My French Guiana adventure: Day 6

Today, I drive to Brazil!

The national "highway" heading east to Brazil is very different from the road heading west to Suriname. Today's drive is much curvier and hillier. And instead of driving through savannah, today I am driving through thick jungle. There are no gas stations for the entire 200km stretch between Cayenne and Brazil. My biggest concern, aside from the heavy rain, is a flat tire. My rental doesn't have a spare.

For much of the drive, I listen to the Omnibus podcast episode about the Gimli Glider.

Just as I could not believe that I had driven to the border with Suriname, I was breathlessly speechless when I parked the Peugeot and looked across the river at Brazil. I am in the town of St George. There is a flotilla of motorboats ferrying people between the countries. People from French Guiana go to Brazil to buy cheap groceries. Brazilians come this way for economic opportunities.

I walk around town. There is a busy supermarket. Well, as "super" as a town with a population of 4,000 can sustain. I walk in and sitting there, reading a newspaper, is the Chinese proprietor. He looks up at me and gives me a smiling nod.

Time for lunch. I go to a rundown hotel that has a restaurant downstairs. Even though the menu is in French, everyone is ordering in Portuguese. I use my one semester's worth of college Portuguese and order fish and chips. The cook walks next door to the fish stall, buys a fish that was just caught in the river, fillets it, fries it, and plops it on a plate. This might be my best meal of the trip.

Satiated, I have one more thing to do in St George. There is a French Foreign Legion base on the outskirts of town. I drive up a single lane dirt road and park about 50 yards from the guard post. I take my hands out of my pockets, smile, and walk as non-confrontationally as possible. A nice Nepalese soldier is standing guard. I cannot go in and I cannot take any photos. But we chat.

While holding his assault rifle, with red dragonflies buzzing around us, the bored soldier answers all my questions. He was studying business management in France when he changed his mind and joined the Legion. He is a really sweet guy. Not what I imagined a Foreign Legionnaire to be like. I say good-bye and head back to Cayenne.

For dinner, I go to a nearby fancy hotel's chic restaurant. Now that I'm a pro, I order a punch (local rum, cane sugar syrup, lime).

For my entree, I order a steak and a glass of red. Everything is tasty, but the steak is tough and the wine refrigerated and ice cold.

Tomorrow is my last full day in French Guiana. I had originally planned to visit Devil's Island. I canceled the plan because I did not want to take a two hour ride on a tiny boat on the open sea in the heat and rain. So I am just going to bum around Cayenne tomorrow.

My French Guiana adventure: Day 4

Today, I visit a spaceport! But first, breakfast. It seems like no brick and mortar eatery in French Guiana opens before 10:30. My tour is 40 minutes away from my hotel and it starts at 7am. Where am I going to eat?

Fortunately, I see a few blue collar guys hanging around this red Peugeot van in Kourou, so I make a u-turn and order a sandwich.

My 5 euro sandwich comes with beef, egg, and cheese. It's super filling and I cannot finish it before the tour, it's so big.

I had assumed the three-hour all-French tour was going to have us walk around a museum and peek into the command center. I had no idea we were going to be on a bus driving all over the spaceport! Our driver is Polynesian and our tour guide is super accommodating. Even though I am the only non-French speaker, she would come up to me after each stop and explain everything in English.

The facility is expansive. Because of French Guiana's proximity to the equator, it takes 25% less fuel to launch a rocket into space. The main rockets in use are Ariane 5 (soon to be 6) and Vega. Soyuz is no longer used since the Ukraine invasion. France and Russia have a long space friendship. The first French astronaut was sent up in a Soviet rocket in the 1980s. 

Security is tight. Army, navy, air force, police, Foreign Legion. They all protect the spaceport. 

The first stop is at an Ariane rocket launchpad. And our bus drives through it! There are two sets of parallel railroad tracks that are used to slowly transport the rocket from the hangar to the pad.

