Going to Guyana

I have very little memory of how I got to Guyana.

That’s one of those improbable sentences that I never thought I’d have occasion to utter or to hear. It ranks up there with “My, you had a very difficult elephant!” That latter comment was addressed to me as the result of a required tourist ride I took on an elephant in Thailand. The elephant assigned to me veered off the appointed trail and went down a steep incline to munch on some attractive vegetation there. The incline became almost a sheer drop into a river. As the elephant made its way down, down… the safety bar on my bench atop the animal broke. But for the mahout’s restraining arm, I would have been catapulted off the precipice to almost certain death.

The sure-seated mahout who’d taken this roguish behavior all in stride, was finally able to urge the elephant away from its preferred snack and get it onto more level ground. When the ride was finally, mercifully over and we went back to the elevated platform where I could dismount, one of my fellow tourists uttered that unforgettable line to me – “My, you had a very difficult elephant!” I should perhaps make that my epitaph. Somehow, it seems globally applicable.

But my own declaration that “I have very little memory of how I got to Guyana” might also capture the spirit of my journey through life. However, I’ll leave the selection of an epitaph for later. For the moment, I’ll explain how, for years, I targeted Guyana as a destination, but then ultimately have almost no idea how I made it there.

Why, Oh Why Guyana?

Since I was a teenager, I wanted to go to Guyana, a country that sits on the map like a stovepipe hat on top of fat man Brazil. That fascination came about as the result of a description I’d once read of the place as a startling combination of British colonial times and of wild untamed rain forest. One rare traveler there said the streets of the capital city Georgetown were lined with faux gaslights, suggesting a proper London street in Sherlock’s time. But wrapped around one of these antiqued light poles in Guyana, he’d seen – a giant anaconda.

That contrast was irresistible. I felt someday, I’d have to go and see that kind of oxymoron for myself. The image suggested a huge caduceus in real life, a snake wrapped around a staff. Of course, in the intervening years, the few people I heard of who’d been to Guyana or its neighboring countries disabused me of the idea that I’d witness any such startling sight. They said the old Victorian streetlamps had long since been replaced with more prosaic street lighting. What’s more, they said large snakes are rarely seen in Georgetown anymore.

Still, I wanted to go. The name “Guyana” means “land of many waters.” In addition to having what’s reputed to be the tallest sheer-drop waterfall in the world (five times the height of Niagara Falls), it has many big rivers and their tributaries. People with ornery, rebel spirits still independently pan for gold along these waters in ways reminiscent of the Alaskan goldrush of the 1890’s. They guard the secret of their claims and watch their backs as they come into the frontier-like town of Bartica (about 400 miles south of Georgetown) to exchange their gold for cash, which many quickly spend on booze and “hostesses.”

I’d long imagined myself panning for gold and diamonds along some hidden waterway where anacondas still could be found, and perhaps even digging for emeralds along the Roraima plateau. I wouldn’t be doing this in the spirit of yet another colonial conqueror stripping a country of its resources. I’d just do it a little, like someone going fishing for a day. It would be a way of briefly sitting amid the exotic nature of the place. And it would give me bragging rights. I could say I’d panned for gold in the rain forest. No one could ever again call me a dull stay-at-home with that kind of intrepid chapter in my background.

But I had another inducement to go to Guyana. A woman from the Jewish community not far from me in Chicago had become President of Guyana. Talk about unexpected sentences directed a person’s way! Janet Rosenberg Jagan had an unexpected life! She was a student nurse at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital when she met Cheddi Jagan, a dental student from Guyana. After they married, she went back with him to Guyana where the two of them became political activists and rose in the ranks. Cheddi ultimately became President of Guyana and has been considered “Father of the Nation,” having helped ferry the country into independence from Britain. Janet held high offices in tandem with him.

