by Jim Richards
Guyana was also well known for the notorious Jonestown Massacre in 1978. A religious sect from the USA led by the charismatic Reverend Jim Jones had set up an agricultural mission, known as Jonestown, in the north-west of Guyana.
Followers had migrated from America, but the mission gradually descended into a mind-control horror, patrolled by armed guards, in which the increasingly paranoid Jones meted out sadistic punishments to any detractors, including children. The culmination of this was the mass suicide of his 909-strong congregation. Jones had exhorted them all to drink Kool-Aid laced with cyanide. The infants and children went first, and once they had died the parents more compliantly followed. It was the largest mass suicide in modern times. Not until 11 September 2001 were more American civilians to die in a deliberate act.
Jerome was a great storyteller. The accuracy of his stories was another matter, but they were certainly entertaining. He told me that he had worked for some years on the gold dredges that operated on the large rivers in the interior of Guyana. He was a gold diver.
Indeed, Jerome was the best gold diver in Guyana. Much hyperbole followed with the accounts of his diving exploits. Every story involved Jerome as the masterful hero who vanquished all before him and ended up with the girl. Many girls, in fact.
Having made his bundle on the dredges, Jerome took his gold and his Guyanese sweetheart and travelled overland in an attempt to illegally enter and settle in the United States. Or backtrack, as the Guyanese called it.
Unfortunately for him, during this trip he awoke one morning to find all his gold, money and even his clothes were gone. His beloved had cleaned him out; there was a note on the pillow. Jerome recited it amiably for me:
‘Dear Jerome, I found out before we left that you were laying down with Alisha. I will be sporting it up in New York with your money while you rot in Guyana, you double-crossing scunt. Love, Eva.’
I wasn’t too sure what a scunt was, but I could guess. Eva’s departure to the USA did seem like a loss to Guyana as, from what Jerome told me, it appeared the country needed good long-term planners like her.
After that hard-luck story, it looked like I was buying lunch. Once we had eaten we approached a couple more boats. Jerome had some front, but his Spanish was worse than mine. We were treated like lepers and got nowhere.
I spent the rest of the afternoon picking Jerome’s brain about Guyanese gold dredging. Not even Jerome’s apparently fervent imagination could dream up an entire industry.
‘The dredges are around the size of a small truck, dey float on the rivers on wooden pontoons. The diver was my job, he da most crucial man and control the end of the suction pipe. We suck up the gravel wit gold or diamond or thing from the river bottom, up the pipe and den wash dem gravels over a sluice box which catch the gold and diamond.’
‘How deep is the diver?’ I asked.
‘Usually ’bout fifty feet.’
‘How do you see that deep in the water?’
‘You have electric light, wid a line connected to the dredge.’
This dredging sounded like just the kind of thing I was looking for. Guyana wasn’t that far away, it was English-speaking and I could also move on to Brazil through the south of Guyana. I was already heading roughly in that direction: why not give it a go?
Thus, on the basis of a chance encounter, I rejigged my highly flexible route to take in the intriguing country of Guyana. Not bad for the price of a lunch.
CHAPTER 7
FOUR PROBLEMS
Travelling from Honduras to Guyana was not easy. I had to get from Central America to South America, and in the way was the Darien Gap in Panama. This was a vast jungle swamp with no roads or vehicle access. It had defeated road engineers for centuries.
During the California gold rush, the lives of countless Argonauts were lost through malaria and yellow fever while they crossed the Panamanian jungles from the Atlantic to the Pacific. I did not intend to become a more contemporary gold rush casualty so, as a twentieth-century Argonaut, I decided to fly. Few airlines serviced Guyana, so I took the short and inexpensive flight to Caracas in Venezuela and then planned to travel east overland to neighbouring Guyana.
I arrived in Caracas in the small hours. Riding the airport bus into town, it looked like a mean city: rubbish-strewn streets with dilapidated concrete buildings. A few dirt-poor people scurried between the shadows and the illumination from the cars and few street lights that worked. There was an air of desperation about the place. From the grubby bus window I saw a person dressed in rags getting mugged by another person dressed in rags. I waited at the main bus depot until dawn, and then found a modest and secure-looking hotel within walking distance.
