by Jim Richards
If you didn’t like snakes, then you had a problem. I was driving the quad bike up a track at 20 kilometres per hour one day when I disturbed an agile snake about a metre long. With an alarming winding motion, it was actually keeping up with me.
Soon after this I waited in wonder as an anaconda crossed the track at a marshy spot. I estimated it was over 7 metres long and 30 centimetres in diameter, and it took about five minutes for the entire snake to cross the path. Omai was like that: unexpectedly magnificent.
I’d initially figured that all the bush at Omai was primary rainforest, untouched by human hand. Randy quickly turned that view on its head. After walking through some pristine-looking jungle, we came across a large boiler system covered in vines, two substantial old steam engines, a rusted generator with an iron flywheel about 3 metres in diameter and an entire eight-head stamp mill. The stamp mill had been used to crush the hard rock so the free gold could be liberated. It was like a scene from Indiana Jones.
Randy then showed me a nearby cliff about 10 metres high, which was the remains of a site where hydraulic mining (jetting with water) had once taken place. There was also a 15-metre-long old dredge left over in a swamp.
All of this mining activity had occurred about a hundred years ago. The ability of the rainforest to regenerate itself was impressive, at least in the relatively small areas that mining activity had affected. This rapid regeneration of trees made me feel somewhat better about the current proposed development at Omai, of which I was a part.
Could Omai be developed as a mine without significant long-term environmental damage? This question was of concern to me, as the destruction of an area of such profound beauty did not seem right at all. But I was reassured that the actual area to be mined was so small relative to the vast wilderness that recovery would happen with time.
I concluded that the mine could contribute so much to the country in terms of jobs, taxes that would actually be paid and development that the tiny area of recoverable destruction was surely worth it.
Every afternoon of the wet season, the heavens would open and inches of rain would fall at a time. As soon as the rain stopped, the sun would come out and steam would rise from the ground. Then the heat and humidity became stifling. This moisture rotted the clothes off your back and anything electronic soon broke; even manual cameras didn’t last long. We had a small air-conditioned room specially built to house the two computers we used for compiling the drilling data, and that worked well.
The average rainfall in the jungles of Guyana is around 100 inches (2.4 metres) a year, half of which tumbles down in May, June and July. During these rainfalls, the gutter that ran down the centre of the camp rapidly transformed into a swift, deep torrent. As the water subsided, you could actually see grains of gold being washed down the channel. Omai was surrounded by a halo of gold.
Indeed, this gold was causing us some serious problems. Itinerant miners were swarming all over our lease like bees to honey; it was a gold rush within a gold rush. There was so much near-surface gold at Omai that just one guy with hand tools could make in a few days what would take him a year back in town (if he could get a job at all).
I came across some of these operations around the old dredge site, where soft and sandy 4-grams-per-tonne paydirt was out-cropping near water. This meant a tonne of dirt contained 4 grams of gold (worth around $150 at today’s gold price).
There were about twenty men toiling away and I wandered up to a couple of them. These two artisanal miners (called ‘pork-knockers’ in Guyana) were stripped to the waist and sweating hard as they wielded their pick and shovel.
‘How’s it going there, guys?’ I asked.
‘Good, man, good. You come to give us a hand?’ they joked.
In fact it looked like damn good fun. But I figured it would not be a smart move given my position.
‘I don’t think my boss would like that much. You mind if I take a look?’
‘No problem,’ they said, emphasising the ‘lem’ in problem as the Guyanese did.
The dirt they were digging was red silt and sand. Alluvial miners love gold in sandy material. It is far easier to treat than clays, which need puddling (breaking up) in water to produce a colloid (which is discarded) and a sandy silt (from which the gold can be recovered).
They washed the dirt using a homemade contraption beaten out of old oil drums, and the wash water was ladled from the lake using buckets. It occurred to me that this device was in actual fact a crude rocker, just like the wooden ones used in California 140 years earlier. As I watched all these men labouring away, I could imagine those California gold rush days with the creeks lined with hundreds of men working in the same manner.
I reckoned the pair of fit guys I was talking to could shift about 5 tonnes of dirt through their rocker in a day. If they recovered half of the gold contained in the dirt (a big if), they might get 10 grams of gold (worth around $380 at today’s gold price). This would have been a year’s salary for a worker in Guyana. It was no wonder the South American gold rush was moving into Omai.