When Cheddi died in 1997, there was a brief period of rather bitter vying among the country’s political parties. But Janet, then in her 70’s, was finally tapped to run for President as a compromise candidate. She won, becoming only the third woman to be President of a country in the Western Hemisphere. At first, there was a bit of grumbling in some quarters about her election. There are almost no European/American white people in Guyana, so some of the citizens there wondered what an older Jewish woman from Chicago was doing as their leader. But Janet Jagan ultimately won praise from most of the country’s factions. She served as a leavening influence, lending herself to the concerns of both the black citizens whose ancestors had been brought to the Caribbean as slaves, the East Indian citizens who had arrived as indentured servants, and the smaller aboriginal Indian population.

If a movie producer from the past had been inclined to take a comic view of this history, I could see him starring Rosalind Russell as the Jewish woman from Chicago who becomes President of a banana republic. (The Irish Rosalind Russell had famously played a Jewish woman from the Bronx in A Majority of One.) I daydreamed about following in Janet Jagan’s footsteps, in a more modest way. If one Chicago woman could become a notable figure in this Caribbean culture – why couldn’t I? There was so much about Guyana that still seemed to be undecided, open-ended. It floated in my imaginations as a polymorphous place where anything and anyone could happen.

No One Ever Goes to Guyana

Over the years, I made tentative inquiries about how to get there and what to do when I got there. But I was always faced with the same brick wall of indifference and incomprehension. Most people had never heard of British Guiana (become Guyana in 1966). They vaguely thought I was referring to Guinea, “a place somewhere in Africa, isn’t it?” After the Jim Jones tragedy, a few more people had heard of the place, but still weren’t sure where it was. They were universally amazed when I told them that Trinidad was not far off its coast. Everyone knew Trinidad. What? There was a whole country close to the U.S. that no one had ever heard of? “Why I must have passed it when I took that Caribbean cruise last summer! How come I never heard of it?”

Indeed, it became a mystery to me why no cruise ships ever stopped at Guyana. I’m still puzzled about that. One partial explanation has been that the country can’t maintain harbors to accommodate big cruise ships. The many rivers flowing through Guyana and emptying into the ocean carry so much sediment, that harbors become silted over shortly after they’re dug. The Guyanese government hasn’t been able to afford to continuously dredge harbors. (Things might soon change though. As I’m writing this in 2021, it’s been predicted that Guyana will soon become the richest country on the planet due to the discovery of offshore oil deposits. Everyone will love it then. But I loved it even when it was poor.)

My attempts to get to Guyana over the decades met with another kind of obstacle. That was people’s sheer unwillingness to even entertain the idea that any outsider would want to go there. All the travel agents I consulted gave a uniform response to my questioning. “Why Guyana? No one ever goes to Guyana.” In fact, the second half of that rebuff was repeated at me so often, it became a sort of catchphrase around my house, uttered as a synonym for anything that just wasn’t going to happen. “For the tenth time, Liz says she’s going to lose weight. Hah! No one ever goes to Guyana.”

Surprisingly, this reluctance on everyone’s part to even contemplate my intentions extended into Guyana’s own officialdom. At one point, I got the idea of calling the office of the Guyanese consulate in Washington. I thought I’d be warmly greeted. I pictured a functionary sitting in a dusty corner office, as lonely and uncalled on as the Maytag repairman of old TV commercial fame. Surely my rare interest would bounce like a birthday balloon into that functionary’s drab, anonymous existence.

But the assistant consulate with whom I spoke ran true to form. When I asked about pamphlets, recommendations for tourists, she rather brusquely said, “I wouldn’t know. No one ever goes to Guyana.” And that ended that conversation.

What’s So Great About Guyana?

This was all very strange. I thought Guyana would have been a frequent destination for Americans. It’s the only South American country where English is the official language. Most of the residents there speak a Guyanese Creole when talking casually among themselves, but revert to a crisp King’s English when speaking to people who might be foreigners. So Guyana affords a rare opportunity for an American to really get to know a Third World Country first-hand, rather than filtered through interpreters.

The weather is a year-round pleasant 80° with ocean breezes wafting through Georgetown. However, there is a rainy season which has caused many of the structures to be built on stilts and to be surrounded by drainage ditches into which all kinds of muddy slop and trash can accumulate.