My best protection from foul play was that the people in Venezuela were generally lighter skinned than those in Central America. With my suntan, military demeanour and haircut, I could easily pass as a member of the Venezuelan military. In Venezuela people did not mess with the military, which suited me just fine. Mind you, I still had to communicate and my accent was a dead giveaway.
I went to the Guyanese embassy to get a visa. This was tricky. In 1990, Guyana was still a fairly closed and somewhat paranoid country, caught in the middle of the Cold War stoush between Russia and the USA. The visa officer could not believe that someone wanted to enter Guyana as a tourist. It took considerable persuasion to convince her of the attractions of her own country. Just as well I did not tell her the real reason for my visit.
There was also a complete lack of information as to how to get into Guyana via Venezuela. All I had was a map. From Caracas I planned to simply work my way ever eastwards by bus, figuring that sooner or later I must end up in Guyana.
The closest town to the Guyanese border and to the coast was a place called Barrancas, on the banks of the mighty Orinoco River, so that was where I headed.
I have always been a dreamer. On the long bus journeys through Venezuela, I thought about the prospecting glory that awaited me on the dredges in Guyana. My gravitas was undone by an incident that happened while changing buses in the dusty Venezuelan town of Temblador. My bus was late, and when it finally arrived in the town, the connecting bus to Barrancas had been waiting hours for the transfer passengers. The doormen hassled us to quickly switch buses, and tried to manhandle me.
‘Manos fuera. Yo no soy un perro,’ I spat at them. (Hands off. I’m not a dog.)
This quick-fire Spanish was rewarded with hysterical laughter. My colloquial language was clearly not yet authentic.
As my bus set off on the rutted road to Barrancas, I felt a bit deflated. I stared out of the window and reflected. I could still take my gold rush undertaking seriously, but perhaps I shouldn’t be taking myself quite so seriously.
Barrancas was civilised, but only just. The town was a rag-tag collection of concrete slum dwellings with peeling bright paint; the weather was hot and humid. Then I saw the river, over 2 kilometres wide at this point, the vast, muddy and majestic Orinoco River. It took my breath away.
Barrancas is the last town on the Orinoco before it splits into its vast delta. It had a frontier atmosphere similar to the Petén in Guatemala: dirt roads and cowboys. I asked around for a way to Guyana and looked at some local maps.
There were no roads or even tracks. Barring the way were virgin jungle, mountain plateaus and the world’s highest waterfall – Angel Falls.
Walking east looked impractical. I did not have the gear or the crew to take on some quite serious mountains, as well as jungle. It was time for plan B, as I had learned in Honduras: when in doubt, go to the port and ask around.
The ‘port’ at Barrancas was a low concrete wharf servicing a collection of small narrow wooden boats that plied the river. I asked around to see if anyone knew how I could get a lift to Guyana. A gang of sinister-looking youths eyed me off from the sidelines, perhaps sensing a payday. Bizarrely, they all wore identical Miami Dolphins baseball caps, which for some reason added to their menace.
After a few false sta
rts, I was shown to a small boat. The captain reckoned he could help and I got aboard, sitting on a wooden plank with a few other passengers. I paid the nominal fare, and as we set off I gave the youths a friendly wave. It pays to travel light.
The boat trip was refreshingly cool after the oppressive heat of the town. We rode downstream for an hour, stopping a couple of times, the vessel totally insignificant on this huge river. On the banks, there was the odd house and clearing, then, as we travelled swampy forest gradually took over.
Eventually we went up a small tributary; numerous vines snaked their way down from the treetops to the river. We slowed and stopped at a jungle shanty that was built over the muddy water. It consisted of a random collection of bamboo huts and fuel tanks supported above the water on stilts. One of the huts was a shop; another had food. A few rangy-looking, barefooted men watched our arrival with interest. The odd hammock indicated a sleeping form. Two mangy dogs sniffed around.
