A Window Opens on My Guyana Adventure
In the first installment of my Guyana adventures, I told what motivated me to visit Guyana. I told how a fellow Chicagoan had become President of this Caribbean country that sits atop Brazil, and how my early attempts to get there had always been greeted with the discouraging mantra of “But nobody ever goes to Guyana.” This repeated refusal to recognize that anyone could have an interest in travelling there made me all the more intent on going. What could be more enticing than the call of a country to which no one ever goes.
I told how I’d decided to use New York as my launch pad. But in the course of touring that city, I caught some horrible virus. This was more than a year before anyone had ever heard of Covid, so it was likely just some virulent form of the common flu. But it downed me. I just barely became conscious enough and steady enough on my feet to get out of bed and get to JFK to catch my plane to Guyana at the appointed time. I got through the 5-hour flight in a haze of Nyquil and fever.
Those five hours transported me away from the bracing chill of New York’s winter and into the lush rain forest warmth of Guyana. Still in a fog, I experienced my arrival at the Cheddi Jagan Airport only in strobes of awareness.
Touchdown
I had expected to land on a barren, dusty airstrip similar to the strip where Representative Leo Ryan and his team had landed when they came to Guyana in 1978 to make their investigative tour of the Jonestown compound. But no, this air terminal used by people flying into the capital city of Georgetown was a modern, welcoming bloom of flowers. A staircase was rolled up to our plane, making me feel like a Hollywood star landing to the applause of an admiring throng in the 1940s. We were ushered across to the terminal building which we entered by walking under a long portico lined with geraniums and bougainvillea. “Welcome” was written in flowers on the adjacent lawn.
The terminal itself was a trim, cool interior of tile. An abstract steel sculpture dominated the central part of the room. The walls were covered with eye-popping color posters of fashion models. Nothing could have been more different from the bleakness that Ryan encountered when he landed on his fateful, fatal trip.
I heard this terminal was further modernized a few months later. It was turned into an extended, glass-faceted abstraction, probably in anticipation of the many visitors the government thought might come as a result of the discovery of oil in Guyana’s waters. But even though it was built, I don’t think “they will come.” I still think that mantra holds – “Nobody ever goes to Guyana.” I was glad to have deplaned into the cozier, more organic airport.
It was a quick process going through customs. But then I panicked. I spilled out into the hot sunlight and was surrounded by a slightly predatory group of cabbies all vying to take me “Where you want to go?” The tour company I’d signed with had said that if anyone opted to arrive early for the tour, no employee would be sent as driver. You’d be on your own. But I hadn’t been able to get any Guyanese dollars before arriving and I wasn’t savvy about how far the trip to the designated hotel would be. I’d be easy pickings.
What a relief when, in spite of the disclaimers, I saw a young fellow holding up a placard with my name on it. I was being greeted after all!
The friendly young man spoke Guyanese Creole rather than the crisp British English which many Guyanese switch to when they speak to outsiders. So I didn’t catch quite all of his narrative of the highlights of the road that we drove. It was a very long ride from the terminal into Georgetown, and I wasn’t sure I could make it. I felt the flu closing in on me. But it was smooth-going and I eventually rallied a bit
I gathered that the road might not always be that drivable. There had been drought in Guyana for a while. Ordinarily, the roads would be rutted and muddy, especially during the long rainy seasons. Many of the houses were on stilts to raise them out of the swirl of water and debris that comes with the rains. In addition, there were concrete drainage channels between most of the houses. These were dry and choked with litter now, but would ordinarily be spilling more torrents of water onto the road.
The Moneychangers
As
we cruised along through this unusually accommodating weather, I began to feel fairly
confident that I could handle this trip. Then though the driver pulled up in
front of a wood shack and told me to “Go in. Get your money. Change your money.
Best place.” Oh-oh. I wondered if my driver had really been sent by the tour
company after all. Well, how could a calculating kidnapper have known my name?
I advanced cautiously through the partially unhinged door of the shack.
Inside, I found myself facing a scowling fellow standing behind a securely locked iron grillwork. Without our saying a word to each other, I pushed a couple hundred dollars U.S. under the grill – and in exchange he gave me a lot of Guyanese bills. I later found out that I had indeed gotten a good exchange rate. When other members of the tour group finally arrived and changed their money at the hotel, they didn’t fare nearly as well.
Moving along, we finally reached my destination, the Cara Lodge in downtown Georgetown. The driver said the cost of the ride was covered by the travel company. But I felt a tip was in order. I decided on $10 U.S. – which meant I handed over $2,000 Guyanese to the young man. When I got home, I gave a souvenir $100 Guyanese bill to a friend of mine. He was flabbergasted by my generosity - until he learned I’d just given him the equivalent of 50-cents.
The Cara Lodge was a lovely building maintained from colonial days. It had a big, open-sky atrium at its center. Birds fluttered amid the potted palms and other foliage in the lounge. Later, when I felt well enough to sit down there, a colorful finch came and perched on the rim of my wine glass, staring quizzically into the rosé liquid.
