Devil's Island, French Guaina

We finally made landfall at the little island grouping famous for it's incredible violence and mistreatment of prisoners, Devil's Island. Actually we landed on Isl de Salut which is the main island of a three island group that includes Isl de Diablo or Devil's Island where the political prisoners lived for about 100 years of so before human rights outcry brought the prison to it's close in the 1950's. The island was made famous by the movie Papillon but now is just some ruins standing off the coast of French Guiana that has a few caretakers and daily tour groups. It is very pretty but also very hot and humid which since it was not even summer yet did make the horror of being a prisoner here pretty real.
The island behind Nancy on the picture is Devil's Island. The little bit of water between the island is off limits because of strong currents and sharks. No wonder people didn't escape often.
No the island is inhabited predominantly by a couple of species of monkeys and a large rodent type animal called the aguta (or something like that). They were actually pretty cute.
Really it was just good to be on land after 8 days crossing the Atlantic. The passage was pretty good but did get a little rough the last couple days. We were worried that we might not be able to land here but the ship turned itself between the wind and the tender and the waves were not so bad. No one got hurt here. Last time they were here someone had a compound fracture and multiple people got stitches so the crew were pretty excited everyone got back in one piece.Lue lisää