On the other side there were about 10 vans waiting to pick people up. I got in one filled with young black girls. They were a grumpy-looking band they all seemed to know each other. I tried to talk to one of them but she just snapped at me so I minded my own business. We drove down a rough dirt road for about a half hour until we got to a paved road, and the van dropped us off and we got in a nice Honda accord. I sat in the front seat and we zoomed down the well-paved road about four hours to the capital of Paramaribo. The drive through the Surinamese countryside was a lot different than Guyana. In Guyana the road is almost constantly lined with houses but Suriname is a lot less populated. Most of the drive was along grass fields along irrigation canals and trees. We went through a couple of villages before the capital city. When I got there I got a hotel room at an old white Dutch guys house ands then went for a walk around the town. There was a central grass area that was surrounded by government buildings next to the river. I saw in the distance they were constructing a bridge. Next to the grass area there was a kind of park with trees around. I walked past a tall wooden yellow church. My book said it was the tallest wooden structure in the world. It looked wilted and the paint was falling off.

I couldn't really communicate with the people there because they all spoke Dutch or a Dutch Creole. So when I saw a white guy sitting down eating I sat down next to him and we started talking. He had been living in a small town in Guyana for the last couple of months staying at his best friend families house and teaching in a local school. he was on vacation in Suriname for a couple of days. The next day I explored the city, which by American standards would just be a town. I went to the bank to get more money but none of the banks accepted visa card, and I had no money left, so i figured the only way to get out of the country was to fly to Brazil of Venezuela, but that was expensive so I looked around and found a place where Brazilian miners work and I could change the Brazilian money I had. It was just enough to take the van back to Guyana, but I still had to eat so I spent the rest of the day looking for a place I could eat with my visa card. Luckily for me there was a place about five kilometers out of town a nice hotel where the Dutch people stay, but I had to eat 20 bucks worth of food which wasn't too hard because the place was expensive. The next morning at five I went to the place the vans leave for Guyana and got in a car. I asked the guy about five times if he went to the river and he said yes but he only took me to the beginning of the dirt road so I had to pay again to get a van to the river.