At the moment though, I was in no shape to sit up and appreciate any of this tropical loveliness. I went straight up to my room where I stayed for two days in semi-torpor. So I missed exploring all the things I’d come early to Guyana to see.
For example, I had wanted to sit in on some court cases to get a feel for what kinds of disputes occupied people in Guyana and what sorts of punishments were meted out for crimes. The manager of the hotel had already told me though that the public wasn’t allowed into the courthouse. However, I came to doubt that because I read in the Kaieteur News, the largest daily paper in Guyana, about people protesting a judge’s actions inside one of the courtrooms. Also, since the country operates largely under the British system of jurisprudence (England having been the country’s last colonial power), I felt the courtrooms here would be as open to the public as they are in England. When I was in England, I sat in on a murder case at the Old Bailey. So why not in Guyana?
A statue of Queen Victoria stands outside the Parliament and courthouse buildings. Much of her nose has been worn away. Still, she seems as if she were meant to welcome the citizenry into the governmental workings of the country.
Either way, I never got the chance to go to a court, a library, a hospital, a school, or any of the other “real life” places I like to visit in other countries. As it turned out, I’d come ahead of the general tour only to stay in bed.
What’s For Dinner?
On the third day, I felt well enough to come down and eat in the hotel dining room. This was the start of my first experience of what was generally haute cuisine. At home, I’d become accustomed to just throwing meals together. Or, eating out in Chicago, I gravitated to greasy spoons where the regulars at the counter were usually a mix of down-and-out eccentrics with off-beat views on life that they were eager to share. But here, fine dining was the focus.
That first supper was salmon and haricot verts (small green beans). The table and the bar at the side of the dining room sparkled with crystal. This was hardly what I expected in a Third World Country. I had expected humble daily mixes of rice and ground taro root.
But au contraire, this commitment to fine dining continued throughout the regularly scheduled part of our tour. We often were treated to 5-course meals prepared specially for us. The first course was often a delicious squash soup delicately flavored with nutmeg. The last course was often a sorbet prepared from some native berries such as jaboticabas.
I was sure this was not the kind of food that the poorer citizens of Guyana generally ate. But neither did I get a sense that average citizens were starving and absolutely precluded from getting these delicacies. My Chicago neighbor and her husband who both served as Presidents of Guyana had been Communists dedicated to promoting socialist programs in the country. But even though, in the course of his Presidency, Cheddi Jagan had exchanged many admiring letters with Castro and had (innocently, mistakenly, I believe) held him up as a model - things here had never gone the way of Cuba. In Cuba, all the best is strictly saved for tourists. Any Cuban caught eating beef or any other reserved item faces severe punishment, even including jail time. By contrast in Guyana, every imaginable kind of food was plentifully stacked on sale in Georgetown’s famous Stabroek Market, available for all to buy at reasonable prices.
No one got sick or had the least worry about eating anything we were served. Of course, there was the usual precaution – “Don’t drink the tap water.”
Diversity Comes
Naturally
There was another note of general egalitarianism that I hadn’t expected to find in such a struggling country. There was a courtyard attached to the Cara Lodge dining room. It was a lovely enclave with blooming clematis growing up the brick walls. But sometimes, when it was windy out, we would see the neighbor’s underwear flapping over the top of the courtyard wall as it was hung out to dry on a clothesline. That neighbor lived in a kind of lean-to that was leaning towards the stately Cara Lodge.
That’s the way it was along every road we traveled and along every street I had a chance to explore. Mansions and posh old colonial buildings exist side-by-side with the lean-to’s and shacks of Guyana’s poorer residents. I’m sure there must be some entire neighborhoods that would more crudely be considered “slums” by Americans. But all I saw was this close-grained mix of rich and poor which seemed a fortuitous arrangement, preventing any sharp caste system based on wealth from developing.
There is something more of a social division based on race in Guyana. The Dutch, who were the colonial power ruling the country before the British took over, brought black people in as slaves. Theirs was a particularly cruel regime. When we were taken to tour old plantation property in Guyana and in adjoining Surinam, we learned how brutal slave owners could be, exacting horrible punishments for any failure to perform designated duties. As opposed to cotton, which was “King” in the U.S., sugar was the “King” that slaves often had to work in these Caribbean countries. One treacherous duty a slave had to perform was to continuously stir the vats of sugar to keep the sticky liquid from congealing. If a slave didn’t stir his vat fast enough or if he slacked off in exhaustion for a few minutes, causing the vat of precious sugar to be ruined – that slave could likely count on having his hands cut off and perhaps on receiving further torturous punishment culminating in execution. So white Americans can’t be cited as having presided over a uniquely cruel slave system in previous centuries.
When the British took over as a colonial power in Guyana, the movement towards freeing the slaves gained momentum. The British ultimately ended slavery slightly before it was ended in the U.S. They generally accomplished this by buying out the slaveowners. Of course, there was opposition to rewarding slaveowners for their inhumanity by paying them for the slaves. But on the whole, this was deemed a better solution than engaging in all-out war, as happened in the U.S.
