Looking Back, Pressing Forward

Yikes - what a difference. I'm back ten days, suddenly it's September - eleven months now to manuscript delivery and obviously counting - and I'm finding it as difficult as I knew it would be to establish a consistent working routine at home. Travel in general and this trip in particular has/had an experiential pattern that I thrive on; goals and intentions and a rich and fascinating landscape to move through and on top of your plans there's always those amazing serendipitous encounters and events that sit like cherries on an ice cream sundae when all good gets even better. That being said by the end of the month I was really really ready to get home but the shift from all of that dazzling movement and input to sitting here on my porch with the computer is....different.

I spent my last day in Suriname working on the blog, intending to shop a bit more, and playing nature tourist. Those last two and a half days were of necessity partly sedentary, and yes, I'm going to tell you why because I do have one piece of valuable travel advice I'd like to pass along. On my final Monday in Paramaribo I tried to commit myself to a 'taxi-free' day - not that I really minded paying all those taxi drivers but I just wanted to see if I could do it. In the end I did take one $15 SRD taxi to try and see that dance performance that was cancelled when I got there and I got a free ride back so maybe that taxi doesn't really count but in any case I walked A LOT that day and I was carrying around my purchases of pottery and wood carvings and antique glass and and and so not only was it hot I was lifting weights all day. And did I make sure to eat regularly, and more important, drink lots of fluids ? No, I didn't and here's where the first part of the advice comes in. As previously reported, I had a full and rich day ending with the National Art Exhibition and that amazing meal after which I walked back to my hotel and headed straight into a much needed shower and discovered that I had a potentially quite serious health issue. As a result of earlier accidents and genetic vascular deficiencies my ankles are very susceptible to swelling, and I know from lots of experience that this is always aggravated by both heat and dehydration but what I didn't know was that this type of swelling can trigger a condition called cellulitis, which is essentially a staph infection of the skin that if untreated can move into your lymph system and put you in the hospital or even....well let's not go there. What i had to deal with was flaming red blotches from my feet to my knees that scared the bejesus out of me but thankfully I knew just what it was because my sister Katie has had a quite bad time with it and, of course, i had the internet. And no matter how frustrated my primary care physician gets with online self-diagnosis, Dr. Google was really helpful to me that night. Now here's the critical piece of advice - for all these years I have ALWAYS traveled with a broad spectrum antibiotic, usually ciprofloxacin but this time it was amoxycillin that my dentist had given me for potential tooth issues and as it turns out this was exactly what i needed for the cellulitis. After a predictably anxious night I could see by the morning that it was definitely working -  blotches not quite so red and starting to recede - and I would not, in fact, have to find a doctor or face a hospital stay in Suriname. Very happy about that. So I kept my feet elevated in the mornings as indicated while I wrote the blog, and took lots of taxis to get where I was going, and was very, very glad that my stupidity regarding sensible self-maintenance while traveling was offset by my intelligent advance planning.

So on that last day in Suriname I called a taxi to take me to Sana Budaya, the Indonesian Cultural Center that i knew i should have called first but i couldn't find a phone number and besides several days earlier a woman who really sounded like she knew what she was saying told me that 'it's a cultural center, it's always open'. I think you know what's coming and yes, that Wednesday it was all packed up following several days of Carifesta events so I had the taxi driver continue on to Leonsburg, the town where I would be meeting up with the dolphin sunset tour folks two hours hence. 'Town' is a rather ambitious word, however - there's a dock, a convenience store, a couple of small restaurants and a really big police station but that's most of it. Happily, I brought my book, the great brown spread of the Surinam River was very beautiful in its own way, and my $3.00 lunch of thick cassava fries, a little bit of chicken, and these gorgeous teeny weeny fried fishes with some kind of pepper sauce - delicious.

The Surinam River

Tour boats waiting for sunset

yum

The Sunset Dolphin Tour is Paramaribo's entry into the ecotourism business, supported by the Green Heritage Fund of Suriname and its European partners. A cousin to the ocean dolphin, this species (Sotalia guianensis) lives and feeds in the estuaries and rivers along the eastern coast of Central and South America, from Nicaragua to Brazil, and is distinguished by its smaller size (about 6' long) and the varying shades of pink that blush the underside of this lovely creature. At the end of the day they can be seen feeding at the confluence of the Suriname and Commewijne Rivers, and the tour boats weave slowly and carefully across the mangrove-lined river while the dolphins leap and play and eat and inevitably disappear just as you hit the shutter on your camera.

