Bigi Pan

Bigi Pan is a coastal wetland in Nickerie district, in the far west of Suriname near the Guyana border, and one of the country's four Multiple-Use Management Areas under the Nature Conservation Division of the Forest Service. It is not a day trip from Paramaribo in any practical sense: the operators that sell it run two- or three-day programmes, and the shorter version starts in Nieuw Nickerie rather than the capital. What people go for is birds. The Anton de Kom University's Bigi Pan Programme describes the area as one of the most extensive and ecologically important wetland systems in the Guianas, with scarlet ibis, flamingos, herons and hundreds of thousands of migratory shorebirds passing through each year. The lagoons and mangrove channels are explored by boat, and some programmes include a night in a lodge on stilts over the water.

We have not found an official visitor page for Bigi Pan: no published entrance fee, no opening times, no rules, and no government description of how to get onto the water. The drive from Paramaribo to Nieuw Nickerie is long, but no source we read states the distance or time, so this page does not print one. What it does print are the operators' own published prices for their Bigi Pan programmes, each with the date it was read. Ask the operator what the boat hours are, because the birds are the point and the light matters.