When plantation owners had no more recourse to slave labor, they took to importing East Indians as indentured servants to do the work on the sugar plantations and elsewhere. They lured families from India by promising decent housing and pay. Such pleasant living conditions almost never materialized for the new immigrants. When the East Indians arrived in Guyana, they often found themselves occupying old slave quarters on the plantations and found themselves made to work under conditions that were as bad or even worse than the black slaves had experienced. Many East Indians continue to live in conditions tantamount to servitude to this day.
This has caused some ongoing hard feeling between blacks and East Indians. Since the blacks gained complete freedom in the mid-1800s, they got a head start in establishing themselves in positions of authority in business and government. They more readily had access to institutions of higher education in Guyana and abroad. Both blacks and East Indians have led the country at various times. Cheddi Jagan, the husband of my Chicago neighbor, was of East Indian descent. His father had risen in the ranks of indentured servants, had become “foreman,” and eventually was able to pay for good educations for his children. He was able to send Cheddi to dental school at Northwestern University near Chicago.
In general though, a common perception among East Indians is that blacks are wealthier and have maintained more power in the country. This has led to occasional outbursts of violence and rioting. Some prejudice between the ethnic groups persists, although while I was there, I witnessed no obvious hostility.
There are virtually no European whites resident in Guyana now. Any white person sighted is likely to be either a Dutch or German tourist, or a missionary. There’s a circulating joke. When a black prospector saw a white man lurching out of the dense rain forest surrounding one of the Amer-Indian tribes, the black prospector correctly identified him as “A Jehovah’s Witness, I presume.”
Once when I walked by myself off the Cara Lodge property, heading for the shopping district, I passed an elderly East Indian man who stared at me in utter astonishment. I didn’t know what to make of his fixed attention. Had I sprouted a shocking wart on my face? When I turned and looked back at him, I saw he was genuflecting and kissing the ground – kissing the ground I had walked on!
I must have struck the fellow as a rara avis, an uncommon pale apparition wafting among the crowd. I know it’s not politically correct to take any pleasure in such an incident. But I couldn’t help it. For a brief second, I gloried in being a kind of E.T., a strange entity whom the elderly man perhaps felt had to be placated and reverenced.
The Others
It wasn’t until my fourth day in Guyana that I really started to be up and about though. The other members of my tour group arrived then and the official itinerary of the tour was launched. Luckily, I was well enough by that time to join in the proceedings.
My roommate was a woman from Hamilton, Canada. Like all the other members of this tour group, she embodied the lyrics of the Johnny Cash-sung tune, “I’ve been everywhere, man.” This tour was itself one of the tour company’s generally “Adventurous” destinations, although it was one of the less physically demanding outings offered by the company. The other group members all seemed to have travelled with this company often before and to have been involved with real feats of derring-do in remote parts of the earth.
At our “Meet and Greet” Dinner, one group member mentioned how a blackout they’d experienced during their entire stay on the Island of Zanzibar in 2010 led to their groping dangerously through the main souk (Arab Bazaar) of the place past nightfall, using only the light from their cell phones. Another person threw out mention of some hairy controversy he’d had with a local tour guide in Samarkand. My roommate entered the fray by casually referencing the sandstorm that had hit her yurt while touring the Gobi Desert in Mongolia.
I hardly had any such extreme adventures with which to introduce myself. I came in weakly with, “Ahem, I had quite a scare there when I couldn’t find my way out of the lower level of the King’s Cross tube station in London.”
I remained something of the group laggard throughout the trip. The man who served as our local guide was Eugene Noel, a prominent Georgetown leader and historian. The trouble though was that he was a fast walker. No, not a fast talker – a fast walker. He led us along trails through the rain forest to our destinations at quite a clip. Most of the others managed this pace without too much trouble. I lurched along though, focusing on the ground, trying not to trip over tree roots or vines. I didn’t dare look up and scan the trees for wildlife, so I saw virtually nothing except the ground.
I wished Eugene would pause more so I could take in my surroundings. But he generally kept moving. In one case, his goal was a pool of red water in the deep jungle. After tearing through the undergrowth, with an indigenous Indian going ahead with a machete, we mercifully paused a few moments to look at the red water – due to the leaching of iron. But this respite was all too short-lived. Before I could catch my breath, Eugene was leading us back, taking big strides. Having relatively stubby legs, I almost had to run to keep up, while the others seemed to be sauntering, with more time to look up into the higher reaches of the foliage, confident of spotting a sloth, a colorful hoatzin bird, maybe even a jaguar.
I did enjoy a second’s worth of triumph when my roommate, looking up for overhanging examples of Guyana’s reportedly amazing flora and fauna - stepped into a nest of fire ants. The ants started to run up her legs with lightning speed. Ah-ha. My concentration on the ground hadn’t been in vain. I’d avoided the fire ants. It was unworthy of me, but I did feel compensated for having been denied the ability to search the treetops for exotic animals. I could enjoy the moment because my roommate suffered no ill effects. She was able to brush off the ants and stride on, having suffered only a couple of inconsequential bites.
Amazingly, I didn’t receive one insect bite the whole time I was in Guyana. That good fortune was probably a combination of their drought conditions at the time I was there, and all those sprays I had applied to my clothes before leaving. When I got back home, I was attacked by the fleas my cats had taken aboard in my absence. I found myself wishing I was back in the rainforest – ah, so pest-free!
