Suriname, South America travel resource.

Suriname,South America.

Hot, steamy Suriname is a gumbo of cultures. In Paramaribo, the capital, you'll find ingredients from Europe, Asia, Africa and South America: Towering palms shade tidy green squares and colonial brick buildings, Bush Negroes (forest-dwelling descendants of escaped slaves) arrive in town to sell their traditional wood carvings, Javanese Muslims crowd into a mosque adjacent to a synagogue, and Dutch-style wooden houses edge mangrove-lined riverbanks.
Outside the densely populated capital, however, the inhabitants are spread very thinly-with only six people per square mile (or 2.5 per sq km). Most of Suriname-more than 80%-is covered with dense rain forest, reachable only by airplane or by riverboat. The government of Suriname knows all that virgin timber is sought by numerous international logging companies, and they've granted logging rights to a few of them. But protests by international environmental groups and Suriname's citizens have also prevented the wholesale destruction of these forests: In 1998, the country created one of the largest rain forest reserves in the world, a 3.95 million-acre/1.6 million-hectare corridor that links Raleighvallen Reserve in the northern part of the country with Eilerts de Haan Gebergte Reserve in the south.