We walked around it until we found the main entrance.  It was completely dark inside but we walked up the stairs to see if there was a listing of hours. There wasn’t but we tried looking through the glass door to see the inside (too dark to see anything).  Then a nice young guard came over and opened the door to inform us that the library was closed on Sundays.  We were disappointed but at least we got to see the outside of the building, which seemed to us rather large and imposing for a town of 18,000 people.  It probably serves the whole island, which is rather sparsely populated.

     We decided to visit the Botanical Gardens, located on the hills behind the library.  The gardens cover some 18 acres that the British requisitioned for this purpose in the late 19th century from what was once a couple of sugar plantations.  They are quite beautiful but mostly up a steep hill that left us rather worn out by the time we reached the top.  Extensive Christmas lights were still in evidence on the buildings and trees but were not lit in the daytime (of course).

     Thereafter we looked for the fort the British built here in the 18th century, but we didn’t find it before we were pretty worn out.  Mary had a knee replaced in July & neither of us is as young as we once were, and did we mention it was hilly and hot and very humid?  So we returned to the ship after what turned out to be a brief look at this town.  We tried to spot the fort as we sailed away but never saw it (or perhaps we just failed to recognize it).  We backed well away from the pier before turning around to sail into the ocean.  As we did so a colorful kite came flying over, apparently from shore, and after a while sank slowly into the water.  A boat came speeding up looking for it, but the kite had submerged by the time it arrived.  Later, after the boat had gone, the kite bobbed back to the surface, where we last saw it.

Devil’s Island, French Guiana

     We were awoken very early on January 9 by the noise of the tender boat hanging just outside our stateroom veranda being lowered into the water.  This was our announcement that we were anchored off this three island archipelago (called Iles de Salut) about 9 miles from the shore of French Guiana.  Thanks a lot; wasn’t this supposed to be a vacation?

     Devil’s Island was, of course, a notorious French prison for about 100 years, ending in 1953.  If you have seen the movie Papillion, you should know a lot about it, although the book on which the movie is based has been debunked as fictional rather than the memoir it purported to be.  The author had actually been imprisoned on the mainland and had never even visited Devil’s Island, much less escaped from it.  Still, the prison was pretty horrible.  Its most famous inmate was Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army who in the late 19th century was framed and convicted of treason, spending about 5 years in seclusion on Devil’s Island before his conviction was overturned and he was returned to France.  Today you can see a restoration of his stone hut from the nearby island of Ile Royale, although no one can actually visit the true Ile Diablo because the waters are too dangerous.

      From our anchorage we could see two of the three islands: Ile Royale (at left in picture below) and Ile St Joseph (at right).  Ile Royale was the main prison installation, housing most of the prisoners and administration of the prison.  Ile St Joseph housed problem prisoners, often held in harsher conditions such as solitary confinement, darkness and enforced silence.  Ile Diablo (Devil’s Island) was for political prisoners, which included Dreyfus and more than twenty republicans who resisted the coup d’etat of Louis Bonaparte, among others.  Devil’s island was on the other side of Ile Royale from where we anchored, so we couldn’t see it from the ship, although you can see it from the other side of Ile Royale.          This was our third visit to this archipelago and Ile Royale is not, for all of its beauty and interest, a metropolis like Paris or Rome where there is always something new to do or see on return visits.  So we stayed on board rather than tendering to the small dock on Ile Royale. 

But if you want to know what we did and saw on previous visits, as well as see and read much more about these islands and the prison and its ruins, you can look at our previous Devil’s Island blog posts, from 2012 and 2019:

https://baderjournal.com/2012/03/07/devils-island-french-guyana/

https://baderjournal.com/2019/12/12/devils-island-french-guiana-2019/

     We were told by some who did go ashore that the restaurant and gift shop were closed as was the church, possibly for additional restoration.  So we weren’t too sorry to miss it.  If it had been our first visit it would have been a very different story.  From the ship we were able to see the top of the modern lighthouse above the trees and another ruins we couldn’t identify visible through an opening in the foliage.  In the opposite direction we could see the shore of French Guiana about 9 miles away.  You can see why few attempted to escape through this long stretch of shark infested waters.

     As an aside, because our veranda was smack up against tender/life boat #11 we had in interesting view of the lowering and raising of the tenders.  Below is a picture of the opened tender cranes after the boats are in the water, taken through the rain spotted glass under the rail across our veranda.  Below that is a view of the tender boats stored in their raised position along the ship and the same view after they are lowered into the sea, showing the walking deck below.  We had never been in quite that position before.

Macapa, Brazil

     The morning of January 11 found us anchored in the Amazon near Macapa, Brazil.  We had crossed the Amazon Bar (where the river meets the ocean) the day before.  There is a dispute whether the Amazon or the Nile is the longest river in the world, but there is no dispute that the Amazon is the biggest in every other way, particularly volume of water.  The river is spectacularly wide; in fact there is an island the size of Switzerland situated near its mouth.  Sailing this river is quite beautiful and varied, with wonderful cloud formations and many different looking villages and isolated houses along its shores.  Mary noted that whoever christened the Mississippi “The Big Muddy” must not have been here, because the Amazon is much bigger and much muddier than the Mississippi.

     The water in the Amazon is historically low this year because of drought throughout the Amazon basin.  This has killed many wildlife, including more than a hundred of the endangered pink dolphins that live here, whose bodies have washed up on shore.  It has also made navigating the river, always a challenge for ocean going ships, much more perilous and a number of them have cancelled Amazon trips.  Although it has double the passenger capacity of the Prinsendam, in which we have cruised the Amazon before, we are told that Zuiderdam has a shallow enough draft to make it through the river with an expert pilot on board.   We picked up three pilots in Macapa, we understand, and will have replacements come aboard several times, kind of like the old Pony Express I guess.  The captain said that the most valuable thing on board the ship right now is the pilots’ paper charts, which show which areas are too shallow and which are still deep enough for Zuiderdam to sail through.

      Although Macapa is a large city of more than 500,000 people, this was not actually a port stop.  No one was allowed off the ship to explore the city.  This stop, only a few hours long, was designated a “service stop” to enable the ship to complete Brazilian paperwork (we know a little about how that can be from our visa fiasco), be inspected by Brazilian officials, and board the pilots.  You would never know this was a big city from the ship’s anchorage, however, because all of it but a small dock was obscured by forest.  In addition to the dock we saw the pilot boats that brought the Brazilian officials and the pilots, one with scaffolding an a raised platform for a pilot to safely jump from the ship.

     It was too bad we couldn’t go ashore because this is one of a handful of cities in the world that the Equator runs through.  There is a tall monument marking the spot, called “Marco Zero,” with a line from the monument to the local soccer stadium where it becomes the center line on the field.  When we had a service stop here in 2019 we couldn’t see Marco Zero from the ship but we were anchored much closer to the center of town so that it actually looked like a city.  The different anchorage is probably attributable to the much lower water level.  You can see our 2019 stop here:

https://baderjournal.com/2019/12/02/three-days-at-sea-2019/

     The rest of the day was basically a sea day (or river day) as we continued our journey up the scenic but muddy Amazon.