Where’s the
Wildlife?
In any case, whether we looked up or down, there was virtually no wildlife to be found. That always seems to be my lot whenever I go into an environment presumably abounding with exotic wildlife. During the weeks I’m there, wherever “there” is – all the animals seem to be elsewhere.
At one point, we thought we might have spotted a sloth in a distant tree. We all peered hard and long through our binoculars. Was that the end of its tail? No, after all that peering, it turned out to be just a twig.
Eugene did take us to a lagoon near Georgetown’s soccer field and as he waggled some grass he’d picked in the water, he drew a number of manatees to the concrete embankment around the lagoon. One manatee elbowed half-way out of the water to get first dibs on the grass. The manatee looked like a slightly tipsy tavern patron bellying up to the bar.
I was especially delighted to see these animals up close at last (having failed to find any in Florida). Elaine Morgan, a controversial author on evolution whose work I enjoy, suggested we study the manatee to gain insights into the evolutionary path that she believed humans took – going from water to land and then taking a U-turn back into the water. (According to her theory, humans made yet another U-turn and came back onto the land again). But she believed that during our presumed aquatic period, we acquired many of the features found in manatees, features such as layers of subcutaneous fat. I was interested to at last get a first-hand look at some of these aspects of the manatees’ anatomy. Still, it wasn’t as if we were getting to see the true wilds of Guyana. It’s possible the manatees had been relocated into this lagoon just so that tourists and school children could feed them. Maybe they’d been installed like exhibits at SeaWorld.
After we all dutifully snapped our pictures, the resort worker released the piranha back into the water. I sort of worried about it. It had had a decidedly bad day, just so that we could be casually entertained. I’d read that many fish who are the subjects of catch-and-release end up dying rather painful deaths – from infections introduced by the hook and from trauma. Piranhas can live twenty years, so I hoped this one’s life span hadn’t been needlessly shortened on my account.
Giant piranha - Open Wide
Kaieteur, Mon Amor
We did see an actual, unplanned mote of wildlife when we were flown up to see the Kaieteur waterfall. Everyone going to Guyana has to, perforce, see these Falls. It’s billed as the highest sheer-drop waterfall in the world, five times higher than Niagara. Tourists are taken in a small charter plane to a drop-off point about half-a-mile from the rim of the waterfall, and they walk from there. Getting on the plane involved a strict weigh-in. The pilot had to know exactly how much weight he was carrying. Too much and someone would have to be left behind, or there would have to be some jettisoning of water bottles, jackets, anything not essential – maybe even one of us, the pilot humorously threatened.
Deep in the Jungle - What Could Have Happened To Us if We Lied About Our Weight, Causing Our Plane to Go Down
Chris, our genial, overall guide from the travel company, made a big joke out of concealing the digital flash of each of our weights as we stepped on the scale – especially when it came to the women. But behind the laughter, this weigh-in was serious business. Going down in that immense and immemorial rainforest would mean almost certain death.
Flying from Georgetown to the area around the Falls gave us a breathtaking view. I had been stunned by the sight of endless woodland the first time I took a bus into West Virginia. But here I saw lush growth ten times denser, more verdant. Guyana bills itself as having the densest unspoiled rainforest on the planet – and I believe that could be true. So much of the rainforest of countries such as Brazil has been cut, burnt, destroyed. But Guyana has experienced mush less of that kind of devastation because “No one ever goes to Guyana.” For a while, there was some clear-cutting to accommodate a nascent bauxite industry. Bauxite is used to make aluminum. But since many substitutes have been found for aluminum and since people are being educated in how to avoid using excesses of products like aluminum foil – the need for bauxite has greatly declined. Many of the old bauxite mines in Guyana have been abandoned and the rainforest has reclaimed the land.
It’s much the same with the gold mining operations in Guyana. Much of the search for gold is still carried out by individual prospectors, hoary old panhandlers who seem to have stepped out of pictures of Alaska’s gold rush days. They do little to change the face of the rainforest as they sit there panning and pickaxing their way to what they hope will be the next big strike. So the rainforest we flew over was indeed pristine and overpowering in its potential to consume.
Chris had assured me that the walk to the Falls would, for once, be easy – no need to keep my eyes on the ground for tripping, snaring hazards. Well, his reassurance wasn’t completely correct. The trail from the airstrip to the rim of the Falls was generally well-worn and clear – until – until we got a little over half-way along. Then there loomed a muddy, steep, 6-foot-high embankment. All the others went up and over with the agility of mountain goats, digging their toes into the mud to create their own temporary staircases. They went up and over with the practiced limberness they’d developed facing the rigors of Timbuktu and Ulan Bator. But I, with only a broken escalator in the London Underground to have exercised me, was stymied.
I looked daggers at Chris. He sheepishly apologized, saying he’d forgotten about this bit of the trail. There was nothing for it but for Eugene and Chris to pitch in and give me a boost. They both leveraged upward on my derriere, one on the right cheek, one on the left – and with a mighty heave, they got me up and over. Since they were both rather handsome men, I didn’t completely mind this contact sport. But still, it was rather an embarrassment, with a reverse need for assistance facing me on the way back.