The 'village tour' that followed upriver was for me not so successful in that there did not seem to be any coordinated collaboration with the chosen site other than the construction of tourist toilets at the dock. This parrot, which clearly seemed to be attached to a family in the community, was quite comfortable with people, but the flea-bitten caged monkeys and a pervasive feeling of malaise left me eager to get back on the boat. We departed just in time to catch the sunset as we motored west towards Leonsburg; perhaps more impressive was the simultaneous rising of a huge orange-tinted full moon over the opposite bank of the river when we docked (photo efforts sadly unsuccessful).

That night (Wednesday August 21) sleep was a pretty fugitive effort; after a final packing/repacking cycle I set my alarm and notified the night guard for a 3:00am wake-up which turned out to be overly responsible on my part since the driver of the airport shuttle bus had decided on his own that my scheduled 3:30 departure was really much too early. After a few phone calls he came at 4:10, convinced that the flight was delayed so what was the rush and with all the additional pickups and the long drive we didn't get to the airport until 10 minutes before 6 and found ourselves at the very end of the checkin line for Dutch Antilles Express, which was showing every sign of a reasonably on-time 7:30ish departure. I got checked in at 6:30, then into the line for exit emigration, then security check, then straight to the gate so no time to exchange the SRDs and thankfully I had brought some food with me but if i had arrived any later it would have cost me a helluva lot more than the $40 or so that I absolutely could not exchange in either Curacao or Miami. So much for know-it-all airport shuttle drivers but that's entirely insignificant compared to the fact that I was not charged for excess baggage and I was well in time for my Miami flight in Curacao and I was not in Suriname hospital being treated for out-of-control cellulitis. Instead, I arrived back in the US around 3:00 in the afternoon  to wait in the not too terribly long lines for immigration and baggage claim at the Miami Airport and rode the Sky Train with all my stuff in all my luggage to pick up a very inexpensive rental car (thank you FGCU) and drive back across the Everglades to my little house under the oak trees.

Since then it's been the usual post-travel checklist and picking up the pieces following a monthlong absence - replacing the dead battery in the car, bleaching the green mold off the porch, laundry laundry laundry, reinstalling the cat, picking up a few previously dropped balls at work, reconnecting with friends and family, and living in a sometimes surreal mental transit space that keeps posting reminders along the lines of three days ago I was buying a cheap Chinese hat in South America or two weeks ago I was painting flowers on the walls of Catty Osman's bar, not to mention the constant internal injunction while driving to stay to the right stay to the right stay to the right.

As promised, here's my purchases this trip; they are slowly but surely finding their places in my wildly eclectic house.

Miniature traditional pots from Hamilton Wiltshire in Barbados

Tiny glazed pots from Hammy, as well as a teeny addition to my global spoon collection

On the left is a flying fish plate I bought from Maggie Bell in 1995; on the right the new 2013 version

Fridge magnets from Red Clay/Fairfield Pottery (the Bells) - small but essential players in their production line

Gorgeous print by Cuban artist Carlos Guzman

Irresistible Cuban shower curtains printed with images from well-known painters

Miniature vessels from the (East) Indian potter at Carifesta - I can't believe I didn't get his name, gotta fix that

Maroon tourist art - a carved wood mirror, and a beautifully simple painted wooden panel

On the left, an incredibly seductive antique Dutch glass bottle dated 1830-1840; it joins my earlier purchases of antique Dutch clay bottles in Guyana (on right)

The lovely, lovely bottle from Carib/Galibi potter Marlene Aloema

And the beautiful mixed media piece titled Rituals by Surinamese photographer  Tanya Frijmersum

My cat River of course had to help while I photographed everything; at this point we have both settled back into the house and the porch but since I am now working at home full-time we are both adjusting to a very different routine (she's doing it way better than I am) and I am trying to figure out just exactly how to go about this book business. I still have many pages of travel notes to write up, follow-up  emails to send, video interviews to transcribe, images to sort and process, and many many books to read so I started with Andrea Stuart's astonishing family history Sugar in the Blood - absolutely brilliant, evocatively imagined and meticulously researched history of people and sugar cane in Barbados, rips the lid off a colonial plantation society toxic with fear and fatally corrupted by the absolute power of the master-slave relationship. Next its on to American archeologist Mark Hauser's decade of publications on Caribbean ceramics, particularly critical as I prepare for my October trip to Jamaica. And, of course, the writing begins - expanded chapter outlines and the first draft of the introduction, then I think the sections on Guyana and Barbados. We'll see.

I'll be posting now and then over the next six weeks; I have GOT to focus on both the travel plans and the paper I'm writing for the Jamaica conference but I'm definitely looking forward to it, and to the trip that will follow to Trinidad for Diwali, the Hindu Festival of Lights.

I was thinking recently about the excitement of my very first encounters with Caribbean pots in 1993, and how bewildered I was when a potter friend who had traveled briefly in the region casually dismissed them as crude and uninteresting. After twenty years I bless every day that I have had with these wonderful pots and their extraordinary makers.