Although there was a significant amount of bauxite mining there in the decades after WWII, most heavy industry has generally ignored it. Many sources rate its rain forest the densest, most untouched in the world. However, there are a wide variety of ecosystems in Guyana to explore. Although the place looks small sitting there with its sister countries of Surinam and French Guiana atop the massive Brazil, its area is actually larger than the combined areas of all the countries comprising Great Britain. So there are savannahs, plateaus, mountains, as well as that immemorial, Joseph Conrad rain forest.

So what’s not to like? The mystery of Guyana’s unpopularity made it all the more beguiling to me. But after that consulate’s unpleasant dispatch of my interest in touring the country, I sort of gave up. The years rolled by. Of course, during all that time, I could have just hopped on a plane. But I’m not the kind of seasoned traveler who can just go cold to exotic places. I need accompaniment, guidance. It was only recently, with the endless possibilities made available on the Internet, that I thought to check again how I might join a tour going to Guyana.

Get Packing

Surprisingly, the world still seemed largely oblivious to the place. But searches did turn up a couple of companies that now featured tours of Guyana. Several of these companies looked a little sketchy, and only operated inside Guyana itself, running day tours to that famous Kaieteur waterfall or to other brief special-interest destinations in the country. One or two companies that advertised more extensive start-to-finish expeditions were, however, of the “Ultimate Explorer” variety. They touted the white water rafting their customers would be doing – the week-long campouts by the Essequibo River – the climb up the sheer face of Mt. Roraima. No, that wasn’t at all what I, the ultimate couch potato, had in mind.

 But finally, I did see one company, a Canadian company, that looked as if it would be more my speed. “Adventures Abroad” offered a tour that principally covered the main cities in Guyana, Surinam, and Trinidad. Well, that perhaps sounded like a little too much of a “If this is Tuesday, it must be Belgium” sort of smear across the landscape. But it was the best I could find. I thought that once I learned the ropes, I could always go back on my own sometime. So I signed on.

There was a little hitch. After I had sent my money in, the Adventures Abroad agent called and said interest in that tour had been very low. (Would the world’s indifference to Guyana never end?) They said if they didn’t get two more people to sign on, the trip would be cancelled. So I hung in nervous anticipation. But at the last minute, two more people did take the necessary leap of faith willing “to go where no man has gone before.” After more than four decades of holding a vision of gas lamps and anacondas - I was going to Guyana.

There was a daunting amount of preparation to be made. By sheer coincidence, just as I was swimming in indecision about where to start, I heard about the existence of “travel clinics.” I hadn’t known that there were such one-stop places that gave travelers all the necessary warning information about their destinations, that gave vaccinations, and that provided pills and accessories. I made an appointment at one near my home.

The place didn’t look auspicious at first glance. It was a small office up some dingy stairs on the second floor of an old office building. Since I arrived a little early, I had to wait out in the hall. The Doctor on duty set up a folding chair there so I could sit while I waited.

Once inside though, everything was a model of solicitude and efficiency. The Doctor looked up “Guyana” in her charts to see what kinds of precautions were necessary or recommended. I ended up getting hepatitis and yellow fever shots (the latter being mandatory for entry). We decided a typhoid shot probably wouldn’t be necessary this time around. She provided me with a regimen of anti-malaria pills. Then we went to work on the insect repellents she felt I’d need. A 24-ounce bottle of Permethrin was the centerpiece of this precaution. She told me how I should thoroughly spray every piece of apparel I might wear with the chemical before I left.

This last requirement led to my getting a reputation as a “The Mad Woman” of my neighborhood. I was scheduled to leave at the end of February, so mid-month, it was time to spray. The instructions on the Permethrin bottle said that clothes should be sprayed “OUTSIDE.” And indeed, I didn’t want to coat the inside of my house with insecticide, especially since I have pets who like to lap up everything in sight.

But this presented a problem. There’d been a big snowstorm in Chicago that had left several feet of drifts in my back yard, drifts that I hadn’t felt like shoveling away. I had shoveled my front sidewalk down to the bare concrete though. So that had to be my theater of operations.

