Today was our trip out to Iles du Salut, site of the infamous Devils Island penal colony. Our taxi driver picked us up at 7:30 and took us down to the dock; we checked in and had to wait until 8:15 catamaran departure. There were quite a few other tourists (all French) along for the ride today. Our catamaran was the Royal Ti'Punch, owned by the Auberge Hotel on the islands and the trip took a little over an hour. There was a tidal bore about halfway to the islands, and the going was pretty rough for awhile. The Iles du Salut is actually a group of three islands, Ile Royale, Ile St. Joseph, and Ile Diable. There were prison facilities on all three islands, Ile Diable (Devils Island) was the one used for political prisoners. It was the French Alcatraz, supposedly inescapable via sea, with strong currents and sharks as deterrents. It is still off limits to this day as it's illegal to land there, you can only see it from the other islands across the narrow channel. Why I don't know.

Ile Royale was our first stop, we had almost 6 hrs to spend on the island. It's not very large, but housed the guards quarters, death row inmates, and prison administration. It currently houses the Auberge hotel, where it is possible to spend the night. Quite pricey though for food, we had brought our own lunch of baguette and salami. The islands are quite lush (unlike in the movie Papillon, which wasn't filmed here) with coconut palms and rainforest vegetation. Only a few of the prison buildings have been restored, most have been left to decay and have slowly been reclaimed by the jungle for the past 50 years. The Auberge is up on top of the hill and had a good view out over Devils Island.

We wandered down to the condemned cells, where prisoners awaited execution. The cells were tiny, dank and dark. Not all prisoners were on death row, but their sentences were still harsh. If a prisoners sentence was 8 years or less, they had to remain in French Guiana for the same number of years once they had served their time; this was to help build up the population of the colony. Those who were sentenced to more than 8 years had to remain in French Guiana.. not that many prisoners even served their full time as most died from yellow fever or malaria. They weren't even given the decency of a burial, their corpses were simply tossed into the sea for the sharks!

We went by the guard's children's cemetery, creepy setting in the trees. There was another tourist family a short distance away who asked if we had any bread; there was a troop of monkeys nearby! We joined them and as soon as we had broken off a chunk of bread we were swarmed by monkeys! They were climbing all over us and trying to get into my bag. There were several different kinds of monkey, smaller ones and big ones who soon started dropping coconuts from above! We escaped before being conked and went and had lunch, then walked around the island (not very large).

The catamaran then took us over to Ile St. Joseph, another prison site. The prison here, Camp Reclusion, has been reclaimed by the jungle, it's a modern day Angkor Thom with strangler figs and trees growing through the cell bars, very scenic! It was also raining which added to the gloom. The rain soon stopped though (we'd been lucky, on our way out this morning the sky was an ominous grey but we'd avoided most of the rain so far).