PARAMARIBO, SURINAME -- I step out of my guesthouse the first bright and humid morning in Paramaribo, still holding Suriname as a fantasy formed by alluring snapshots and brief descriptions, like an Internet date I am meeting for the first time.

First impressions call to mind previous encounters. The sight of a roti bread shop housed in a white colonial building conjures the memory -- if not quite the manic energy -- of New Delhi. The sound of Afro-Caribbean music beating out of a Chinese-owned DVD store -- New York, perhaps. I am on the northern fringe of South America, but nobody is speaking Spanish.

I emerge from the capital's historic downtown onto the Waterkant, an esplanade with food stalls along the muddy Suriname River, where Indian families eat Javanese bami noodles and Creole men sip their first of many Parbo beers under the shade of weeping tamarind trees. The heat is rising.

Down the street, merchants, hustlers and loiterers drift between the neon-lit casinos and gold exchanges that surround the boisterous Central Market. Inside, broad women in colorful African head wraps use long Chinese string beans to shoo flies off displays of bananas, rambutans and medicinal barks.

I pass a dark-skinned Creole man with a shiny set of gold teeth who is selling cups of shaved ice with an array of flavored syrups. His wooden pushcart is festooned with -- among other random items -- plastic pink roses, Surinamese and Chinese flags, a framed poster of Orlando Bloom's elfin character in Lord of the Rings, and the words ``Snoop-Dog Bless!'' scrawled in red paint.

The ices taste OK, but are better as a metaphor. Suriname -- a nation smaller than Washington state, much of it uninhabited jungle -- is home to 480,000 people who speak more than 15 languages.

Dutch is the official one, but if this cart's decorations are any reflection of where most Surinamers currently look to in the world, Holland is conspicuously absent.

English is also widely spoken, beamed with American Idol into thousands of living rooms each week. But the lingua franca is Sranan Tongo -- a hybrid of English, Dutch, Portuguese and West African words that best reflects the Babel that Suriname came to be.

Much of that story is a familiar colonial tale. Natives encountered strange Europeans, first the British, then the Dutch. The colonialists imported slaves (from Africa) and indentured servants (Indians, Chinese, Indonesians).

Independence was eventually achieved in 1975, and power struggles followed -- 20 years of them, give or take.

But the denouement is unique. Descendents of all these multiethnic settlers still remain -- Arawak and Carib Indians inhabit the coast, Maroons live in inland jungle communities founded by the escaped slaves, and pasty Dutch tourists pedal bicycles around the capital -- to form an ethos of ethnic tolerance of which Surinamers proudly boast.

From the Central Market I stroll up Jodenbreestraat to reach a symbol of this remarkable pluralism. Neve Shalom, a wooden synagogue built in 1835, occupies a plot of land next to a towering, modern mosque. Stately white columns give the synagogue the appearance of an antebellum mansion in the tropical sun.

Caretaking a tiny, adjacent museum, 61-year-old Lilly Duym represents the legacy of the Sephardic Jews who sailed from Portuguese Brazil in the 1660s, fleeing intolerance, to establish sugar cane plantations up the Suriname River.

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