At the border of French Guyana, the officials welcomed us „home“. French Guyana is part of France, so it’s also part of the EU, we could technically have stayed for as long as we wanted.
We REALLY enjoyed the french food. We got all the yummy french cheese and fresh baguettes. In Kourou, we visited „Europes Gateway to Space“, an ESA spaceport! AND, a week later a rocket would be launched into space. We couldn’t miss that! So we lounged around Kourou for a week, enjoying the food and the beach (could be worse!) and kind of fell in love with the little town.
The rocket launch was exhilarating! We could see it flying all the way to space until it was too small to identify in the blue sky. We'll share more photos in the stories.
Suriname, is a weird little country, no offense. Over a 1/3 of the population is Hindustani, which is reflected in the architecture and the official language is Dutch, two things you wouldn't expect in Sth America!
From Guyana (an ex-British colony, so a left-hand drive country) we drove a muddy track to the border with Brazil and from there, north to Venezuela.
We were hoping to see the Tepuis, but due to bad weather, we only saw them covered in clouds.
A few days later we had one of the worst days in our lives. A lady smashed into us with her car, our Defender was totaled, the trip was over, time to go home. This happened very far in the south of the country, where it was hard to get in touch with anyone or even to organize a tow truck. Luckily a very sweet family invited us into their home, Defender parked up front, and we could make daily trips with the local taxies into town to have internet access and phones.
A tow truck then took us to Caracas. 3 days drive. We even slept in the Defender on the tow truck.
Long story short, a day before our 3month visa expired we were finally able to leave the country, having put the Defender in a container, made daily dreadfully long trips to the port or banks or offices or swiss embassy. Our feelings were in turmoil, we had to get through this super complicated export process before we could even start to process our feelings about the crash. But we met some very sweet people and the whole situation would have been so much worse without their help.