But it was a case of “no child left behind.” I got to see Kaieteur Falls with the rest of the group. Eugene regretfully informed us that the Falls weren’t at their most spectacular just then. Since the country had been experiencing such a drought, there wasn’t the usual enormous torrent of water spilling over the rim. The width of the Falls had greatly diminished – but its height was still there – the tallest in the world. (Well Venezuela and a few other countries dispute Guyana’s claim on this score, but close enough.)
There were no guard rails at the rim and some of these intrepid group members vied with each other over who dared get closest to the edge to take a selfie. This was the ideal setting for a husband to get rid of a troublesome wife – or vice versa. “Just take one more step back honey, so I can get all of you in the picture.”
Kaieteur Falls, Tallest Sheer-Drop Falls in the World
But it was at the rim of Kaieteur Falls that I saw the only genuinely wild wildlife in Guyana – a creature who hadn’t been coaxed and planted in place as a tourist attraction. Chris cried out, “Here’s one! It’s a golden rocket frog!”
We all gathered round the radiant little frog, smaller than a thumb nail, and we peered down at it, likely making it very self-conscious. The only place in the world these frogs are found is around Kaieteur Falls. They are very endangered due to the encroachment of the rainforest. This is one instance where the recovery of the rainforest is endangering a species. These frogs perhaps do better in more open wetlands.
Endangered Golden Rocket Frog Found Only Around Kaieteur Falls
A Capuchin Crusoe
There was another instance when we thought we might be sighting some genuine, unrehearsed wildlife. When we were being rowed down the Essequibo River past an uninhabited island, a Capuchin monkey came down to the shore and assumed the welcoming stance of an official greeter at Walmart’s. We were soon disillusioned about this being an example of impromptu wildlife behavior though. Eugene had the rower pull into a bay of the island. He got off carrying a bunch of bananas. He explained that he always brought something for the monkey when he knew he’d be passing. The Capuchin had been someone’s pet, but had been abandoned on this island when it had become too unruly to safely keep in the owner’s home anymore.
We soon saw an example of this unruliness. One of our group asked Eugene if she could feed the monkey. It had been coming forward to carefully take Eugene’s offerings one-by-one. Eugene gave the woman a little bag of fruit and told her to offer some to the monkey piece-by-piece in the flat of her hand, as you would feed a horse. That piecemeal plan didn’t get very far. As the woman stepped out of the boat onto the rocky shoreline, the monkey lunged forward, gave the woman a tremendous whack on the shoulder, and grabbed the entire bag of fruit.
The woman almost fell back into the river under the force of the blow – which would not have been good due to circling caimans. But she recovered in time and was alright. Eugene used the incident as a platform from which to deliver a speech about his disgust with people who make pets out of wild animals. He said how sorry he felt for this abandoned Capuchin, now left all alone on the island. He was looking for another pet monkey to be relinquished so he could bring it to the island, a kind of Friday to keep the deserted Capuchin company. (Eugene incidentally told us that many of these river islands were up for sale by the government. We could buy an island for a dollar, if we promised to develop it in accordance with government regulations.)
Circling Caiman
Singing for Your
Super
Both of our guides were very concerned about the welfare of wild animals. One Amer-Indian guide we met at a resort had proudly displayed one of his caged “singing finches” to us and told us that he was entering the bird in the regular contest that takes place on weekends in Georgetown. I later murmured to Chris how I regretted we were leaving Georgetown before the contest. I said it might have been interesting to see one of these popular Guyanese events.
Christ, usually very genial, snapped back at me, “Well, you can’t see everything.” Later I realized how opposed he was to this exploitation of native wildlife. He undoubtedly had the right idea. I’ve been reading that in recent years, there’s been a rash of people smuggling singing canaries and finches from the Caribbean into the U.S. for the increasingly popular singing contests being held in New York and elsewhere. Many of the birds, stuffed in hair curlers and toilet rolls, don’t survive the trip. Those that do survive often suffer harsh treatment here, being made to sing louder and longer to win contest prizes for their owners.
A Bird in the Bush
Actually, we did get to see another instance of truly unstaged, uncaged wildlife. We were taken on an excursion boat down the Demerara River just before dusk to see the incoming flight of scarlet ibises as they settled down to roost for the night. Several hundred ibises flew onto their accustomed branches in the jungle foliage by the river’s edge, with some white herons scattered in among them. We had to stay well away from the birds’ resting places so as not to disturb them or the ecology of their chosen flora. So even my 40x zoom camera wasn’t able to get a clear picture of this red, white, and green fantasia. But we did get an impression of a red that was redder than red – redder than even a cardinal red, if that’s possible. Birdwatchers come from all over the world to see this flight of the ibises.
That was the one day of our 2-week trip that we had bad weather. It was pouring rain. We all pitched in to hold up a tarp someone unfolded over our heads. But since I was at the far side of the boat, every pitch of the boat caused the tarp to dump gallons of accumulated water directly onto my head and camera. Every ten minutes or so, it was a World Series winners’ celebration, but it wasn’t Gatorade being spilled over me. Miraculously, neither I nor my camera suffered any bad consequences from these drenchings.
