Laura Zera

Stories to Connect Cultures

Travel: The Inevitable Backpacking Cock-Up, Followed by Redemption

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3:40 a.m. on March 10th – My iPhone alarm goes off. It’s harp music. What a joke that is at zero dark thirty in the morning. I dress, then shove the last bits of crap into my backpack in a manner which bears no resemblance to packing.

Leaving Paramaribo

4:00 a.m. – In front of the guesthouse, I get ready to wait for the shared taxi that’s to pick me up “sometime between 4 and 5 a.m.” in Paramaribo, Suriname and proceed to Georgetown, Guyana. Look, there’s a taxi out front already! Loaded with gear, I run-hobble over. It turns out to be another guest returning from a night out. Drunk, he stumbles into the guesthouse. Deflated, I drop into a chair on the porch.

4:30 a.m. – Of course the taxi’s not going to come in the first half of the hour. They’re going to make me wait. I could have slept until 4.Continue Reading

Travel: Suriname’s Amazon Jungle – Part II

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“E Wiki No?” asks Netta, a woman of about 50 who works at the Pingpe ‘resort’ where I’m staying. She’s inquiring as to how I’m doing on this sticky March morning.

“Me Wiki O.” I’m doing fine, I reply, having been taught a bit of Saramaccan by Don, my guide for this trip up the Suriname River and into the Amazon jungle. Netta nods and moves off to the open-air kitchen to find some pomelo, knowing it’s one of my favorite fruits. In a bright pink t-shirt and pink patterned kanga, her form is in vibrant contrast to the cloak of green all around me.Continue Reading

Travel: You Know You’re in Suriname When…

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Goooood morning (etc.) from Suriname! I arrived in Paramaribo on Mar.3 and am chilling out until I head into the jungle in two days. Here are my observations thus far, delivered in a format that I’m sure has a name, but I don’t know what it is. I call it backwards logic.

  1. You walk past a dog and it instantly and submissively bows its head (You know you’re in a developing country when…).

    And I heart U2!
  2. A Heineken delivery truck pulls up outside your guesthouse at 9:30 a.m. (You know you’re in a former Dutch colony when…).

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