Goodbye to most of that

We're preparing for our return now - the movers are about to collect our things (we hope) - and starting to think about what we'll miss: warm weather, cheap rum, sea views ... not all that much in fact but it's been an interesting year.

Our neighbour Margaret has also just left to return to Trinidad, which for her means going back to civilisation - she's distinctly sniffy about Guyana. It's a bit ironic therefore that we had a weekend in Trinidad at the beginning of this month and spent most of the time with no water, no power and not much else. Just like being back in Guyana in fact. To do them justice, we were in a pretty remote part of the north coast and there was heavy rain which kept bringing down the power lines. Between the rainstorms it was a lovely place, though. We were staying on one of the beaches the turtles use in spring to lay their eggs. No sign of them, but plenty of old eggshells and vultures hanging around waiting for their next meal. We also visited an eco-centre in the mountains - lots of humming birds and elderly British and American tourists; our demographic I suppose, but it didn't feel like it.

We've also been to Berbice along the east coast of Guyana with Penny's colleague Sam and her family. The Guyanese always speak positively of Berbice and it is indeed very pleasant and laid back. It's also got country (cows grazing in fields and that sort of thing) which you don't really get elsewhere in Guyana - it's either built-up, sugarcane or rice plantations or (generally) wilderness - and makes a nice change.

It's been rather odd having the build up to Christmas in temperatures of 30 degrees plus. The Guyanese are pretty enthusiastic about the whole thing - putting up fake Christmas trees and many houses are decorated with huge inflatable Santa Claus and reindeer. The Christmas cards feature snowy scenes that most have never experienced and have no wish to - in fact, dealing with cold weather, is the main concern Sam has about a possible study visit to the UK next summer. There is an air of mild surprise that we northerners - there's a Canadian museum 'expert' in town as well - actually feel there should be cold and snow at this time of year.

Hope to see y'all again in the New Year. We should be back by Christmas - snow and other travel hazards permitting - and no doubt longing for the sun again. Penny may get back to it again in the spring, as she has a bit of unfinished business (more detail on the archive experience in a following post).

New venture into the interior

Going into "the interior" has a 19th Century colonial air about it but it feels a bit like that in Guyana. There is a fairly thin coastal strip which is more or less modern - fields, roads, electricity, telephone, running water etc. As you go inland the trappings of civilisation gradually start to fall away until none are left. It's great in a way for eco-tourism, which is what we've been doing, but it can also bring problems, as we found on our trip.

We started at the Iwokrama field station, and were travelling with Aidan and Isabella, two scientists from Newcastle - Isabella is Iwokrama's 'resident' scientist - and a rain gauge which they were going to install at a ranch further south. Our first port of call was the Amerindian village of Rewa and "port" is the right word as you have to get there by boat. It's about three hours down the river Rupununi from the nearest road. But first you have to find the river, which is more difficult than it sounds. In the dry season it has a more or less defined channel, about 150 feet wide, but in the wet season it spreads into the surrounding forest until it is around two miles across. Mid-season, where we are now, it is somewhere in between and though nominally we were heading for Kwatamang landing in practice you just go along until the road gives out and the water is deep enough for the boat, which could be more or less anywhere. Then it's about an hour of the boat picking its way through the flooded forest, basically by trial and error, before (with luck) you get out to the main river channel.

Still, we got to Rewa all right and it proved a lovely peaceful place. There were the usual hikes, boat trips and other wildlife spotting activities (sightings included squirrel monkeys, golden-handed tamarins and a huge fish called the arapaima), but we also spent some time in the village. It was preparing for the big event of the year, the climax of Amerindian heritage month of September, where a team sets off for the regional centre of Annai to participate in various traditional activities. We saw the rehearsals/heats for various competitive events which do not feature in the Commonwealth Games, like cassava-grating, hand cotton spinning and fire-lighting.

From Rewa we went by boat to Karanambu, our next stop. It's a good seven hours. The boat had metal seats and was a bit crowded with us, all our luggage and the rain gauge so by the time we arrived our bums were aching. Karanambu is run by Diane McTurk, a game old lady from a long established settler family who now does somewhat western style eco-tourism and takes in foundling giant otters before they eventually return to the wild. Our first activity, naturally, was another boat ride, but it was interesting enough for us to forget our aching bums - some of the time anyway. We saw a huge heronry where thousands of herons of various sorts roost for the night, then saw some lilies open. I know that sounds like watching paint dry but in fact it's fascinating. They were the huge Amazon lilies - the ones with the great wide pads. During the day the flowers are closed up tight and look a bit like coconuts. At twilight they open up into big white classically shaped lotuses, aiming to attract the beetles which help fertilise them. The process takes about half an hour and you can just about see the plants moving and certainly see the bettles diving in as promised.

