Sunday's Update

To give a quick update on Sunday's activities, we spent the afternoon with Ara Travel on a very informal famtrip around the west-side of Paramaribo and towards Guyanna (but we didn't go that far). The guy who runs Ara Travel was the chair of the Chamber of Commerce in Suriname for 10 years and has spent the last 16 years in the business environment. He also has 250+ relatives and seems very well connected. He also has the fantastic idea of coordinating trips with all tour operators to have a complete end-to-end tourism experience as well as bundling tour trips with other countries in the region. He is definitely a good contact to have and one that we will be following up with on a survey or two.

In the late afternoon, the UCLA team in Suriname met to gather our initial thoughts and how to package everything up to share with William and Jody back in the US.  We will likely start compiling what we have on Monday after our last interviews since that is the last point before I leave on Tuesday (at a wonderful time of 245AM).

At this point we feel that the interior/rainforest is definitely a key piece of tourism in Suriname, but we haven't actually seen it ourselves. We are going to see if Debbie and Hiro can make a trip to Brownsberg (near Brokopondo Lake) to at least experience a bit more before we leave. It seems that most tourist activities can be drawn on almost a straight line from Paramaribo, south to Brokopondo Lake (including Brownsberg and Bergndal) and then the Upper Suriname River through Awarradam, Palameu, and ending at Kasikasima (although the last three involve flying out to the southern half of the country in the "bush").

As an additional item to think about; we have been discussing how to classify comparison countries (as we head into that research for Phase 2). We should at least have the five of us fill out a similarity matrix so that we can get a better idea of how we perceive Suriname compares to other countries (including William could be good to get a the perspective of someone who hasn't yet been). It is true that Costa Rica and Belize may be the most similar when you know enough about the country, but most tourists won't know that much about it and may perceive it differently. For instance, they may be deciding between going to Suriname or Tanzania (not Suriname and Costa Rica). So, the plan is to pick the top 10 or so countries that we feel would be good comparisons.

John Kinney