. Now it was a shabby supermarket. But the recurring motif made sense. El Dorado was an elusive destination, but the Guianas, with their fast-flowing rivers, impenetrable jungles, tall mountains and general separateness, were the most obvious region in which to hide a Golden Man and a gilded city.
And had I found my new New World? Well, yes, in 21 days I had seen cultures and people, heard languages and music, tasted meals (and rums), and felt and thought many things that told me the Guianas had little in common with Argentina, Peru or Colombia – so I was a contented conquistador.
Many of my fellow travellers said they would definitely return to explore the region further, especially Guyana – being able to speak English while in Latin America has obvious appeal.
On the last evening we went to a smart restaurant with a haughty sommelier and ate easily the best meal of the trip; if Evelyn Waugh had made it as far as the capital of Guyane française he might, with the help of a few good Armagnacs, have thought he had arrived in Paris after all.
Essentials
Chris Moss travelled with Journey Latin America (020 8747 8315; www.journeylatinamerica.co.uk). The company still has spaces on its next tour of Guyana, Surinam and French Guiana, the 20-day "Coq of the Walk" trip, departing on September 28. It costs from £3,998 per person, including flights, transfers, accommodation and some meals.
Flights
Air France flies Paris Orly-Cayenne seven times a week, with returns from Heathrow from £940. KLM flies Amsterdam Schipol-Paramaribo five times a week: from Heathrow return from £996. To fly from Britain to Georgetown involves changing planes in Barbados, Port of Spain or in the US.
Reading
Wild Coast, a new travelogue by John Gimlette (Profile, £15), is a lively celebration of Guyana's isolation and individuality. Evelyn Waugh's 92 Days (Serif, £9.99) is full of insights, intelligent asides and remarks about "savages". Andrew Westoll's Surinam (Old Street, £10.99) is the only English-language travelogue dedicated to that country, a passionate, well-researched and often moving account of a personal journey. Ruth Harris's The Man on Devil's Island, (Penguin, £14.99) is the latest addition to the extensive bibliography about the Dreyfus case, and provides fresh insights as well as new material.
Guidebooks
Guyana (Bradt, £15.99); South American Handbook (Footprint, £22.50).
Health
Yellow-fever vaccinations are recommended for the Guianas; malaria prophylaxis for visits to any of the countries. Rabies jabs are not required unless you are likely to be two to three days' travel from a clinic. See www.fitfortravel.nhs.uk.
When to go
The Guianas are outside the hurricane zone, but there are rains, sometimes heavy, from May to August. The temperature is 20-30C (70-85F) year round.
On a whistle-stop tour of the lesser explored countries of Guyana, Surinam and French Guiana, Chris Moss may not have found the legendary El Dorado – but he did have adventures aplenty.
A maze of wide, deep rivers has slowed down development in the region, but also kept the Guianas greener and cleaner than any other region in South America Photo: ALAMYLittle wonder I had slept through El Dorado. We had flown from London to Amsterdam to Caracas, then to Bolívar on the Orinoco river, and then taken a small plane and a motorboat to get to Angel Falls. I climbed a mountain, took a photo of the waterfall and then went to bed in a hammock.
Next day it was back in the boat and on to another mono-prop. By the time we got on the night bus, I was too weary to be thinking about gold. I only found out we had passed through a town bearing that mythical name when I woke up in the Brazilian city of Boa Vista – which Evelyn Waugh, arriving there in 1932 after an arduous overland trip, had complained wasn't as pleasant as Paris.
There were probably easier ways to get to Guyana, but, according to my guide, Chris Parrott, who was on his fourth trip to the region, that wasn't the point. "It has always been an adventure. Logistics are tricky and discomfort is part of the package and, in any case, to do the Guianas and Angel Falls in one trip you can only come here for about two months of the year because of the weather – it's usually either too dry or too wet."
Chris, co-founder and director of Journey Latin America (JLA), had gone back to his roots. "I came here back in 1975. My overriding memories of that trip are rain, rain, rain – and kids playing cricket in it – and of using a converted military plane to get around. It's easier now, but even the bridge from Brazil into Guyana only opened in 2009."
Last year was JLA's 30th anniversary. Chris wanted to do something special to celebrate it. "I decided to become a tour leader again. When the talk turned to pioneering, I said I'd prove a trip to the three Guianas could be done."