The rocket flames go down a hole, through that yellow tube, and away from the launchpad. That's a water tower next to the tube.

The rain stops briefly and we get out of the bus. This is a shot of the launchpad we just drove through.

The food at the spaceport is catered by Sodexo.

We then climb an elevated bunker where people can observe Vega launches.

The gray building in the background is the Soyuz launchpad. Supposedly, it looks totally different from the Ariane and Vegas launchpads because of the Soviets' different philosophy. We can't get closer because it has been completely shut down.

A sloth!

Here is the control room. VIPs and guests sit in comfortable lecture hall-style seats behind the windows.

There is a Lego model of the control room and lecture hall.

The four top VIPs, including a representative from France, sit here. She is the one who counts down from ten before blastoff. That orange phone is for emergencies, such as when an errant rocket needs to be destroyed.

I return to Cayenne, stock up on provisions for my upcoming road trips, and have dinner at a Creole-Haitian-Vietnamese place. It's just me and a table of 20 hot cops. I order a punch, thinking it's like sangria. It's actually a local specialty that you make yourself at your table. It's just rum, cane sugar syrup, and lime.

For my entree, I order stew. They have chicken, beef, fish, and pakira. Not knowing what pakira is, I order it. It's skunk pig.

Tomorrow, I drive 300 kilometers to the Suriname border.

My French Guiana adventure: Day 2

The Air France staff at Miami airport cared more about checking my yellow fever vaccination card than my boarding pass.

I love looking at the Departure board. Pointe A Pitre (Guadeloupe). That's where I'm going!

I like to think of myself as being a geography and history nerd. But I had no idea where Guadeloupe and Martinique are. Or their history. So I read Wikipedia the night before.

First, it was "discovered" by Columbus in 1493. When you fly over this part of the Caribbean, you quickly realize how easy it is to discover pieces of land. Islands are everywhere.

Second, the island was so prosperous (slaves and sugar), France gave up all of its Canadian possessions in order to get the island back from the British.

Third, it was owned by Sweden from 1813 to 1814.

There it is.

A highway. There was nothing like it anywhere in French Guiana, and it's one-sixth the size of France.

Though Guadeloupe was not my final destination, I did enter France so I got my passport stamped.

I heard about the legendary rum here. For six euros, I got the most expensive rum for sale at the rinky dink airport bar. It was called Rhum Vieux. My next flight was boarding so I had to finish it in three big gulps.

Back on the plane for a 30 minute hop to Martinique.

Per Wikipedia, Columbus spotted it in 1493 and landed there in 1502. Like Guadeloupe, Dutch Jews expelled from Brazil settled in Martinique. During World War II, it was controlled by the Vichy bastards so German U-boats went there for fuel and supplies.

Martinique looked pretty developed tourist infrastructure-wise. Lots of multi-story hotels.

As we hit French Guiana, it's just green, dense jungle. The only interruptions are caused by rivers.

Cayenne airport at sunset.

As I step out of the airport, I am hit by the humidity. I have a guy in a Hyundai Tuscon taxi cab drive me 30 minutes to my hotel in "downtown" Cayenne. As we pull out of the airport, it is a two-lane road with barely any traffic. It has a rural Japan feel. There are a lot of billboards selling four things-- an automatic Peugeot for 18,900 euros, cheap vacations to Fortaleza (Brazil), frozen chicken nuggets at a supermarket, and military/police recruitment.

I get dropped off in the dark at my hotel. The popular restaurant/bar on the ground floor is closed and dark. It is Sunday night. I approach the side door and there's an older, lanky, slovenly dressed guard sitting in a plastic chair. He speaks English with a Caribbean accent. He tells me the hotel staff is gone and he was not told that I would be checking in. I ask him to call the staff. He tells me he suffered a brain injury earlier that day and he doesn't know how to use a phone. What?! 

I leave my backpack (my only luggage) on the table and pace around in the heat. What do I do? The entire city is closed.

