Hotel Wednesday

 

We did not leave the grounds yesterday thus there is nothing to report. We swam, we read, we watched videos, we napped.  Rusty, the most important crew member napped inside on his bed and the tile floor and then when he stood at the door I let him out to lie in the grass until he got too hot and needed to come back in. 

So before we get to Guyana this is a good moment to consider this country no one has heard of except possibly as the place where the Jonestown massacre took place.

You can look it up for yourself but the site is pretty inaccessible even today and as far as I know there’s nothing to see except a monument for those that might fly or boat there near the Venezuelan border.

The only other categories of tourism you might run across are birding and environmental eco- tourism. Guyana is not well developed and you have to be pretty rugged to go birding in the jungle but I’m told you will see unusual wildlife. We are saving that for the Pantanal in southern Brazil. Our journey is to satisfy my curiosity.

There are three Guyanas on the Atlantic Coast. The top one, formerly British Guyana began life as a trio of Dutch outposts that Britain took control of after the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815 when the world map got redrawn. Georgetown the capital got its name from the King of course but its old Dutch name, Stabroek is still used to this day for the main opposition newspaper The Stabroek Times. 800,000 people live in Guyana which gained independence in 1966 and has limped along ever since with not much development and high levels of poverty. But things are changing.

 

The great good fortune of Guyana is that ten years ago they found large deposits of oil off its coast, so now the debate is how to spend the money they expect to see flowing into the country. Good fortune can easily turn into a curse of course and one has to wonder how the country will treat its people. Then there is Venezuela wracked with problems next door and as is often the case appears to be trying to distract its people by claiming a large chuck of northern Guyana as its own territory. So far it’s all talk but the Guyanese are wondering if Venezuela may make a move now there is oil in the area, not that oil revenues have done much good for Venezuelans with their own abundant reserves.

Guyana recently started spending $190 million dollars, most of it a Caribbean development bank loan to build a paved highway to Brazil. They’ve only completed 25 miles of the 275 but they are hoping to get it built all the way to Lethem to open up northern Brazil (too late for us…) by connecting Boa Vista to the port in Georgetown. So they have lots of big plans in the works but there’s no telling when or if life for ordinary people will improve. 

It’s strange self contained world we are about to enter, in South America but not of it, a country which is largely unexplored and inhabited almost exclusively along the coast. If you look at the borders of the Guyanas they are marked only with dotted lines as they haven’t been surveyed, no one travels there in impenetrable rain forests and what is Guyana and what is Suriname formerly Dutch Guyana is not defined. And then there is French Guyana, not a colony they say but an overseas department of France. When we get to French Guyana we enter the European Union. Go figure. It’s all a little crazy. But where in the world isn’t, these days?