Over two decades, I had been to every other South American country, and at last here was a three-week tour to Guyana, Surinam and French Guiana. They were – are – the three oddballs of Latin American history, where Spanish and Portuguese aren't official languages, where the Hispanic liberators San Martin and Bolívar hadn't helped out, and where you have cricket creases, space rockets and rice and beans instead of football, siestas and empanadas. All of us in the group of 16 well-travelled adventurers – aged between about 30 and 70 – had our own reasons for going. For one it was butterflies and birds. Another was fascinated by Devil's Island. For me it was a new world in the now very familiar New World and a tour – albeit a whistle-stop one – was like a conquest.
Guyana
We took a mini bus from Boa Vista and soon crossed the new road at the border – which looped over itself to deposit us on the left-hand side. A reggae remix of Auld Lang Syne welcomed our group to a town called Lethem. The heat and humidity and the plane-less airstrip were generic Latin America.
But a sign advertising "El Dorado" – a prize-winning Guyanese rum – and lots of rainbow-coloured Rasta hats told me I was in Guyana. A bunch of guys sat under a mango tree at the bus station said "hello", and they said it in English, with a Caribbean creole twang.
Our first stop was Atta Rainforest Lodge, a jungle retreat in the 500,000-acre Iwokrama wilderness reserve. Around the simple chalets strolled tall crested currasows, rooting for insects. Blue Morpho butterflies perched on branches. A red-rumpled agouti (a rodent like a big guinea pig crossed with a squirrel) scuttled up the path as I set out on a canopy walk. These were the flashes of colour trying to get themselves noticed in the dense jungle; otherwise, everything was bottle, emerald, lime, racing or some other shade of green.
Just south of the lodge, I saw the country's most iconic hue – the bright orange of the Guianan cock-of-the-rock. He looked like the sort of bird a child might come up with in crayoning class: a big, odd-shaped head; beady eyes; and feathers a shade of orange somewhere between easyJet and Satsuma.
Climbing up into the hills the next day I could see a lot more of the savannah and, blue in the distance, the Kanuku mountain range. Chris said it was an ancient formation blessed with some of the most pristine wilderness on earth. As always when on a tour, I wanted to stray off the itinerary and go and see these magical-sounding mountains – but it was not to be. We had a schedule to keep, things to tick off.
Guyana's capital has more old, wooden houses than any city I've visited, and has a dilapidated, melancholy air that reminded me of Havana. In the tepid ponds of the city's main park were manatees and a caiman and a humidity that wrapped itself around you like a coat; Georgetown, a former plantation settlement built on floodplains, seemed vulnerable, as if the sea might come in at any moment and reclaim it; if the jungle didn't arrive first, that is.
Despite having some open drains where there should have been pavements, it's a great city for walking. I paid my respects at the Bourda Cricket Club ground. I explored the Starbroek market, treading carefully on broken floorboards through which I could see the flowing Demerara river. I visited the local museum – a brilliant, chaotic assortment of stuff, with the governor's old Rolls parked beside a cabinet containing a half-stuffed boa constrictor. I finished my tour with a trip to the Castellani House art gallery, where several paintings told of a struggle with the relentless greenery of the jungle.
When I left the gallery a storm was arriving from the interior. Georgetown looked like a study in Gothic tropical. I beat a path through the ramshackle suburbs and made for a jazz bar where I got to try that award-winning rum.
Surinam
"Guianas" means "land of flowing waters" in the native Taino language, and on the road from Georgetown into Surinam we crossed a lot of them. The maze of wide, deep rivers has slowed down development in the region, but also kept the Guianas greener and cleaner than any other region in South America.
The Dutch, of course, know more about water management than most, and once we had crossed the border – at a place called South Drain – the roads were smooth. There were Dutch-style churches raised on stilts to prevent any flood damage. There were sleeping policemen to slow us down, too. Later, in the suburbs of the capital, Paramaribo, came modern factories and Chinese supermarkets, swastika-bearing Hindu temples and mosques topped by crescent moons. It seemed the Dutch had shipped in people from all over the colonies, and now the Surinamese had developed industries to employ them.
Beside Fort Zeelandia (formerly Fort Willoughby, built by British colonists in 1651) Paramaribo contains some fine examples of Surinamese architecture: white clapperboard houses with red zinc rooftops, Demerara shutters (angled to house blocks of ice that cooled the incoming sea breezes), picket-style fencing and ornate gables.