Then, a guy appears out of nowhere and offers to help. He is a hotel guest from Mainland France and he has an Australian accent. He works for an aluminum company and currently ranks as the third most frequent flyer Air France has. He is only in French Guiana for work for two days. His shortest work trip distance-wise is to Dakar. He spends 240 days a year traveling. Though he tried hard to help, I couldn't get a room.

I had booked a nice suite at this hotel for my entire stay. Frustrated, I was told to walk down one block to the fancy hotel next to the police station. I'll stay there for a night and come back tomorrow morning to sort things out. Fine.

I check in at the Hotel Amazonia, which appears to be a business hotel affiliated with Best Western. It costs a bit more than my original hotel. It is filled with cops. Dozens upon dozens of cops from France are here to protect the head of the European Space Agency, who is here for a visit. What's odd is that every single cop staying at this hotel is in their 20s, blond or brown haired, with the same physique, and the same height. The ones not in uniform are wearing tight t-shirts, short shorts, and shower sandals. And they're all eating pizzas.

Famished, I go to the hotel restaurant and get the cheapest entree, this fish.

Exhausted, I collapse on my bed. I have no idea what tomorrow will bring.

A one-day vacation

After four months of sheltering in place, we needed a mental health break. So we went to Sutter Creek in the Sierra foothills.

This was a gold mining town with a lot of old (for California) buildings. Virtually everything was closed. There was just one restaurant open. All of the wine tasting rooms were closed. We just walked up and down the main street. When we were walking up the street, I saw this 911. When we were walking down the street, I noticed the first generation Equus across the street.

This is definitely a different place from home. A teenaged girl walked past us with a red MAGA hat. An antique store had this poster on the front window. The poster was created and distributed by Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership. Really. The antique store also had a picture of Bill Clinton wearing a dress and the Obamas wearing Trump shirts. Klassy.

We stayed at the Foxes Bed & Breakfast. We have been going there regularly since the early 2000s. Currently, they rent out four out of the seven rooms at a time and they always keep a room unoccupied for at least 24 hours before renting it out to new guests.

I wanted to buy wine and my only option was a nearby gas station.

I usually ask for this specific room (Fox's Den) because they have a stack of old National Geographic magazines. I ended up reading two newspapers, two Economists, and two Road & Tracks. It's amazing how much I can get done without kids around.

Guy travels throughout Belarus to try six beers in three days

What can I say? Right up my alley.

Al Bundy Barack Obama ad

I was reading up on actor Ed O'Neill on Wikipedia when I found out about this ad.

And then I found these...

North Korean beer festival

A day trip up to Sonoma/Napa

A couple of Fridays ago, after the huge fires died down, we went up to Sonoma and Napa for the day. The area depends on tourism so we thought we'd do our part. Here is what we saw.

We first drove up to Sonoma. We passed by Sonoma Raceway. 60% of the hill overlooking the racetrack was charred black.

We went to Ceja Winery near Fremont Diner. It was the first day the tasting room opened since the fire. We were the only ones there for a long time, until a couple from Charleston, South Carolina, showed up. Here are a few unused livery cars parked outside.

We then went to St. Helena for lunch. The restaurant is usually pretty busy, but we had no problem getting a table. The staff frankly looked shellshocked. The menu was very limited, but we had a good time.

Then, it was a stroll through town. I saw this BMW Z8 in a bank parking lot. I wonder if it belongs to a good customer who needed a safe place to protect his prized possession from the fire.

And I believe that's a Honda Clarity, the fuel cell-powered sedan. It looked fugly.

We then drove up to Calistoga. The town was evacuated but the firefighters were able to save it. It's my favorite place up there. I couldn't get a mud bath at Indian Springs that day because the male section of the spa was closed for planned renovations.

And here's the drive down Silverado Trail. The fire reached the edge of the road and many buildings and vineyards were saved. The firefighters did an incredible job.