Things to Do in Paramaribo in May

The Paramaribo City Tour covers the colonial inner city on foot and by vehicle. It threads through the wooden cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, one of the largest timber churches in the Western Hemisphere. Its interior is cool and dim, smelling of aged tropical hardwood and candle wax. Then past the Presidential Palace on Onafhankelijkheidsplein, where the white façade glows against the dark sky of an approaching squall. Guides narrate the layered history of Suriname's capital through its architecture. The tall, narrow Dutch trading houses along Waterkant with their pitched roofs and shuttered windows. The Neve Shalom synagogue standing next to the Ahmadiyya Anjuman mosque. The Fort Zeelandia compound where the brick walls still hold the damp chill of the river even at noon. The tour also passes through the Central Market. The sound of Sranantongo bargaining mixes with the crack of fresh coconuts being split. The sharp tang of fermented cassava rises from the stalls.

The Full-Day Brownsberg Nature Park Tour drives roughly two hours south of Paramaribo into the interior. It climbs a laterite plateau that rises 500 metres above the Brokopondo Reservoir, a flooded valley so vast that the skeletal trunks of drowned trees still pierce the surface decades after damming. The park's trails lead through primary rainforest. Howler monkeys roar from the canopy in a low, guttural vibration you feel in your sternum before you consciously hear it. The air is so saturated with moisture that every breath tastes green, vegetal, faintly metallic from the iron-rich soil underfoot. At Mazaroni Falls and Irene Falls, brown water crashes over granite ledges into pools cold enough to shock the skin after the humid trail. Swimming here, surrounded by walls of dripping ferns and the electric blue flash of morpho butterflies, is one of the most vivid sensory experiences Suriname offers.

The Sunset and Dolphin Tour launches from the river's edge near Paramaribo. It motors downstream toward the point where the Suriname River opens into the Atlantic. Guiana dolphins, grey-pink, blunt-nosed, smaller than their oceanic cousins, surface in clusters. They exhale with a soft hiss audible across the flat water. The light at this hour does something particular on the Suriname coast. The sun drops through layers of equatorial humidity and stains the river copper and amber. The mangrove-lined banks go dark in silhouette. The air finally cools enough to feel the breeze off the open water on sweat-damp skin. The boat lingers in the estuary as the dolphins feed. Their dorsal fins cut arcs through water the colour of strong tea. The return trip runs upriver under a sky that shifts from burnt orange to indigo in the twenty minutes it takes for full dark to arrive.

Bigi Pan Tourist Eco Lodge sits on the edge of the Bigi Pan lagoon system in northwest Suriname. This is a vast brackish wetland where freshwater swamp meets tidal mangrove forest. The horizon dissolves into a flat line of water, mud, and sky. The draw is birdlife on a scale that shames most tropical reserves. Scarlet ibis roost here in flocks so dense they redden entire trees at dusk. The sound of hundreds of birds settling, the rustle, the squabbling, the occasional sharp alarm call, carries across the still water like a crowd murmuring in a theatre. Boat tours through the mangrove channels pass caiman floating at the surface with only their ridged eyes visible. The water itself is warm, tannin-dark, smelling of salt and decomposing leaf litter. The lodge is basic but functional. The real luxury is location. You wake before dawn to mist hanging over the lagoon and the first ibis lifting off in ragged scarlet lines against the grey-pink sky.