Late one night, when foot traffic in front of my house should have been at a minimum, I spread old bedsheets on the sidewalk. Then I spread my entire planned vacation wardrobe out on the sheets. I set to work spraying my blouses with their outstretched arms seeming to embrace the sight of the wintry sky overhead. I sprayed the several pairs of culottes I was going to take as a compromise between shorts and full-length, heat-retaining pants. I was in the middle of spraying a dress I was going to take for the tour group’s formal farewell dinner – when a pedestrian approached. He cautiously veered away from my sheets and partially inclined himself up the piled snow by the street gutters. He paused midway along the course of this display. “What, what are you doing?” he asked suspiciously.

“I’m spraying my clothes with insecticide,” I informed him. “You know, to repel tropical insects. I wouldn’t want to get bitten by a mosquito carrying malaria, or anything like that,” I sententiously explained. I’d forgotten to preface my little lecture with the fact that I was going to travel to a tropical country. So my concern about catching malaria in the dead of winter, in freezing Chicago, in the wake of a record-breaking snowstorm – struck the passerby as serious derangement. With eyes darting left and right to confirm that he had a quick escape route, he humored me, “No, no, you wouldn’t want malaria.” With that he beat a hasty retreat, scaling a particularly steep curbside bank of snow to put as much distance as possible between himself and my hallucinated swarm of malaria-bearing mosquitoes.

Then came the project of packing. It wasn’t until I started that final process that I realized how I had, once again, created a major problem for myself. I always make a resolution to pack light the next time I go anywhere. But I saw that was going to be impossible in this case. There are only two ways of getting to Guyana from Chicago. Since there are no passenger ships that dock there, the only way is to fly. You can fly out of New York, or you can fly out of Miami. Since I’d been to Miami before, I decided to fly out of New York. I’d never been there, so I arranged to stay a week in a cheap Times Square hotel and see the sights before leaving for Guyana.

What had I done? I had chosen to visit the two most climatically different places on one trip. That meant having to pack a heavy coat on the one hand – and three heavy bottles of insect repellent on the other hand. That meant two sets of clothing, two sets of tour books and itineraries. It meant snowshoes and sandals. I ended with a couple of elephantine pieces of luggage that I had to schlep. “My, you had a very difficult elephant.”

A Stopover in New York

I probably made my dilemma of cartage even worse by having chosen to go to New York by train rather than plane. I’d read that, for years, Amtrak management has been bitter about being required to continue long distance passenger service at the federally stipulated rates. It receives a mere pittance in government subsidies for carrying humans. Even taking the individual fares paid into account, it loses money on every person who opts to travel by Amtrak. That’s why, according to some accounts, a culture of antagonism to passengers permeates Amtrak service. I didn’t believe it could be very bad though, and “riding the rails” has always carried such romantic appeal for me. Unfortunately, the media’s assessment of the quality of Amtrak’s service to passengers proved to be all too accurate on this run to New York.

I set out on my big adventure from Chicago’s Union Station on a cold February day. All the train cars were packed. Not a single coach seat was available for anyone to sprawl. The overhead storage racks were correspondingly stuffed to overflowing. As a result, most of us had to continue to wear our coats during the whole 24-hour ride to New York. This might not have been too great a hardship, except, as we started to roll on through Indiana and points east, the temperature in the cars started to climb, climb, climb. It must have gotten to 95° by the time we were approaching Cincinnati. We were sweating; some of us were feeling faint; all of us were complaining. It was almost impossible to enjoy the scenery, which had been the whole point of taking the train.

Whenever the conductor came through our car, we moaned in unison - “Turn down the heat!! Pleeeeeease!!” Each time she ricocheted like a pinball down the aisle, she had a slightly different excuse for not being able to do so. Mostly though, her excuses centered around the alleged fact that, “The thermostat is underneath the car carriages. It can’t be reached until we stop.”