It looked like a privateer’s base, but was in fact a fuel-smuggling depot. Venezuela is a major producer of oil and, as such, fuel is dirt cheap. On the other hand, the surrounding countries in the Caribbean, including Guyana, have high excise duties and thus expensive petrol and diesel. So a large fuel-smuggling industry exists in the Orinoco delta servicing nearby Caribbean markets.
We pulled up at a rough jetty built of timber and the boat captain indicated that this was my stop, so I clambered out. I noticed one of the huts had two attractive and scantily clad young women sitting out the front and I got an encouraging smile. Then I saw a spraypainted red love heart on the door of the hut.
The boat captain shouted to a man and waved him over, pointing at me. Up walked Rick and introduced himself. He was a fit-looking thickset guy of mixed race and was a Guyanese fuel smuggler.
We got straight down to business.
‘You want to go to Guyana, my friend?’ Rick asked in the identical accent to my old pal Jerome.
‘Yes please.’
‘No problem. A hundred US dollars and I’ll take you through.’
That seemed reasonable to me. Rick didn’t ask me my business and I didn’t tell him. We walked down the jetty and wound past the huts, talking as we went, our feet springing on the bamboo underlay. Rick seemed happy that I was British and said he wished the British were still running Guyana. We walked out of the hutted area onto another even shorter jetty.
‘Here she is,’ Rick said proudly.
‘She’ was an open, wooden riverboat roughly 10 metres long with two large outboard engines. The water was barely 50 centimetres beneath the gunnels. The vessel was packed with 44-gallon drums of fuel stacked up like a long pyramid. It looked horribly top heavy.
He is actually proposing to go into the open sea on this thing?
‘She looks great, Rick, thanks,’ I whispered.
‘Sleep on board. We’ll leave early in the morning.’ Rick put his hand out for the fare. I paid him and was rewarded with a big grin. He turned and hollered for one of the girls he knew from the love-heart hut.
I went up to the food shack, ate some freshly made arepas (a spicy corn pancake filled with meat and vegetables) and had a couple of cold Polar beers that tasted great. I bought some extra arepas to take along for the trip.
Back in the boat I found a spot between the drums to lie down and some old newspapers for bedding, I set up my mosquito net and, despite the stink of diesel, I went to sleep, hoping the drums would not roll on top of me in the night.
I was awoken at dawn when Rick started up the outboard engines. Within a few minutes we were out of the tributary where the smugglers had their den. We worked our way through the myriad channels that make up the 200-kilometre-wide Orinoco delta.
Rick seemed to know his way around. He told me that he had been doing the journey since he was a kid. The riverbanks were an impenetrable mass of vines and foliage all competing for sunlight; rising behind them was the canopy of giant mahogany trees. Flocks of brilliantly coloured birds regularly broke cover.
After about seven hours the air started to smell salty and the channel widened out: we were approaching the sea. It was only choppy, which was bad enough, and the bailing pump was working flat-out to get rid of the water that washed over the gunnels. I didn’t fancy our chances in rough weather, but Rick looked confident.
Once in open sea, we turned east and steamed along at about 10 knots, keeping within sight of land, which I was happy about – I was a fair swimmer and could probably make land at a push, although after that your problems would only be starting as you negotiated the endless mangroves. The breeze was chilly and Rick threw me a yellow waterproof jacket to keep the wind and minor spray off.
We kept going all day and the chop remained manageable. I made the odd brew on Rick’s kerosene stove and we shared some food. Over the noise of the engines, we chatted and I asked him about Guyana.
‘It’s been totally wrecked by that scunt Burnham,’ he said emphatically.
‘Who is Burnham?’
‘A crazy man, dead now, thank de Lord. He was our dumb-arse president since independence [from Britain in 1966] and he ruined the place. Can you imagine, the guy banned imported food, made bread illegal and nationalised every damn thing. Unbelievable, man, he totally screwed it up; you couldn’t buy nuthin.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘In ’bout eighty-five, Burnham had an operation in Georgetown. The Cuban doctors killed him. Good doctors, them Cubans. Dey reckon it was revenge for Burnham killing their man Teekah in Guyana.’