We then started encountering some of the downside of being out of communication; we didn't know whether or when we could leave for our next destination, Nappi, which is inaccessible in the wet season. Eventually we set off but were told it was too late to get in that night and had to go to Lethem, the frontier town on the Brazilian border which we had visited in January. We set off early the next morning to start the 2 1/2 hour walk in to the eco-lodge from Nappi village at dawn. Our luggage set off separately by ox-cart, trundling along by a different route but at about the same pace as us (fortunately we had left the rain gauge in Lethem). The North Downs Way it was not; most of the walk was a wade through thick mud and from time to time we had to cross streams, which meant a difficult choice between getting your boots soaked or taking them off and walking barefoot through the muddy bottom (sandals or flip-flops didn't really work as they got sucked off by the mud). Still, we got there, only to find there was no water so the only way to clean the mud off was in the creek beside the camp. We had a good day, though, with some nature-spotting treks through the jungle (spider monkeys, capuchin birds and a bright red cock of the rock) only to find on our return that we had to leave at 3.30 the following morning and do the 2 1/2 hour trek back in the dark because of a mix-up over our flight from Lethem. So we were feeling pretty dirty and tired by the time we caught the plane but at least we managed to get back to Georgetown, which at one point had looked very uncertain, and it's from there that we are posting this blog.

Baganara

We spent last weekend, which saw some fairly British-style rain, and fittingly commemorated our wedding anniversary (the only day it rained in the summer of 1976), at Baganara, an island resort on the Essequibo river, another big river running in from the coast (Georgetown is on the Demarara). Getting there was quite a trek - most travelling in Guyana is fairly complicated - involving a taxi ride to Parika, a crowded speedboat down the Essequibo to Bartica, and a smaller boat across to the island. The rivers are really enormous and muddy, like lakes, and quite reminiscent of the Finnish lakes we saw last autumn (apart from the temperature), with trees and mangroves down to the shore. We passed ourselves off as 'experienced' canoeists, and kayaked round Baganara island a couple of times, in between the showers, seeing lots of birds and a howler monkey, and avoiding the large groups of day-trippers brought in to celebrate Father's Day on Sunday. The food, to be fair, was pretty good, compared to what is on offer in the eco-resorts, but given this is considered luxurious living in Guyana, it didn't really represent value for money in western terms. We came back on the firm's boat, open to some fairly heavy rain, and saw Eddie Grant's (of 'Baby Come Back' fame) abandoned house in the middle of the river, where Mick Jagger stayed when he visited to see the cricket.

Penny's project is progressing slowly but in danger of hitting the buffers with the Catch 22 of reluctance to 'build capacity' ie get some decent training, because any skilled people leave for better salary and conditions abroad.
UK visits planned over next month, so hope to see some of you then.

Water, Water everywhere

A long gap as we spent the best part of May outside Guyana, mostly in the USA, for nephew, Martin's wedding and in Penny's case getting up to the snow in Yosemite. June has been pretty wet but not noticeably cooler. Luckily most of the rain, which can be very heavy, occurs at night and occasionally wakes us up, as it is also very noisy on the corrugated tin roof (the usual roofing material here). Georgetown was beautifully laid out by the Dutch, with plots (a few acres each) separated by canals and drainage channels. On the outskirts they have been colonised by enormous lilies (the pads are used as plates - like banana leaves - at Hindu celebrations), so defeating their purpose, but becoming rather beautiful. That, and the cows and goats grazing on the verges, gives the area around us a very countryfied feel, more so as there are some houses with chickens and cows in their back yards, in a mainly residential area, with posh villas besides shacks that look like allotment huts, nearly all on stilts, the traditional method of building to cope with the floods. They did dredge out some of the channels after the first bout of heavy rain in April, but the vegetation has grown back within weeks.

