Things to Do in Paramaribo in March

The Paramaribo City Tour covers the capital's colonial core on foot and by vehicle, threading through the UNESCO-listed wooden district where seventeenth-century Dutch planning meets tropical improvisation. You'll find the whitewashed synagogue and mosque standing side by side on Keizerstraat, the enormous timber nave of Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral creaking overhead, and Fort Zeelandia's brick ramparts still warm from the afternoon sun. Guides walk you through the Centrale Markt's produce hall, where pyramids of cassava and bundles of kousenband sit next to tables piled with dried shrimp whose briny, smoky scent clings to your clothes long after you leave. The tour also takes in Palmentuin, a formal garden of towering royal palms where howler monkeys call from the canopy and the ground stays soft underfoot with decomposing fronds.

The Full-Day Brownsberg Nature Park Tour carries you roughly two hours south of Paramaribo into the interior, climbing to a laterite plateau that rises above the Brokopondo Reservoir, a flooded valley where the skeletal trunks of drowned trees still break the surface like bleached bones. The trail to Mazaroni Falls descends through closed-canopy rainforest where the air is noticeably cooler and heavy with the vegetal sweetness of decaying leaves and wet bark. At the falls themselves, copper-tinted water drops over a rock ledge into a pool cold enough to make you gasp. The roar drowns out everything except the alarm calls of toucans high above. Brownsberg is one of the most accessible stretches of intact Guiana Shield rainforest on earth, home to howler monkeys, poison dart frogs the colour of spilled ink, and more than four hundred recorded bird species.

The Sunset and Dolphin Tour Suriname launches from the waterfront district and heads downriver toward the mouth of the Suriname River, where the brackish estuary meets the Atlantic and Guiana dolphins, a distinct coastal species, grey-pink and smaller than their oceanic relatives, surface to feed in the tidal current. The boat slows near the mangrove fringe and the guide cuts the engine. In the quiet you hear the dolphins' exhalations before you see them, a soft percussive puff followed by a rolling grey back and a dorsal fin that catches the last copper light. Behind you, Paramaribo's skyline, the cathedral spire, the container cranes, the low commercial waterfront, turns to silhouette as the sun drops into the river, staining the water from khaki to a deep, almost metallic orange.

Bigi Pan Tourist Eco Lodge sits deep in the coastal wetlands of western Suriname, a vast network of lagoons, mangrove channels, and mudflats that form one of the most important waterbird habitats on the Atlantic coast of South America. Getting there involves a road transfer from Paramaribo followed by a boat ride through narrow channels where the prop churns up the sulphurous smell of black mud and the mangrove roots form cathedral-like arches overhead. Scarlet ibises, hundreds of them, sometimes thousands, roost in the mangroves at dusk. The sight of their crimson bodies against the dark green canopy, reflected in the still brown water below, is so saturated it looks artificial. The lodge itself is basic but functional, raised on stilts above the waterline. Falling asleep to the sound of water lapping against the pilings while nightjars call from the surrounding bush is the kind of sensory solitude that Paramaribo's capital noise makes you forget exists.