As you start reading, you might well be thinking, "Exactly where is this place I see listed in the catalog every year, and what's so 'wild & wonderful' about it?" Ah, fair questions! Grab a map of northern South America and put on your bins and bandana -- we're gonna take a little spin through Suriname!

First of all, Suriname is tiny, encompassing less than 64,000 square miles; it's South America's smallest sovereign nation and has a population under half-a-million people of a dozen tongues, the vast majority of whom live near the Caribbean coast. That immediately translates to "tens of thousands of square miles of undisturbed habitats with no people and no tongues," definitely a wild & wonderful thing. Consider next that there are few roads anywhere into the interior, which means you have to take wild & wonderful charter flights into dirt airstrips in the middle of nowhere. As the porters scramble up to unload the plane at Foengoe Island and it hits you that the friendly pilot will now be leaving for...how many days was it?...you are overcome with the strangest mix of trepidation and excitement (after all, two hours in a big turbo-prop covers a good piece of ground) that, amazingly, vanishes instantly as a troop of earnestly prayed-for Red-fan Parrots squeals into the trees to check us out; yes, another w & w thing! One hour and nine lifers later, at the lodge down by the river, still trying to wrap your head around those macaws, you're pleasantly surprised to see that the rooms are really neat and as you lather up in the shower, you find yourself smiling so much that you catch a mouthful of soap. Nothing like a frosty drink to reset the palate and, as we wrap up the daily list, it smells like there's something tasty coming out of the kitchen. When it gets there, no one can identify it but heck, this is Suriname, and as you dig in, it actually turns out to be one of the best meals you've had in forever.

Enough said. Whether we're birding and hiking in the forest, boating to trailheads on rivers, or just birding around the lodge clearings and airstrips, each day brings new and often unexpected w & w moments because in Suriname we spend so much time in true wilderness settings where the balance of nature has not been altered since time began--and we really don't know what lies around the next bend.

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