That seemed very odd. Odd and unlikely. But we couldn’t inspire her to make a more thorough search for the thermostats we felt sure must be at hand somewhere inside one or all of the cars. When we’d stop at a city, we always hoped that someone could crawl under the train and access that elusive thermostat. But city after city, town after town – there was always some reason why no one had been able to accomplish that feat. So on we rolled in a sauna.

Finally, as we left Charleston West Virginia, headed for Washington and the last lap into New York – that same conductor announced matter-of-factly that a thermostat had been located, apparently inside, on a wall near one of the washrooms. With an air of having done an extraordinary favor for us, a favor no doubt deserving of a large tip, she said, “I turned the thermostat down for you, so you can all be more comfortable.” The temperature didn’t go down much. But we travelled those last miles into New York in what was no longer a sweltering, but merely a balmy 85°.

What a relief it was to debouche into the cold, cavernous underground of Penn Station. I wasted no time. I had calculated my Times Square hotel was within walking distance from the Station, so I made directly for the staircase up and out. A bracing, but not frigid breeze from the great outdoors greeted me as I yanked my two balky, bulky suitcases after me, one jarring step at a time. Just as I reached the sidewalk and was standing, reveling at being in New York, New York – a young woman in running shoes approached me and commiserated, “Oh, you poor dear! That’s quite a load you’ve got there. Are you staying around here?”

Still disoriented from the heatstroke visited on me by Amtrak, I blurted out in what I hoped was a mildly dismissive, “Yes, yes I’m fine. I’m just down the street at the Econo Lodge. I’m fine.”

With that, the athletic young woman took charge. “Oh, I know where that is. Here let me help you. You poor dear,” she repeated. She then grabbed one of my suitcases with preemptory force and charged off down 8^th Avenue. Before I knew it, I’d lost sight of her in the crowd.

I stood there, stunned. I hadn’t been one second in New York and already I’d been robbed! Even worse – I’d been insulted. “Poor dear,” indeed! I fancied myself as cutting a rather vibrant, youthful figure. Where did my mugger come off calling me a “Poor dear?”

I didn’t know what to do. Call the police? But I didn’t yet have any hard evidence that the suitcase was gone for good. I decided I’d walk down to the hotel and call from there. It was a longer distance than I’d calculated, but not too bad, especially since I’d been relieved of half my burden.

As I yanked my now unmatched piece of luggage through the door of the Econo Lodge, something familiar caught my eye. There was my other suitcase standing, as bulging as ever, against the wall of the hotel lobby! A miracle on 47^th Street! The clerk behind the counter guessed my identity. “Is that yours?” she pointed. “It was just delivered.”

First impressions are lasting. And so I’ve been bound to always think kindly of New York, no matter what might ever happen to me there in the future. I went up to my assigned room. It was a dingy closet of a place. But the bed was clean, and it and all things New York were good.

The next morning, I signed on for a “Deluxe” tour of the city. It was one of those touristy sweeps that shows you everything and therefore nothing. But since I was booked for a week in the City, I thought I could go back and explore more in depth later, on my own. This all-points junket by land and by sea took in places as diverse as the front of the Dakota Apartment Building where John Lennon was shot, and the waters out past the Statue of Liberty. Our tour guide was an elderly man who took every opportunity to tell us all about the fascinating religious landmarks he’d seen on his recent trip to Israel. So we actually ended up hearing more about Jerusalem than New York.

But the fellow was conscientious when it came to giving us plenty of photo ops. As we stood catty-corner from the Empire State Building, he pulled a stuffed gorilla out of his knapsack. He wiggle-waggled it in the air so, if we angled our cameras just right, we could get a picture that looked as if the cuddle toy was climbing up the spire of that iconic structure.