Making the Rounds
Back in Georgetown, Chris and Eugene led us on a tour of the City’s highlights. There was that Stabroek Market that’s been a famous gathering of vendors’ stalls since the early 1800’s. (Georgetown was originally named “Stabroek” when the Dutch claimed the territory.) The current Dutch-looking building that houses these stalls was finished in the later 1800s and features a striking central clock tower. There is produce galore on display there. The day we visited, the meat counters were perhaps a bit sparse. I saw a decapitated capybara being offered as the only meaty foodstuff at one counter. But the place has a veritable Walmart’s variety. There are clothes, shoes, kitchenware, and tchotchkes rampant. The Market is a lively hubbub and meeting place, beautifully illuminated at night.
Then we went inside the famed St. George’s Cathedral, an Anglican church that is said to be the tallest all-wood church in the world and one of the top-ten or twenty tallest all-wood buildings of any kind in the world. It does have a lovely, vaulted interior whose wood canopy gives the feel of keeping things close to nature. The wood used was from the Greenheart Tree, also known as the Demerara Greenheart. The lumber is notably durable and mildew and pest-resistant. The tree doesn’t grow well, or at all, outside of its native Guianas though. It seems to need the close companionship of some other species of foliage in order to do well. Some as yet undiscovered combination of bacteria and plant enzymes is needed to trigger the tree into mature growth.
Over the Apse in St. George's Cathedral, Tallest All-Wood Church, Georgetown
Again, it seems that while some racial tension might exist between blacks and East Indians in Guyana – religious strife is less of a problem there and in its sister Guianas. In Paramaribo, the capital city of adjoining Surinam (or “Suriname” as it’s more recently been designated), a mosque and a synagogue have famously co-existed side-by-side in friendship for decades. Everyone who sees this can’t help but think, “If only there could be such tolerance in the rest of the world…”
Women's Washing House on the Grounds of Synagogue - with Islamic Mosque its Neighbor in the Background
Eugene also took us through Georgetown’s botanic gardens and its anthropology museum. We went on several forays into the surrounding jungle where a local Ameri-Indian guide would stop (again, not nearly often enough) to point out the medicinal properties of various plants and shrubs we passed. Most of this went over my head as I predictably brought up the rear for every one of these brief pauses along the trail.
My Cup Runneth
Over
One member of our group was particularly attentive to these mini-lectures on native medicine though. There was a handsome couple on this tour who had apparently taken a number of the more challenging tours offered by “Adventures Abroad.” The man was a trim, middle-aged engineer. He talked to us knowledgeably about how he had applied his knowledge of resonance to build some bridges in Thailand that were sure to be safe and unswaying.
His girlfriend was a beautiful young Asian woman. This couple had early attracted my attention because of what I considered to be the man’s superhuman tolerance of his girlfriend’s ditzy ineptitude. I watched the two play badminton at the Baganara resort for half an hour. In all that time, the girlfriend failed to hit even one shuttlecock back in the direction of the net. She would swing her arm up and over her head so that the shuttlecock went flying behind her, if she made contact with the shuttlecock at all. After each such unsuccessful flailing, she would laugh carelessly, and make the same wildly inconsequential move the next time the shuttlecock came her way. “Oh, I as bad as when we play tennis – when we in Paris – in Canada,” she said almost proudly.
“We played tennis in Paris, France, honey,” the man corrected without a hint of condescension or irritation. “That was in Europe. But yes, we had quite the matches there, didn’t we?” he smiled fondly at her. He continued the one-sided game, while his girlfriend showed no improvement in her technique.
I was frankly getting impatient just watching her and was surprised that her boyfriend didn’t show the least bit of frustration. Instead he remained calmly encouraging. I wondered if there could be a toxic relationship that is just the opposite of abusive. Could a partner be too tolerant of a mate’s almost purposive shortcomings?
Carrying his indulgence even further, the man emphasized his girlfriend’s achievements to our group. He proudly patted her on the back and told us she was a Doctor. This news stunned me. How could so uncoordinated and seemingly unknowledgeable a person be a Doctor?
Later I learned she was a “Doctor of Cupping.” Well, that explained it. “Cupping” is a form of alternative medicine, popular in Asia, in which suction cups are applied to various parts of the body. When they are briskly withdrawn, the pulling action is supposed to adjust the function of various muscles and nerves.
Since the woman had an adjunct interest in naturopathy, she did try to listen to our guides’ explanations of how some of the different roots and fruits we stepped over in the jungle were used to cure ulcers, headaches, fevers, etc. But the language barrier between the Asian woman and the Amer-Indian guide seemed likely to be too great for there to be much communication. I dreaded to think how this might end in the Doctor’s foisting too large a dose of the bark of the Chondrodendron tomentosum plant on her next unsuspecting patient, thinking she’d heard that it cured impotence. When in fact – it’s curare.
