The only reason we came to Guyana was to satisfy a curiosity. It seemed a shame to be here and not see as much as we could, especially as we can’t enter Venezuela and Bolivia. So let’s go see the Guyanas as not many people do.
Act in haste repent at leisure. The journey to Georgetown has been tough and Guyana is not a country that lends itself to tourism, or at least our kind of travel.
We set off on our first morning in Guyana wild camping in the savannah grasslands north of Lethem after a restless sleepless night.
We average about 9 miles an hour on these dirt roads with some faster stretches obviously but lots of slow downs and pauses to deal with difficult potholes and other obstacles. But for two days we devoted ourselves to making progress and it was exhausting.
By 6:30 we were on the road to Annai the first village supposedly with gas for sale, about forty miles away.
The road was either rocky and tough causing us to bounce around or it was soft but dried mud and sand that creates parallel ridges known as washboard that shake the teeth out of your head.
It was slow progress not made easier by the knowledge that decent pavement would have got us to Annai in an hour.
As it was the indigenous village was not a pleasant experience. The service station looked closed but I figured we might as well ask.
I should never have bothered going into the main store. Three people in the place looked at me and turned away so I said “Good morning” and they ignored me so I added “A warm Guyanese morning to all you cheerful people.” And the old man turned to me and said without preamble “Why don’t you fuck off back where you come from,” in his Afro-Caribbean accent but entirely understandable.
“I will be happy to but first I was asking about gasoline,” but he was having none of it. “You come in here to insult Guyanan people, you fuck off back where you come from.”
So I fucked off not whence I came but up the road through the misery that is Annai. The planks below are a sidewalk for rainy season:
A home without walls:
The reason there is no gasoline in Annai at the general store may be because it’s available out here, or vice versa. About a mile out of town I spotted a blue sign:
A man came out and sold us two 20 liter containers of gasoline for 6,000 Guyanese dollars each, which came to US$60 for about ten and a half gallons roughly which is almost double the going rate in Georgetown we discovered. At $3:40 a gallon gas is quite cheap in the Guyanese capital, by South American standards and it’s ethanol free.
Our gas mileage drops in dirt as well as our speed but we grind along at nine miles an hour and had planned to buy gas as we went.
Why did the cows cross the road? To get to the water of course. 
And then we had the first of four police checkpoints on the road. You’d think maybe they’d check you in to make sure you show up at the next checkpoint but this one set the tone. The police officer flipped the passports I’d brought, ignored GANNET2’s temporary import permit and I walked back to the van and drove on. The point of all this? There is none as far as I can tell.
The road didn’t get better, the heat didn’t get cooler, the view didn’t change much, just a few hills as showed up.
Slowly the grassland changed to jungle about a hundred miles into the journey. And I noticed that as the trees grew taller and threw more shade the temperature dropped from 96 to 81. Deforestation works if you want to raise temperatures.
I walked up to the building and found a police sergeant stretched out on a couch under the building talking on a phone. He took one look at me and waved me on without interrupting his call. I walked back to GANNET2.
It was just a matter of dodging traffic and the worst of the pot holes and mounds of dried mud left over from rainy season. 
Notice the absence of power lines fences or any other infrastructure along the road. In the modern world this is isolation on dry land.
There is no sign of maintenance either.
Sometimes you have to pull over to let them by.
Twenty minutes of rain was enough to show me how treacherously slippery the mud can be. Luckily we were on a not very strenuous flat section.
We didn’t need gas at this point but it was a sign we were almost at the ferry, 130 miles from Lethem and half way to Linden. It was close to four pm Saturday and the ferry stops running at six so we were going to be able to cross the Essequibo River and be ready for a long drive Sunday.
The lodge is $300 a night, no air conditioning, and no dogs. We drive for the ferry.
The approach to the ferry landing: a useless pole on one side and a deep hole on the other. One last attempt to topple us.
The ferry is free going to Georgetown but the boarding process seemed very hairy to me but we had no choice so on we had to go. I would rather have been somewhere else at that point, anywhere.