Unesco World Heritage status and funds from Conservation International have encouraged Paramaribo's municipal authorities to protect its buildings. The old town and the waterfront are full of carefully preserved colonial mansions now occupied by government ministries. After Georgetown, there was something rather solid and safe-looking about Paramaribo. There was a stylish European-style café selling real espressos. It was all quite posh.
To the south was a shoddier, more modern district, better for shopping and getting a sense of the rich mixture of Surinam's people – Maroons and Creoles, Indonesians and Chinese, French and Dutch. On a hyperactive shopping street I bought a parrot-green Surinam football shirt – Clarence Seedorf, Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink and many other footballing stars were born in this far-flung former colony, but opted to play for Holland.
I stayed in Paramaribo for only a weekend, but got the impression of a confident city. On the Saturday night there was a gig at the St Peter and St Paul cathedral, which was being inaugurated after renovations. The atmosphere was part church fete, part pop concert, with a boy band playing trumpets, pinafored hostesses dispensing canapés, and lots of grandees from Surinam and across the Dutch Caribbean in attendance, including a cardinal and his rich-looking white friends from the Antilles. Surinam has been independent since 1975, but in matters of church and state de blanken still seem to hold sway.
But civilised, stylish Paramaribo is an exception to the rule in Surinam. A striking map in my hotel showed the country from space – a dot of light on the coast and then nothing but darkness. In his The Discovery of Guiana, published in 1596, Walter Raleigh remarked, "[Guiana] hath the strongest situation of any region under the sun, and is environed with impassable mountains on every side." He noted, with some satisfaction, the repeated and futile attempts by the Spaniards to "attempt" the Guianas. During his first voyage, in 1595, Raleigh was assured by natives that "the golden parts" of Guiana lay deep in the dark interior. Twenty years later, James I gave his support for a second voyage to find El Dorado. The expedition failed and Raleigh went to the scaffold.
The Surinamese commemorate Raleigh's exploits at Raleighvallen – Raleigh Falls – a nature reserve in that interior. Too far off our coastal route to visit, it was yet another place I had to limit myself to dreaming about. If El Dorado sustained the adventurers of the past, the notion of wonder keeps the contemporary traveller going; I began to hatch plans to come back to Surinam and explore the places where no light was shining.
We travelled along another highway following signs for "Frans-Guyana". Just short of the border – another river crossing, this time by motor canoe – I swapped my Guyanese and Surinamese dollars for euros. I felt as though we were getting closer to home, which was comforting and discomfiting at the same time; what on earth was a colony still doing in the right-hand corner of South America?
French Guiana
"Liberte, Égalité, Fraternité" was stencilled on the side of a small government building five minutes' walk from the border post at Le Juliette. Two minutes' walk away was the transportation camp of St Laurent du Marconi. This huge prison processed 70,000 convicted criminals and political prisoners between 1852 and 1953. Weather-beaten signs hinted at the life – of sorts – lived by the inmates.
"Cuisine" was visible above the door of an oxblood-coloured building. Another sign pointed towards the guillotine. There was a dining room, a library, a lavatory, a bathing area, a clothing store and an anthropometric centre, where convicts' brains and physiognomies were measured by doctors trying to devise a scientific profile of criminality.
After a walk around the camp – there were no other visitors during the hour or so we spent there – I strolled over to a boulangerie to get a quiche. It was delicious, the best snack I'd eaten in the Guianas. There was further evidence of French influence: good roads; smart buses; EU flags and "F" registration plates; Tricolores on official buildings; Renaults and Citroëns.
A two-hour bus trip to the east was Kourou, the town where Ariane rockets are launched. A Milton Keynes kind of place, it is a strange and unharmonious conurbation dumped in the Guyanese jungle. I went on a tour of the launch pads and control rooms, but we weren't allowed anywhere near the one rocket being prepared for flight as it was already fuelled and off limits to all but key personnel.
Kourou was also the departure point for the second – and, often, final – stage in the human horror that started in St Laurent. In the morning we took a boat out to the prisons of Iles du Salut. As the haze cleared, three islands came into view. To our left was Île Royale, where the administration buildings were located, and to our right Île Saint-Joseph, where the main prison was built. Beyond these, barely visible as you approach by sea – and in any case closed to visitors because of poor moorings – was Île du Diable (Devil's Island), reserved for political prisoners.
