Into the Jungle

After exploring the offshore islands of Isles Salut, Saecwen’s next adventure in French Guiana was to enter the Maroni River, one of a number of major river systems on the north east coast of South America which proliferate between mighty deltas of the Amazon to the south and the Orinoco to the north.

Kayaking up the Maroni river

After a dawn landfall off the mouth of the Maroni, a strong tide took us all the way up to St Laurent de Maroni, 25 miles from the sea. This French frontier post was originally established as the initial reception centre for convicts being transported to Guiana from France. The huge convict reception complex still dominates the centre the town and several scenes of the Papillon movie were filmed here on location. Now its high walls and barred windows provide office space for local businesses as St Laurent bustles with activity, with dozens of trading pirogues each day crossing back and forth to the former Dutch colony, Suriname on the other side of the river.

Carnival practice in Saint Laurent de Maroni

French Guiana is a fully-fledged Département of France, with a very young population of that includes Haitians, Brazilians and Surinamese. While French creole is the main language spoken some families still speak Arawak whose communities date back to pre-colonial times.  We were lucky enough to witness an amazing late night drumming session with big traditional samba style drums alongside brass instruments. 

Saecwen at anchor in Coswine Crique, Maroni River

It was fascinating to see the mainland of French Guiana and the history of the penal colony was still very present. It was also very useful to re-provision the boat. To our delight we found supermarkets stocked with French cheese and local restaurants sporting full French wine lists. However, our real objective in coming to the river was to explore its back country and wildlife.

Osprey in Coswine Creek, Maroni River

So with the boat laden with fresh oranges strung up in our cabin we headed back into river. With a two-meter tide, entering the various side rivers (or Criques) was a little scary given they all had very shallow sand bars across their mouths. But once in, we found very deep water (sometimes exceeding 15 meters).

Sunrise in the Maroni river

The bird life was amazing. Parakeets and bright green parrots would noisily squawk their way home at dawn and dusk. Beautiful ospreys and not so beautiful vultures would soar above us. Several varieties of heron and egret stalked around in the shallows and to our delight we saw a solitary stunning scarlet ibis – although it was disappointing and worrying not to see more given they had been known to proliferate in large numbers along these rivers in the past.

Brown faced Ibis at sunset

We found safe depths in which to anchor the boat and were lucky enough to be the only ones there, aside from one visiting fisherman for a few hours. We were able to explore deep into the surrounding rain forest and mangrove swamps in our kayaks, which was magical. We would loved to have spent more time exploring these rivers. However, the long-range weather forecast was starting to predict volatile activity across our old friend the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone. A series of prolonged thunderstorms and wind squalls were set to develop in the coming days and it was clearly highly advisable to get ahead of this weather to safely push on north.

Little blue heron, White egret, Scarlet Ibis

So, after flogging our way out of the river against a huge spring tide for several hours in company with our Danish friends aboard their 45ft ketch Odara, we headed back out to sea. Next stop: the island of Tobago in the Caribbean, 550 miles to the northwest.