FORCE OF NATURE

From Paramaribo a few days later, I hitch a ride to Raleighvallen, the northern gateway to the Central Suriname Nature Reserve.

In 1998, the Surinamese government was on the verge of parceling out a huge swath of land to Asian logging companies until a constituency led by Washington's Conservation International intervened, convincing the government it was better off staking out a future in ecotourism. That led to the establishment of the reserve, a 6,000-square-mile corridor of virgin forest in the country's heartland.

Back in the 1970s, Raleighvallen was internationally recognized as a bird watchers' paradise, attracting Americans long before current hot spots like Costa Rica siphoned their numbers. But political instability in the 1980s crippled Suriname's tourism industry; it's only just recovering.

The tourism welcome center stands on the edge of Foengoe Island, a mile-long strip in the Coppename River that serves as the main facility for visitors to the nature reserve. We arrive there after a bumpy, four-hour van trip to the river and another four hours upstream in a motorized long boat. (A half-hour flight with a tour operator is another way.)

Near the welcome center are two sparse but comfortable longhouses for guests and a couple of thatched-roof dining areas. My room provides a bed with mosquito net, a shower, and a flush toilet; the back wall, open to the languid river, offers the luxury.

A cluster of huts belongs to the island's inhabitants, about 20 Kwinti Maroon, descendants of runaway slaves who work as guides for Suriname's parks department.

Shortly after dawn my first morning, I wander uphill to the island's grassy airstrip, a swath cut across the forest that provides an ideal vantage point for spotting birds -- toucans, tanagers, macaws --in the early burning-off fog.

The Coppename River, colored like black tea but so pure that it can be gulped like a cool beverage, also acts as a break in the dense verdure, where at various moments I spy wayward flocks of parrots and a pair of river otters gliding quietly along the water's edge.

For a trek to the Voltzberg, an iconic granite dome that rises 800 feet from the forest floor, I'm appointed a Kwinti guide named Stephen, a stout, dark-skinned man who wears camouflage pants and rubber boots and flashes gold when he smiles. Stephen and I walk along a well-trodden trail that meanders around the bases of giant, buttressed trees weeping liana vines. A black frog trimmed in yellow, carrying eggs on its back, stands frozen on the leaf litter; an army of leaf-cutter ants marches without pause. Blue morpho butterflies meander erratically.

I flinch when a troop of migrating capuchins crash through the trees above me, disrupting the false stillness; by the end of the hike, I will see five other monkey species, including gangly spider monkeys and a diminutive marmoset.

After two hours on the trail, Stephen and I reach the base of the Voltzberg and begin a steep ascent. We soon rise above a lush canopy of bursting crowns, treading up an exposed surface of charcoal-colored rock, home to an incongruous community of cacti and lizards.

Beneath us a choppy green sea spreads in all directions, lapping against the bases of scattered granite domes rising like islands out of the landscape. On the horizon a faint outline of mountains marks the northernmost reaches of the Brazilian Amazon.