As with a lot of things in Guyana, there are some upsides to the inefficiencies and lack-lustre economy. In many ways the rainforest is safer with no pressure of population and near impossibility of getting to it, It's a pity that the Guyanese lose out in order to keep it that way

markets and economics in Guyana

Last weekend we went to Parika market. Parika is a port on the River Essequibo - which is huge, the third largest in South America and over twenty miles wide at its mouth. There are lots of islands in the estuary, mostly very fertile and on Sundays the farmers come over on speedboats to sell their fruit and veg in Parika. It's as busy and messy as you'd expect and we experimented a bit (with a little advice from Eddie, our taxi driver) buying some salted curi fish and some labba (a medium sized rodent like a small capybara). The fish was tasty but pretty bony and the labba was rather good, a cross between rabbit and beef and a welcome change from chicken and mince, so hope it's sustainable. They say that if you eat some labba and drink some creek water (which we've done in Iwokrama) you're bound to come back to Guyana so it looks as if our fates are sealed.

Anyway, it prompted some thoughts on Guyana's economy. Prices are much the same level here as in the UK but wages are much lower - which is tough for the average Guyanese and also a bit odd. Why aren't the low wages reflected in lower prices or a lower exchange rate? For what it's worth (comments from experienced development economists welcome) there seems to be a combination of reasons. First, Guyana's economy is very dependent on imports - the entire population is about that of a city like Sheffield and there are a lot of things it doesn't produce itself, including some fairly basic items. Prices therefore tend to be around world levels. Meanwhile the exchange rate is artificially sustained by remittances from overseas Guyanese (there are more Guyanese overseas than in Guyana itself); also by various forms of unrecorded economic activity, including illegal logging and mining, smuggling and the drugs trade (it's not a major transit route but for a small economy like this, the quantities that come through amount to a big number). What it adds up to is that around half the economy is illegal or externally generated, which makes life pretty tough for Guyanese working in the legal economy with no outside support no wonder so many don't stay.

Meanwhile, the rainy season is getting more settled in, which means it's also time for the World 20:20 cricket, which is the equivalent of Guyana's Wimbledon, though it only gets the first rounds (the finals are in Barbados). We get the weather about ten minutes before the cricket does(the opposite of our Wimbledon experience - it's ten minutes ahead of Lovelace Road) and we've been watching on TV rather than the stadium, I'm afraid. At least we can make a cup of tea when the rain starts.

Easter, kites and a haircut

One advantage of Georgetown is that it is quite easy to get out into the jungle, where we spent the Easter weekend at a resort called Arrowpoint connected with an Indian village. We managed to get in a variety of activities, kayaking, trekking, swimming, birdwatching etc - though all you really had to do was sit on the balcony and wait for dozens of macaws to fly past. Still, we did more walking than most of their visitors, I think - Penny needs to keep up her fitness levels for Yosemite in May. On one of the walks you encounter a crashed plane in the jungle - rather worrying as it looked like all the small planes we have been flying on in Guyana.

We were back in Georgetown for Easter Monday, when the custom is to fly kites from the sea-wall, with competitions for the biggest, highest etc. We even flew a small one ourselves (out of competition) which we'd got as a free gift one day at the shops.

But the boldest initiative was this weekend when Penny took the plunge and had a haircut, accompanied by our friend Margaret as her expert adviser - no photos of the result, I fear but you could call it a reasonable success!

a month later..

Another apology for being such unassiduous bloggers - put it down to our age (and Penny is a year nearer 60 since the last post). Malcolm made a trip to the UK in early March, and Penny practised single living in Georgetown and started a yoga class, which is run by an energetic Guyanese lady, in a circular wooden 'benab' in the grounds of the Pegasus hotel.

Penny went briefly to the Iwokrama forest field station to move the library under cover, and met a research team from Newcastle setting up river and weather monitoring equipment. She joined them for a night trip on the river, and saw snakes and caiman, and a fantastic array of stars, including the milky way.

Last weekend we were in Tobago - it's a bit of a change from Guyana; the sea is clear and blue and we went snorkelling with tropical fish, swimming with dolphins, and exploring the reefs. Everything is a bit more tourist friendly than in Guyana, including the food which is (slightly) more varied (though rather more expensive). We even did some sight-seeing - the island is dotted with beautiful little bays dominated by old forts built by the French or British depending on who was in charge at the time. But it's all very peaceful now and not yet too overrun by tourists despite the attractions, so we're likely to make it a regular weekend or holiday destination.