The bus we chartered picked us up from our home in Berbice at 3:00 AM, and we finally arrived at our hotel in Paramaribo 17 hours later. About 7 of those hours were spent crossing the Corentyne River separating Guyana from Suriname. The ferry ride itself only took about 20 minutes, but waiting for the ferry to arrive in Guyana (which was significantly late) and getting through immigration on the Suriname side (which was basically a cage match) put our Peace Corps resilience training through its paces.
The return trip went much better. It only took about 13 hours. That’s 30 hours of being on the road for 51 hours spent in Paramaribo!
It was worth the effort to get there though. New Year’s Eve in Paramaribo was like Mardi Gras. The center of the city was blocked off, and there were thousands of people partying in the streets. We got to try some street food and had lunch in a Dutch sausage shack.
The most conspicuous part of the celebration was the fireworks, which were being set off in the hundreds of thousands. A line of fireworks would be laid out down the center of the road and lit off at one end. The explosions crept down the street like a fuse burning in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. When it reached an intersection, the firework fuse climbed a crane towards a bright red container that looked like an oversized stick of dynamite. There was a big boom. Then the process was repeated with a line of fireworks coming down another street towards the crane. Safety officers would walk a couple of feet ahead of the explosions and casually nudge people out of the way. I guess they figured that only an idiot would stand staring stupidly at a line of miniature bombs working its way down the street launching paper projectiles in every direction.
We rung in 2015 on the roof of our hotel. From the seventh floor you could see fireworks being launched into the air in a 360 degree arc from locations throughout the city. People had been shooting them off for hours, but once the clock tolled midnight the celebration only intensified. Fireworks were being launched from the parking lot across the street from our hotel and exploding just above our heads!
New Year’s Day in Paramaribo was the total opposite of New Year’s Eve. Absolutely everything was closed, and the streets were as deserted as those in a zombie movie. All that was left from the previous day’s celebration were piles of empty bottles and billions of bits of red paper from the fireworks. It was such a ghost town that Kathrina and I were happy to hear that McDonald’s was going to open at 3:00 PM, otherwise we were not sure where to get anything to eat. (I had the habanero turkey bacon Quarter Pounder with a gallon and a half of carbonated sugar water, and Kathrina had the Chicken Mac.) Not having anything to do on New Year’s Day wasn’t actually much of a problem, because we enjoyed soaking in as much air conditioning as possible and not having to wrestle our way out from under a mosquito net every time we had to get out of bed!
Click below to watch the highlight reel from “A Peace Corps New Year’s Eve, 2014 in Paramaribo, Suriname!”
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