Burnham’s body was mummified by the Lenin Mausoleum in Moscow, which probably sums it up nicely.
From Rick’s summary of the politics, it looked like we were sailing into a paranoid one-party state in total economic disarray. He told me that the secret police were on the nasty side too; I would need to watch my step.
‘Why do you do this trip alone?’ I asked him.
‘I prefer it, and I don’t want anyone knowing I have a girlfriend in Venezuela. I can go a night without sleep.’
‘What does scunt mean?’
‘It’s a bad person,’ he laughed.
I told Rick of my gold-mining plans, and he was interested. Rick was smuggling fuel for a local trader, and its ultimate destination was the gold and diamond dredges on the rivers in the Guyanese interior. He described these dredges to me in detail, which sounded promising.
‘Just watch out for the police on da river, Jim, they’ll rob you blind if you don’t have some protection.’
During my travels so far, people seemed far more worried about the police and army than about any criminals. I figured it might be prudent to get my passport stamped, so I was at least legally in the country.
‘Dere’s an immigration office in Georgetown, they’ll fix you up,’ Rick said.
The wind had died down now and with it the chop. The Guyanese coastline remained clearly visible – mile after mile of uninhabited jungle, mangroves and mud flats.
I napped on and off through the chilly night, getting up a couple of times to make a brew for us both. I was used to lack of sleep from the army and it didn’t bother me. Rick seemed to half doze at the tiller.
At dawn I looked at the land. Not much had changed except that now we came across the odd settlement with palm-roofed shacks made of bamboo or wood. Eventually Rick turned the boat to enter what looked like a massive inland sea. We had arrived at the Essequibo River, the largest river in Guyana.
The scale of this river was hard to take in from a small boat. To give some idea, Rick pointed out a particular island that was bigger than Barbados. It was a vast wilderness of forest, swamp and open river.
Around 10 a.m., we reached Rick’s destination, Bartica. We landed at a large wooden jetty alongside a couple of other fuel boats and some smaller tenders.
I shook hands with Rick and sincerely thanked him for the safe passage. I scrambled onto the jetty, watched by some inquisitive Guyanese, black skinned and very different in looks from the V
enezuelans I had left behind.
Bartica was an unkempt trading town of about a hundred single- and double-storey buildings. It had been set up at a strategic entry point to the jungle interior, or bush as the Guyanese called it. The town was a service centre, where you could find fuel, food, supplies, equipment and mechanical repair shops. Signage showed merchants were buying gold and diamonds, which was encouraging.
I managed to change some of my US dollars here for local Guyanese dollars. Roughly one US dollar bought 120 ‘G dollars’, as they were known. Then at a food cart I bought some cook-up rice – a flavoursome hotpot of meat, peas and rice in coconut water – which hit the spot.
Occasional wooden boats were coming and going like taxis, and I decided to press on to the capital Georgetown to get my passport stamped. I caught a fast boat from Bartica to Parika, 60 kilometres downstream on the eastern bank of the Essequibo River.
We bounced over the water at breakneck speed and landed at Parika just before I vomited from motion sickness. I stepped ashore among a sprawl of boats and people. Close by was a battered-looking minibus with loud reggae music coming from it; a man in the doorway was shouting, ‘Georgetown, Georgetown.’
I climbed on board.
If’d I stuck out in Central America, I looked like an absolute alien here. Everybody was either black or dark-skinned Indian. Although I didn’t feel hassled or threatened in any way, I did take the precaution of asking a fellow passenger the price of the fare to Georgetown. This was just as well, as when the doorman came to take my money he did try it on – in a good-natured way.
I always carry earplugs when I am travelling and, despite being a Bob Marley fan, I really needed them for the hour it took to get to Georgetown on the rough road. The other passengers welcomed me like an old friend, sharing food and laughter. It was a far cry from the surly tube passengers of London. The mood was infectious and I was tired, but happy with my progress. People here spoke English too, or at least an understandable Creole version, which made things easier.