MI GUDU RIVER CRUISES SURINAME
History
In February 2004, shipcarpenter René Segerius and Dutch newspaper journalist Leonoor Wagenaar said goodbye to their life in Amsterdam and moved permanently to Suriname. Instead of just bringing the usual household goods, the couple was followed by no less than sixty tons of steel: the kit of parts for the river cruiser, on which they planned to transport tourists through the pristine rainforest. A few years later, in April 2007, the ship made her first trips. On this page you can read about the history of Mi Gudu and find out what happened during those years (and a few years before that).
Elsewhere on this site you can also read the Parool newspapercolumns about the construction, written by Leonoor.
"Eversince we started building our ship Mi Gudu (which is Surinamese for ‘My Baby’ aswell as ‘Our Wealth’) in April 2004, our daily life has been filled with contemplating, sweating, designing, examining and pretesting. Sometimes, when friends from the Netherlands come over and admire the ship, we look at her from a different angle.... Working on Mi Gudu on a daily basis makes you forget how extraordinary it all is. Because all well considered, one has to admit the whole project remains a precarious enterprise: giving up a well-paying permanent job as a journalist, throwing your pension away, selling a beautiful, self-built sailing clipper that lies on a canal in the heart of Amsterdam, leaving everything and everyone that is dear to you behind, and go off to start a whole new life at the age of fifty.”
"René and I didn’t know eachother very long when we decided to marry, both for the first time in our lives. At that time we already knew the destination of our honeymoon: Suriname. But when we arrived we were completely overwhelmed by the warm hospitable attitude of the people and the indescribable beauty of the interior with its immensely broad rivers that knew the secrets of those dark, mysterious woods high upstream…”
During their honeymoon, René’s dormant hernia got even more serious, after barely surviving a terrible trip by car over the countless pits on the long road between Paramaribo and Albina. So he could not make any more trips by car. “But those rivers, why could we not sail those beautiful rivers? We searched high and low, but there was not a single pleasure craft to be found. At that point we realised two facts. One: If he wanted to save his back René could not continue his job in the Netherlands as a shipcarpenter. The other: if those rivers were so unexploited and virginal, didn’t we accidentally discover a hole in the market? Two things that made us look at Suriname in a totally different way. Besides, after 25 years of exuberant work as a journalist with het Parool, I also felt I could leave my job without much pain in my heart. Hence the Plan grew.”
"That was in October 2002. Six months later we were back in Suriname. To network like no one had ever done before. We got in touch with local captains of industry, aswell as the head of the MAS (Maritime Authority Suriname), while at the same time we had begun to establish our company...
At the MAS office we talked to a wise Javanese man, who together with his staff, had to gauge the depth of the rivers every two years. Together we studied the nautical charts and he showed us how we could sail through the interior to New Nickerie in just a few days. ‘Especially the Wayambo river’, he said, ‘with its Indian villages, is perhaps the finest scenery I have ever seen in Suriname; purple and greenheart trees that lose their leaves in February to start blossoming in bright purple, yellow or orange colours, sloths and monkeys high up in the trees, scarlet macaws flying over your head: a virgin paradise.’ Maarten van der Jagt, a fully qualified ship engineer and at that point still working for the MAS, became a really close friend. A friendship that would prove to be a golden one.
"Back in the Netherlands we started with the practical preparations. At Euro Ship Services, a company that designs ships and cuts steel kits by computer, we began our first tentative talks. A few months later we were in Suriname again. In order to search for a construction site. And to regulate everything we could, to get a consent to import our steel duty-free. Because if we would have to pay taxes, varying from thirty to forty percent, it would have been end of story. And believe it or not: within five days we had our permission, signed by the Minister himself.
"Maarten van der Jagt, intended successor of the director of the MAS, had left the firm to start working at Ercon, the steel construction company of his cousin. We made a home visit and of course we started talking about building Mi Gudu. We still hadn’t decided where to build it. There were a few options but they all had various limitations: too little power and marshy ground.
That night, all of a sudden it struck us: why not build the ship next to Ercon on the dead-end public road: plenty of power, we could borrow their welding transformers, there was already a crane so Maarten could help with the lifting of the plates... At that time it became perfectly clear to us: Mi Gudu is born under a very lucky star.