We began with a walk up to the ruins of Île Saint-Joseph, atop a low hill. The yellow-orange paintwork was distressed after half a century of exposure to sea breezes, and thick lianas and tree-roots had invaded the site. The iron bars in cell windows were rusty but still unbending; the inhumanly tiny cells were open to the sky.
On Île Royale I saw the solitary confinement cells, bereft of natural light. In the entrance to the prison chapel were postcards of paintings by Frank Lagrange, a convict who had applied his forging talents to art. In a series of vividly painted tableaux, he showed convicts arriving in shackles, being put to work breaking stones, getting into fistfights, trying to escape and being recaptured. From the northern side of the island I had my fill of Devil's Island, imagining solitary Dreyfus eking out his days in the 1890s. The juxtaposition of the architecture of incarceration and the turquoise sea was like a sick joke.
A memorable day ended with a memorable meal back on the mainland. At a strip-lit restaurant called Le Flamengo, the specialities were local game, including peccary, armadillo, iguana and capybara. I had armadillo and chips, and John ordered paca and chips – paca turned out to be another rodent, and its meat was tender with a rich, gamy flavour. Armadillo was nice, too, but the armoured feet got stuck between my teeth.
Cayenne, just along the coast from Kourou, was a synthesis of Georgetown's shabby gentility and Paramaribo's wealthy European veneer. There was an elegant bar-café opposite the palm gardens, where I spent an indolent afternoon. People-watching revealed that the Cayennaise dress less smartly than the Georgetowners – proof they were fully paid-up members of Europe – and also that Cayenne boasted more beggars than the other two capitals.
Almost opposite was the Musée Départemental, home to a tiny display of artefacts relating to slavery and an impressive collection of butterflies and other insects – and the originals of Lagrange's paintings.
On my way back from the café, I noticed a sign for El Dorado. In my beginning was my end. I'd slept through it, drunk it, read about it. Now it was a shabby supermarket. But the recurring motif made sense. El Dorado was an elusive destination, but the Guianas, with their fast-flowing rivers, impenetrable jungles, tall mountains and general separateness, were the most obvious region in which to hide a Golden Man and a gilded city.
And had I found my new New World? Well, yes, in 21 days I had seen cultures and people, heard languages and music, tasted meals (and rums), and felt and thought many things that told me the Guianas had little in common with Argentina, Peru or Colombia – so I was a contented conquistador.
Many of my fellow travellers said they would definitely return to explore the region further, especially Guyana – being able to speak English while in Latin America has obvious appeal.
On the last evening we went to a smart restaurant with a haughty sommelier and ate easily the best meal of the trip; if Evelyn Waugh had made it as far as the capital of Guyane française he might, with the help of a few good Armagnacs, have thought he had arrived in Paris after all.
Essentials
Chris Moss travelled with Journey Latin America (020 8747 8315; www.journeylatinamerica.co.uk). The company still has spaces on its next tour of Guyana, Surinam and French Guiana, the 20-day "Coq of the Walk" trip, departing on September 28. It costs from £3,998 per person, including flights, transfers, accommodation and some meals.
Flights
Air France flies Paris Orly-Cayenne seven times a week, with returns from Heathrow from £940. KLM flies Amsterdam Schipol-Paramaribo five times a week: from Heathrow return from £996. To fly from Britain to Georgetown involves changing planes in Barbados, Port of Spain or in the US.
Reading
Wild Coast, a new travelogue by John Gimlette (Profile, £15), is a lively celebration of Guyana's isolation and individuality. Evelyn Waugh's 92 Days (Serif, £9.99) is full of insights, intelligent asides and remarks about "savages". Andrew Westoll's Surinam (Old Street, £10.99) is the only English-language travelogue dedicated to that country, a passionate, well-researched and often moving account of a personal journey. Ruth Harris's The Man on Devil's Island, (Penguin, £14.99) is the latest addition to the extensive bibliography about the Dreyfus case, and provides fresh insights as well as new material.
Guidebooks
Guyana (Bradt, £15.99); South American Handbook (Footprint, £22.50).
Health
Yellow-fever vaccinations are recommended for the Guianas; malaria prophylaxis for visits to any of the countries. Rabies jabs are not required unless you are likely to be two to three days' travel from a clinic. See www.fitfortravel.nhs.uk.
When to go
The Guianas are outside the hurricane zone, but there are rains, sometimes heavy, from May to August. The temperature is 20-30C (70-85F) year round.