Kourou, French Guiana

 The imprint of France on this Guiana is more and more evident—toilet publiques, town maries, picnic tables along the road, mediatechs, 8 á Huit convenience stores and round-about art.  Kourou, where the Space Center is located, announced itself with a grand arch in its round-about featuring three of its emblems—a rocket blasting into space, parrots and men paddling a boat, most likely out to the trio of islands of the notorious penal colony.

Tourist offices are also to be found, though not prominently advertised with signs indicating the way to their location, as is the case in France.  I had to ask about their whereabouts in both Cayenne and Kourou.  As is common in French tourist offices, where they keep records of such things, I was asked where I was from. The woman in Cayenne was aghast.  “An American!  I’ve been here five years and you're the first,” she said.  “Mostly we just get people from France and Belgium and occasionally England and Germany. Do you speak English in America?”

She forced a bundle of maps and literature on me, more than I needed, and was a fount of information. She told me I had just missed a launch at Kourou.  There are only about a dozen a year, so each is a big event.  She heartily recommended the Space Museum and a free bus tour of the vast site that covers 750 square kilometers.

It was forty miles to Kourou on a busy two-lane highway connecting the two main cities of French Guiana.  The flat coastal plain allowed me to get there in ample time for the early afternoon tour.  A replica of a rocket in the parking lot at the entry to the Center, alongside a gallery of flags of the many countries who participate in the launches of satellites there, gave it the look of an amusement park.  There is no denying it is a tourist attraction, as there were several bus loads of school kids at the museum, though not many tourists, just a German couple who were rocket-ship groupies, having also visited Cape Canaveral.

My rush to get there was in naught, as one must undergo a security clearance that takes forty-eight hours to process before being allowed to take the tour.  It was Tuesday and the earliest tour I could take wouldn’t be until Friday.  It would be in French accompanied by an English transcript.  The next English language tour wasn’t until February 10.  

I’d  just have to be content with the museum, which was bilingual.  It traced the history of space flight, with mannequins of the first men in space—the Russian Yuri Gagarine in 1961, Alan Shepherd the first American shortly after, and the first Frenchman in 1982 with a Soviet crew.  Shepherd later was part of a lunar expedition and was credited with being the only person to play golf on the moon.

A map showed the location of the fourteen sites around the world with space launch pads.  Three are in China and two in Russia, the US and Japan.  The one in French Guiana is the most used of them all, as it’s close proximity to the equator allows it to benefit from the slingshot effect of the earth’s rotation for the rockets to escape earth’s gravity.  It is twenty per cent more efficient than Cape Canaveral and thirty per cent more efficient than those in Russia.  More than fifty per cent of the satellites orbiting the earth have been launched in French Guiana.  In 2007 Russia established its own launch pad at the Kourou complex.

The Space Center employs 1,700 people, seventy per cent who are locals.  It is responsible for another 7,500 indirect jobs in the country, accounting for twelve per cent of its work force.  Kourou itself had another replica of a rocket on its Main Street leading into the town.

I declined to take the hour-long ferry out to the trio of islands where the prison was, as the actual island with the prison, Devil’s Island, where Dreyfus and Papillon were incarcerated, is off limits.  I contented myself with looking out at the islands in the distance from a monument to Dreyfus at the tip of the peninsula that Kourou extends out from.

There was a meager slender beach and a couple of hotels nearby where one could gaze out on the islands. As at the Space Center, there was hardly a tourist to be seen.

I would have had to find a hotel if I wanted to go out to the islands, as there are just two ferries in the morning and they don’t return until the afternoon.  There is a hotel on one of the islands, if one cared to stay over.  I’d been out to the island prison outside of Cape Town where Mandela spent a few years and didn’t particularly enjoy the memory of that experience, so was glad not to be impregnated with any more here.  

Besides the round-about art, there was also other random art along the road and in towns, including an oversized bicycle, as if anticipating a stage of The Tour de France.

There was such an abundance of wrecked cars I came to regard them as an art form as well.

Most had rusted magnificently.

And some were nearly consumed by weeds.