"So it was final. René sold his ship on the Oude Schans for a great price, we designed and ordered the new ship hull (of course all of that took weeks) a DAF engine was taken apart completely and refurbished by Great Engines in Dordrecht, there was a huge generator to be imported... Winter set in and we travelled all over the country to try and gather every necessary thing. Shivery we looked at the air conditioning unit. Greedy we roamed through the giant kitchencompany of Beuk near Utrecht and pointed out: such a stove, and that frying machine, what type of ice cube machines do you sell, and what does such a cooled workbench exactly do? We bought brass sidescuttles that were imported from India. Everything, everything, everything was sent VAT-free to the trans-Atlantic transporter in Alkmaar. In those days René would start from his sleep many times: would he remember to purchase this? Hadn’t he forgotten that?
"We finally departed in February 2004. On our way to the plane, in the aircraft ramp, I suddenly was taken by a stroke of panic: what on earth were we doing? But René radiated. And after all, we were in this together.
We had already rented our house in North Paramaribo. And although of course we still had no furniture, for it was sailing over the ocean, we started to pioneer immediately. With a newly purchased bed, two sofas and a TV.
A couple of days later we had our two four-wheel drives and two puppy watchdogs: the adventure had really begun.
The steel containers arrived at the end of that month; one smaller container with all the accessories and three forty foot containers with sixty tons of steel in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Three lousy piles of steel really, but if you would have put them all in one container, the burden would be so heavy that no crane would ever be able to lift it on the quay.
And then suddenly there was this enormous steel mountain, with some tattooed numbers here and there. But unlike myself, I don’t think René panicked by the sight. He was quite sure of his case. So, in the beginning of April we organized a big party to celebrate the refutation of the keel, with catering, a brassband and about a hundred guests.”
"Through a contractor we found three labourers: Henry, Marlon, and Bokian, loose-workers who usually got underpaid to do a very heavy job. But Marlon appeared to be a wonderful welder, Henry had an immediate preponderance over the other and Bokian, well Bokian was our Jack-of-all-trades. He came from the deep interiors and almost illiterate, but the most diligent and faithful of all three. They were going to stay throughout the building of Mi Gudu. And the ship became their greatest pride.
Setbacks? I don’t remember having them, they were simply not there or we have supplanted them? Well, there may have been just one: the launch celebration, just before Christmas 2004. She refused to go into the water. The bulldozer pushed and slipped, the round bars underneath her were crushed, she fell on her side, was revived by the crane, but still she kept on refusing as a stubborn teenager. The next day we received help from a neighbour who owns a loader. Beautiful moments, flooded by tears. And after some fearfilled minutess she finally submitted. There were only a few friends to witness that moment. But they all cried when Mi Gudu was finally floating. Sweet, emotional memories.”
In the photo gallery of this website you can see some pictures of how she was built. With your own eyes you can see how, out of nowhere, a beautiful ship has risen…
“Then came the final stretch. And that appeared to be a long and tuff final stretch indeed! The wainscoting, the electricity plant, the air conditioners, plumbing, the pier....”
Through the bi-weekly column in the Parool all the highlights are described. A selection of the columns of 2006 can also be found on this site.
"In 2008 we moved to Groningen, a lovely rural town on the borders of the beautiful Saramacca River. Our home is at the riverside and our Mi Gudu floats just in front of us!
From the moment we moved to the Saramacca district, we focus on several trips to the west of Suriname, where the rain forest is still untouched.”
Specifications Mi Gudu: L.O.A. 27.5 m, width 6.5m, height 2.9, height 5.0 m by boat, plane and kimmen 8 mm, side-deck-building and 6 mm, propulsion DAF 1160, 170 horsepower at 1800 RPM, 40 KVA generator 400/230 volts.
Collected columns Parool: Leonoor Wagenaar, Mi Gudu, my Honey, an adventure in later life, publishing Conserve, ISBN 90-5429-216-4
Elsewhere on this site you can also read the Parool newspapercolumns about the construction, written by Leonoor.