Today Bartica,
Tomorrow Guyana
We went farther afield than Georgetown, Kaieteur Falls, and our Baganara Resort. Our small charter plane dropped us off in Bartica, a city south of Georgetown. Parts of the town still serve as a kind of wild west outpost where prospectors can come to exchange whatever gold they might have found in the jungle for dollars. I gather most of the crusty old independent panhandlers are soon parted from their dollars – in the saloons and houses of entertainment in Bartica. Indeed, they might have been parted with their stash even sooner as the result of having been waylaid by brigands on the roads and waterways coming into Bartica. It sometimes happens.
The word “Guyana” means “land of many waters” and Bartica is a prime illustration of that geographic feature. Three great rivers, the Essequibo, the Mazaruni, and the Cuyuni, all meet in Bartica.
I fractioned off from the group for a moment to go and explore a small inlet of one of the rivers that was burbling by a dockside. The inlet was aswirl with litter and some oily scum. I stood taking pictures of this, not because I was documenting what I considered a sorry mess in a Third World Country. I actually had the opposite reaction. I was taking pictures of what had developed into an iridescent, kaleidoscopic brilliance created by the oil slick and the colorful combined wrappers from innumerable cigarette packages and candy bars. I thought it was beautiful.
But someone else naturally assumed I was appalled by the sight. An East Indian man came hurrying up to me carrying a clipboard. “Yes, yes, yes, isn’t it terrible?” he bemoaned. “I’ve been trying to get this cleaned up for years. And also the rest…” With this addendum to his concern, he looked back over his shoulder dismally at what might have been a “hostess house” along the main street.
But the pollution of the waters was his main target. He said, “I see you are also concerned. Perhaps we could join forces.” He held the clipboard up to me and invited me to sign on to run for “The Clean-up Bartica Committee on the Bartica City Council.” He said he was sure I could be elected. “It’s a hard job and not enough people are interested,” he assured me.
This was incredible! Here I’d been in Guyana only a few days and already a path had opened to me to follow in my fellow Chicagoan’s footsteps. We prophetically even had the same middle name. Today the Bartica City Council – Tomorrow the Presidency!
Although there might be some pushback to my candidacy for higher office. There had been that bit of grumbling over having an elderly white woman from Chicago elected as President of this nation of color. Having yet a second white woman from Chicago trying to accede to the Presidency might seem like just a bit too much. Still, I considered how I might be able to break through racial barriers and win the day with my charm. LOL.
Too bad. I had to tell the fellow that I was just a tourist in Guyana for another week or so. I wouldn’t be able to serve on the Committee. I was sad that it wouldn’t be practical or likely even possible for me to become a real part of Guyana’s life. Casting my own backward glance that was already heavy with nostalgia and sentiment – I moved on with the tour.
What’s in a
Suri-Name
Too soon we left Guyana, moving on to take a quick view of Suriname. Getting in there proved to be more difficult than I thought it would be. Our group was held up at the border by an officious, armed border agent. He stared each of us down in turn as he demanded to see our return plane tickets and spent so much time examining each document with sneering skepticism that we almost missed our connection. In the 1980s, a group of dissidents who had criticized the then military government had been rounded up in the country’s landmark Fort Zeelandia and had been tortured and killed. The border agent interrogating us looked just old enough to have participated in those torture killings. By the cruel satisfaction he took in the power he wielded over us, I could picture him having gleefully done just that.
When we were finally passed through and well away from the border, Chris agreed, “Wow, that was hairy.” He told us about a second, somewhat separate, series of killings that had been conducted from the 1980s through the early 1990s - another action in which I could picture that border guard participating. The Maroon population (consisting of the descendants of black slaves) who have developed their own settlements and culture in Suriname – were indiscriminately tortured and killed as they tried to flee one way and another through the very kinds of border crossings we had negotiated. Pregnant women were ripped open on the streets while their killers laughed. Any Maroon or anyone suspected of siding with the Maroons was subject to being detained and sent to a harsh fate in that not-very-distant past. The military government in power during those years, on up through even more recent governments, have been waging a war of assimilation against the Maroons, confiscating their land, decimating them. (There have been similar campaigns of obliteration against the Amer-Indian tribes throughout the Guianas.)
This historical/political sidebar to our casual tourism made me think – perhaps we shouldn’t concentrate so much on why America is so “bad” when it comes to race relations. Perhaps we should concentrate more on why we are so (relatively) good. What is it about our social/economic arrangements that have prevented such wholesale brutality in the U.S. and that perhaps could be exported to the many countries around the world where brutality is more routine?
But our trip continued on the lighter side. Suriname used to be “Dutch Guiana” and Dutch is the official language there. However, most of the ethnically diverse residents speak a form of English Creole in their daily lives. Since there isn’t the same fallback to the King’s English that there is in Guyana, I felt more linguistically at sea here. I didn’t believe I could ever feel at home in Suriname as a writer, especially since my writing tends to be more from the lush, overgrown school of Henry James rather than the crisp, clean Hemingway school.