The next days I spent walking around. I saw some notable “characters” of New York. I saw the naked cowboy in Times Square. Then I discovered a more truly remarkable character on the steps of the main library. I learned that Garrett Buhl Robinson sets up on the library steps between the two lions almost every day, rain or shine, and sells his self-published books of poetry. I was attracted to his paperback book entitled “Martha,” because that was my mother’s name, and I was feeling more poignantly orphaned than usual, roaming around on my own in the big city. Chatting with him, I learned that the “Martha” of the epic poem in his book was Martha Graham, the famous doyenne of American modern dance. It soon became apparent that Garrett was enamored with classical music and ballet. He was able to go into a transport of appreciation of the art forms.

Although I was delighted to have discovered this true free spirit of New York, and although I walked away happy with a signed copy of Martha tucked in my purse, my encounter with Garrett also left me feeling a bit melancholy – and envious. How far distant I was from any such capacity for real absorption and enthusiasm. I’d come closer when I was in my teens, but even then, I felt I’d only enjoyed the shiny surfaces of things. I’d never really been able to have a through-and-through “passion” for anything, as modern parlance seems to require. It’s likely that that’s true of most people. Most people are probably actually faking passion, or they’re convincing themselves of enthusiasms that they don’t really have. But it was plain that Garrett was a rare soul who felt the real thing.

I went on up the staircase where Garrett was posted, into the library itself. Whenever I’m in a foreign city, I make a point of visiting a library there if at all possible. I quickly learned a surprising thing about that big lion-guarded building. I learned that you can’t check out books there. Except for a small “popular library” alcove where you can perhaps grab a paperback for a lunchtime read - this is not a circulating library. So there were no floors and stacks of books I could browse through. Almost everything in the vast building is archived and is off-limits to everyone except serious scholars.

In any case though, I didn’t want to spend all my time in New York in the library. I bury myself sufficiently in books when I’m at home. So I did try to walk around a little and become part of New York’s unique vibe. But after my fourth day there, my throat began to feel scratchy. The day after that, I woke up in the pigeonhole of my hotel room with one of the worst flus of my life. And that was the end of my New York state of mind.

I couldn’t get out of bed for a day and a half. After that, I was only briefly able to make it down to the hotel lobby to get an orange juice and a hard-boiled egg, the main foods that the hotel had on offer for their standing room only “free breakfast.”

In another essay, I wrote how uniquely subject I am to these terrible attacks of the flu when I travel. I put this susceptibility down to the fact that I am mostly a homebody. I’m at home 90% of the time and then – I burst out on one of these overly ambitious peregrinations. I haven’t been out in the world enough to build up resistance to the common colds and flus that circulate around and that others get inoculated with in small doses. It’s what I’m afraid might happen to many people after everyone comes out of their Covid isolation this year.

I also blamed my disability this time on those long hours spent in the torture hotbox of the train car. Such exposure to heat has always lowered my resistance. But whatever the cause of my malady, I spent my remaining days in New York as a messy ooze of guacamole in the taco roll of my blankets. I was only dimly aware of my surroundings. I did take comfort in the banging reverberations of the garbage trucks that came at dawn every morning to upend the dumpsters on the side street below my window. That jarring noise that probably irritated other tourists, was a comfort to me. It let me know I was still in the land of the living. Other than that, it was all a hallucinatory swirl of lions and gorillas in the mist.

I rallied just enough to know when it was time for me to get up and catch a plane to Guyana. I got down into the lobby at 4:00 AM, this time having to jockey both weighty bags of insecticide and sweaters on my own. A cab was called to come take me to JFK and – something – something – something. Although I arrived over three hours early at the airport, I almost missed my plane. While my ticket read “Caribbean Airlines,” it turned out that I was actually flying under the aegis of American Airlines. I sat by the wrong counter until it was almost departure time. When no one had come to man that counter, I knew something was wrong. I made it over to check in with American Airlines just in time. I do remember that.

The flight itself is a blur. It was a small plane, completely full. I had been swilling Nyquil or something to keep from coughing and spreading germs en route, so I was barely conscious for the 5-hour flight.

All I remember is that I left New York on a cold, dreary morning – and when I snapped into some semblance of awareness again, I was in a warm, sunny wonderland. After decades of imagining anacondas and gaslights, I was here. I was in Guyana - at last.

What happened next is another story.