"Eversince we started building our ship Mi Gudu (which is Surinamese for ‘My Baby’ aswell as ‘Our Wealth’) in April 2004, our daily life has been filled with contemplating, sweating, designing, examining and pretesting. Sometimes, when friends from the Netherlands come over and admire the ship, we look at her from a different angle.... Working on Mi Gudu on a daily basis makes you forget how extraordinary it all is. Because all well considered, one has to admit the whole project remains a precarious enterprise: giving up a well-
"René and I didn’t know eachother very long when we decided to marry, both for the first time in our lives. At that time we already knew the destination of our honeymoon: Suriname. But when we arrived we were completely overwhelmed by the warm hospitable attitude of the people and the indescribable beauty of the interior with its immensely broad rivers that knew the secrets of those dark, mysterious woods high upstream…”
During their honeymoon, René’s dormant hernia got even more serious, after barely surviving a terrible trip by car over the countless pits on the long road between Paramaribo and Albina. So he could not make any more trips by car. “But those rivers, why could we not sail those beautiful rivers? We searched high and low, but there was not a single pleasure craft to be found. At that point we realised two facts. One: If he wanted to save his back René could not continue his job in the Netherlands as a shipcarpenter. The other: if those rivers were so unexploited and virginal, didn’t we accidentally discover a hole in the market? Two things that made us look at Suriname in a totally different way. Besides, after 25 years of exuberant work as a journalist with het Parool, I also felt I could leave my job without much pain in my heart. Hence the Plan grew.”
"That was in October 2002. Six months later we were back in Suriname. To network like no one had ever done before. We got in touch with local captains of industry, aswell as the head of the MAS (Maritime Authority Suriname), while at the same time we had begun to establish our company...
At the MAS office we talked to a wise Javanese man, who together with his staff, had to gauge the depth of the rivers every two years. Together we studied the nautical charts and he showed us how we could sail through the interior to New Nickerie in just a few days. ‘Especially the Wayambo river’, he said, ‘with its Indian villages, is perhaps the finest scenery I have ever seen in Suriname; purple and greenheart trees that lose their leaves in February to start blossoming in bright purple, yellow or orange colours, sloths and monkeys high up in the trees, scarlet macaws flying over your head: a virgin paradise.’ Maarten van der Jagt, a fully qualified ship engineer and at that point still working for the MAS, became a really close friend. A friendship that would prove to be a golden one.
"Back in the Netherlands we started with the practical preparations. At Euro Ship Services, a company that designs ships and cuts steel kits by computer, we began our first tentative talks. A few months later we were in Suriname again. In order to search for a construction site. And to regulate everything we could, to get a consent to import our steel duty-
"Maarten van der Jagt, intended successor of the director of the MAS, had left the firm to start working at Ercon, the steel construction company of his cousin. We made a home visit and of course we started talking about building Mi Gudu. We still hadn’t decided where to build it. There were a few options but they all had various limitations: too little power and marshy ground.
"So it was final. René sold his ship on the Oude Schans for a great price, we designed and ordered the new ship hull (of course all of that took weeks) a DAF engine was taken apart completely and refurbished by Great Engines in Dordrecht, there was a huge generator to be imported... Winter set in and we travelled all over the country to try and gather every necessary thing. Shivery we looked at the air conditioning unit. Greedy we roamed through the giant kitchencompany of Beuk near Utrecht and pointed out: such a stove, and that frying machine, what type of ice cube machines do you sell, and what does such a cooled workbench exactly do? We bought brass sidescuttles that were imported from India. Everything, everything, everything was sent VAT-
We had already rented our house in North Paramaribo. And although of course we still had no furniture, for it was sailing over the ocean, we started to pioneer immediately. With a newly purchased bed, two sofas and a TV.
A couple of days later we had our two four-
The steel containers arrived at the end of that month; one smaller container with all the accessories and three forty foot containers with sixty tons of steel in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Three lousy piles of steel really, but if you would have put them all in one container, the burden would be so heavy that no crane would ever be able to lift it on the quay.
And then suddenly there was this enormous steel mountain, with some tattooed numbers here and there. But unlike myself, I don’t think René panicked by the sight. He was quite sure of his case. So, in the beginning of April we organized a big party to celebrate the refutation of the keel, with catering, a brassband and about a hundred guests.”
"Through a contractor we found three labourers: Henry, Marlon, and Bokian, loose-
In the photo gallery of this website you can see some pictures of how she was built. With your own eyes you can see how, out of nowhere, a beautiful ship has risen…
“Then came the final stretch. And that appeared to be a long and tuff final stretch indeed! The wainscoting, the electricity plant, the air conditioners, plumbing, the pier....”
Through the bi-
From the moment we moved to the Saramacca district, we focus on several trips to the west of Suriname, where the rain forest is still untouched.”
Specifications Mi Gudu: L.O.A. 27.5 m, width 6.5m, height 2.9, height 5.0 m by boat, plane and kimmen 8 mm, side-
