#30 - TALES FROM THE FIELD #2

Our 2012 Suriname adventure was an incredibly successful field trip. We found tarantulas, reptiles and amphibians that I had dreamed about seeing in nature. But as with all field trips, we enjoyed some relaxation as well.

One thing we always do is pick up a bottle of the local spirits. Andrew likes to think that this contributes to keeping away stomach bugs that may result in spending the day on the toilet, but I know that we also like to end our day of hard work with a nice little buzz. Andrew and I share a love of good drink and fine cigars and our evenings always see us talking into the night with both in hand.

Before I left for Suriname I had researched their different rums, which would be the local spirit in this country. I learned of the brand Borgoe and which types were finest. I also learned that their Parbo Bier was award winning. The country's Dutch heritage had no doubt contributed to crafting a fine pilsner beer and we enjoyed it very much. It is a favorite I wish I could find here in the states.

In Suriname we operated out of fewer base camps, with Babunhol camp set alongside the Suriname river being our primary home for the field trip. We had rented an open air cabin of sorts, which was their best lodging. Babunhol was popular with people who lived in Paramaribo, the capitol about an hour's drive north, and on the weekends it was a recreational area where they would sling their hammocks and cook their native dishes. Suriname is without beach as its coastal area on the north is all muck and silt. But Babunhol had created its own beach. In the middle of the river was a floating barge that had a big pump and they had someone in old-fashioned scuba gear that you've only seen in movies holding a hose on the river bottom so that sand could basically be vacuumed up to the shore. It was then distributed by the wheelbarrow full to create a nice sandy beach.

I swam in the river every morning and most evenings. Later when we took a guided boat ride upriver I noticed all the piranha nets everywhere else that villages had shoreline access. I was told that the piranhas here weren't particularly aggressive unless you had an open cut or wound. Funny that nobody told me that before I had made dawn swims part of my routine!

Babunhol had no regular electricity, but did have a generator that would run from 7-10 pm each night. This gave us a short window to charge our camera batteries and other electronics and have some light in our cabin for cooking dinner and sorting our gear. I had brought my laptop and every day each team member would give me their memory cards and I would back them up onto an external hard drive for safety. Then three copies of each image file would exist: one on the card, one on my laptop hard drive and a third on the external HD. But my laptop proved useful for something else as well. Of course, we had no Internet, but I told the guys that I had the first two seasons of Game of Thrones on my computer. Nobody had ever seen it and it became a nightly ritual that we would watch a couple episodes. We would sit out on the grass in folding chairs with our Parbo beer and rum (and Andy and I with cigars) and watch it with the beautiful Suriname river our scenic backdrop. It was open air tropical theater on a very small screen, but my mates quickly became engrossed with the epic HBO blockbuster adaptation of G.R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire book series.

Our base at Babunhol proved to be a dream. We found Tapinauchenius gigas there, which before was only known from French Guiana. Tapinauchenius plumpipes and Ephebopus murinus were abundant there, and the thatched roofs for hammock sleepers and staff quarters held Avicularia sp. I found a labaria or fer de lance right on the beach after Guy had walked right past it looking for spiders in tree holes instead of watching what he might trod upon. On our last day at Babunhol our groundskeeper called me over to see a lizard and there was Polychrus marmoratus, the monkey lizard, which was at the top of my herp bucket list for the trip.

Avics are arboreal and common around habitation so the workers there who would tend the beach and grounds and change our linens, plus the Javanese cook that we had hired to prepare our dinners each night, were well acquainted with these "flying spiders". We keepers are very familiar with the Avic tendency to leap and this trait is exaggerated to be flight, much as it is in other parts of the world where arboreal tarantulas have been found. For example, Poecilotheria are known as "parachute spiders" in India.

The Surinam people had a great fear of these "flying spiders" and, of course, believed their bite was fatal. We spent a great deal of effort trying to get them to understand English spoken by four different accents (me = American, Paul = English midlands, Andrew = rapid southeast London, Guy = Geordie from "Northumberland" - the far northeast of England near Scotland). We explained that they were harmless and even showed them how we could handle them. Each day we would repeat this and a groundskeeper named Errol started catching tree frogs and lizards for me to photograph. But it took quite some time to get them to lighten up on their lifetime fear of spiders, especially the anansi or tarantulas we were after. One night after our Javanese cook and his gorgeous young daughter served us dinner and ice cold beer we were joined in the picnic area by a group of young men who served as "lifeguards" (very loosely) on the beach when people came to picnic on the weekends. They also wanted to be "forest guides" and we did pay them for one walk where we ended up doing the guiding (of course) and one boat trip upriver to a Maroon (Sarramaccan) village (more on this in a second). Anyway, they were relaxing and drinking beer after beer. The biggest one probably weighed 120 pounds and it wasn't long before they were a little obnoxious. They didn't exactly have the bulk to keep up with me. Guy, I believe, went over to the outhouse adjacent to our open air "restaurant" to "have a wazz" and found a large female Phoneutria fera with seven legs. After all the trouble we had gone through to attempt teaching everyone that the spiders were not dangerous, now we had to explain in a foreign language that this is the spider that THEY DO NEED TO FEAR!

As I just mentioned, we hired these guys to take us on a trip to a Maroon village. Suriname is not a Latin country, despite being part of South America. The three small northeastern coast countries (Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana [or Guyane] have more in common with the Caribbean. And Suriname was a Dutch colony. The official language is Dutch, but the lingua franca or language of the people is Sranan (or Sranan Tongo), a creole language. Surinamese switch back and forth between Dutch and Sranan and in the interior of the country Dutch is forgotten altogether. Most people in Suriname are either East Indians (from the north of India near Nepal) or black, either Maroons, which are descendants of  Caribbean slaves from Africa, or Creoles, which are the mixed descendants of West African slaves and Europeans (mostly Dutch). The East Indians were the second wave of contract workers after slavery was abolished in 1807. There are also good numbers of Javanese and Chinese (also descendants of contract workers). Anyway, Maroons are the people that live in little villages and are what would be considered the "native people". As our boat approached the village (after a beautiful trip up river viewing all kinds of piranha nets as I mentioned earlier!) we saw topless women bathing and washing clothes and cooking pots in the river. Our guides called ahead in yet another dialect and the women covered themselves up and parted so we could beach our long wooden river boat. Andrew asked to see the "chief" or whatever absurd word he may have used instead, and our guides spoke to an elderly woman in a loose brown sarong of sorts, which was basically a rag wrapped around her private bits. I say elderly, but for all I know she was younger than me. These people definitely were people of the forest and time is hard on them. As we further inquired after the village boss or chief or whatever, all of a sudden she reached into her sarong exposing a pendulous old breast and pulled out a cell phone. The natives in the jungle mystique had just been broken. She spoke quickly and then told our guides where to take us. It was amazing how impoverished this village was and how ramshackle their little huts were. But here was an old woman doing her chores along the Suriname river with a Nokia wedged under her tit! As we walked around the village all eyes were upon us. We kinda stand out among poor, very dark-skinned people, especially the giant gringo (me). We found the school, which was one of the better buildings in the little village and the teachers were dressed in nice clothes and all the students had clean little uniforms on. It was surreal to say the least. Later we sat around while the village leader told us some lengthy story that we thought would be profound only to roll our eyes at each other when it turned out to just be some stupid joke. Andrew gave his some tip and Paul, Guy and I couldn't get back to the boat fast enough. Our cultural experience was tainted and we had spiders, frogs and lizards to look for anyway.

Until next time ... Have a good & safe holiday weekend.