I revel in having a hundred synonyms of a word to choose from, with a hundred different nuances of meaning. I’ll often use a succession of adjectives like a sculptor makes successive cuts in his block of marble – honing down closer to the elusive meaning in my head with each new word stroke. Part of my style could be sheer laziness or lack of the skill. I can’t ever seem to cut through to the proper shape with one deft incision. When I heard that Hemingway had once been challenged to write a story in six words, a story with a meaningful beginning, middle, and end – I scoffed. “No way could that be done.”
But Hemingway did it. He wrote:
For Sale.
Baby’s Clothes.
Never Used.
Perhaps English Creole can accomplish such compaction of emotion, with its improvised scat-jazz approach. But I don’t really see how.
When someone said, “Me walkie backa foto,” our guide told us he was saying, “I’m going to walk behind the Fortress.” Where I might like to have gotten to a more specific motive for movement, such as “I sauntered behind the fortress; I rushed behind the fortress; I swaggered off behind the fortress - in Creole it would likely all reduce to the same “Me walkie backa foto.” So no, I don’t think I could function as a writer in Suriname.
We toured the capital city of Paramaribo, walking, sauntering, sashaying down palm tree-lined streets lined with Dutch colonial houses with their double-pitched roofs. We were then taken to see some of the old embattlements left from WWII. I hadn’t realized that quite a few allied G.I.s had been sent to the Guianas to protect the bauxite production which, it was feared, the Germans would try to sabotage. We saw WWII cannons aimed out at the Caribbean, ready to fire on any such Nazi attempts.
Since we were really just passing through the country, we didn’t get to sample all the multi-ethnic food available. We ate at our hotel. But there our experience of gourmet dining continued. For our first dinner, I discovered their walnut-honey-shrimp dish. It was the most delicious version of that dish I’ve ever had. Maybe it was the freshness of the shrimp; maybe it was some secret ingredient – but after sampling my food, all the other members of the group agreed that this was the best they’d ever tasted. Everyone got some, abandoning whatever they had previously ordered. We all became addicted, trying to finagle the same dish for breakfast, for lunch, and for take-out.
But that first night, which was our introduction to the dish and the country, was magical. Once again we were served amidst glittering glasses, fine china, and linen napkins. We sat there on the top story of our hotel, looking out over the night lights of Paramaribo. It was a time and place I never thought I’d be.
But we had to move on again. My roommate was disappointed that this tour wasn’t going to visit the third one of the sister Guianas, French Guiana. She had wanted to tour Devil’s Island, the old (now closed) prison on the island where Dreyfus was confined and which was the main character in the movie Papillon. However, we had seen one of the larger prison boats that served the main Guyanese prison, the one located on an island in the Mazaruni River. That had been picturesque, in all its rust and chains.
Guyana's Prison Boat - Main Transport for Prisoners Since Fr. Guiana's Devil's Island Prison Has Been Closed
Trinidad
Instead of finishing up in French Guiana, we went to Trinidad. The highlight of our brief time there was a trip to the famous Asa Wright Nature Center, which has now unfortunately been closed, perhaps permanently, due to financial problems in the wake of Covid. It was on many people’s list of “100 Things to See Before You Die,” so it’s actually lucky we went there instead of to French Guiana. French Guiana will always be there.
The Asa Wright Center has attracted almost every kind of wildlife that there is in the Caribbean. It was especially welcoming to hummingbirds. I spent most of my time there sitting on the veranda of the Lodge, watching the flashing jewels of hummingbirds dart among the feeders. The occasional agouti and capybara would also wander by underneath. It was wonderful to see these large, intelligent members of the rodent family living happy lives rather than sitting, decapitated, on the meat counter of the Stabroek Market.
An Agouti, along with the Capybara, One of the Large, Intelligent Rodents Found in South America
A Hummingbird at the Feeder at the (now closed) Asa Wright Center in Trinidad
The Road Taken
I sat and watched the darting and fluttering of birds and thought back on my Guyana odyssey. I had missed so many of the things I wanted to see there because of being bedridden with the flu through my first days. But I wondered, if I ever went back, what would I do? I wouldn’t want to just make the rounds of tourist attractions again – Kaieteur, Stabroek, the tallest all-wood church. I’d have to go with some definite purpose and project in mind, something that would inject me into the daily life of the country.
A few of my acquaintances become part of animal rescue projects when they go to foreign countries such as India. They receive some criticism for that. Residents wonder why they are rescuing animals when there are so many humans who need rescuing. But I see the attraction of such projects. It’s a massive and potentially intrusive project to try to rescue starving humans or humans who have been imprisoned for criticizing the government. But it’s always possible to scoop up a stray dog and bring it to a vet.
I don’t feel as if I’m finished with Guyana. I felt I’d like to see more. But I thought of Robert Frost’s poem:
Two paths diverged in a yellow wood….
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
Guyana remains, at the crossroads of my travels, a path I walked down a little way. It strikes me as a country-in-waiting. It’s waiting to be found. It’s waiting for the day when you never hear anyone say, “But no one ever goes to Guyana.” It’s poised on the edge of so many possibilities. But not yet. At the moment, it’s still the undiscovered country. And with all its tallest – wildest - most pristine, I hope not too many people discover it - not too soon.