The company quietly tolerated these few pork-knockers, but as time went on and word got out about the strong gold grades, these small bands became more numerous and sophisticated. After a few weeks, pumps, generators and mechanical jigs were being used. Our own crews were getting sucked into the action, stealing food and fuel to sell to the pork-knockers in return for gold.
They weren’t threatening, but neither were they moving. We called in the police and the GGMC (Guyana Geology and Mines Commission) to kick the pork-knockers off the company’s claims. This resulted in a series of pitched battles in which the main motivation of the police appeared to be to seize the pork-knockers’ gold.
It was an uneven match. The Guyanese police were armed with guns and batons and could be vicious; the pork-knockers soon melted away into the jungle. The police then seized the abandoned mining gear, which they transported on our boats, using our fuel, to Bartica. There they sold the equipment and pocketed the money.
The pork-knockers then went to Bartica and bought their own gear back again, returned to Omai and continued working, thus completing a virtuous circle in which everyone was a winner except Golden Star, which was paying for the whole show.
Gold fever is tenacious. The problem was nicely summed up in a meeting between Golden Star and the police in Georgetown, which was recounted to me.
‘So the pork-knockers are back again. What do you suggest next?’ our company representative had asked the meeting.
‘You could wait for the gold to run out,’ said the police superintendent helpfully.
Back at our camp, the banka drilling samples were seriously backing up and they needed to be treated and assayed. This alluvial assay process took place at the company’s other gold project site, Mahdia.
About a month after my arrival at Omai, I organised one of these logistic runs to Mahdia. A few of us departed upriver on the company boat, laden with the bulky banka drill samples. After two hours we turned from the Essequibo River up the smaller (yet still significant) Potaro River, upon which numerous gold dredges were operating. After a further hour there was a loud roar and a set of impassable falls came into view. The samples were portaged around these falls, over a steep and slippery track, by barefoot local drugers (porters) whom I paid in cash. On the other side, we got onto another Golden Star boat and continued our journey up the Potaro River.
Eventually we approached Garraway Stream, our disembarkation point. Right here, in the middle of this isolated jungle, a full-scale suspension bridge hung over the Potaro River. It was wide enough to take a truck and the span must have been 200 metres. It also looked decades old and was an incongruous sight.
We landed on the southern side of the river and loaded our gear onto a Bedford truck. I was thankful we did not have to cross the bridge; the locals called it Cassandra Crossing, named after a bridge collapse disaster movie.
As we were about to leave, two Amerindians approached me,
between them carrying a heavy tarpaulin, which they laid at my feet. After the interesting journey so far, I just knew this was going to be good. Inside the tarpaulin was the largest fish I had ever seen; it was over a metre long, a scaly, elongate monster that must have weighed 60 kilograms. They had caught it spear-fishing on the nearby Essequibo River and were on their way to sell it in Mahdia. It was an arapaima, the largest freshwater fish in the world, and this was a small one.
The arapaima could grow up to 4 metres long and weigh 200 kilograms. Bizarrely, this type of fish breathes air and so a patient hunter could spear it from the surface. We gave the men and their amazing fish a lift.
After half an hour driving on the washed-out jungle track, we reached the gold rush town of Mahdia. The sleazy main street of wooden shanties consisted of bars, shops and brothels, or versions of all three. Everywhere music blared. Lots of men and a few women hung around drinking and laughing and the acrid smell of Guyanese Bristol cigarettes hung in the air. We dropped off the Amerindians with their fish at a dirty-looking restaurant.
At the end of town was the Golden Star camp. I was greeted by Keith, the camp manager, who was what the Guyanese call ‘mixed’, meaning his forebears came from every race under the sun.
We carefully unloaded the samples next to the gold lab and were joined by Leandro, a garrulous Brazilian geologist whose main English vocabulary consisted of ‘fuck’ and ‘scunt’, which he thought was an English word.
Leandro explained the lab process to me. ‘The fucking sample gets weighed and then the bastard is frigging puddled in this shitting bucket using this scunting tool …’ and so on. What he meant to say was the sample was emptied into a bucket with plenty of water and soap powder to break the surface tension and stop the fine gold from floating away. The sample was then manually agitated using a metal whisk to break down the balls of clay.
Once this was achieved the sample was fed through a Denver gold saver (a type of moving sluice) and concentrated. This process was overseen by a trusted employee with the unlikely name of Airport, who had a bad limp.
Rumour had it that the limp was the result of a curse placed upon him by an Amerindian girl he had raped. Keith recounted this story like it was fact. As I said, there were a lot of superstitious people in Guyana.
Leandro then took me on a tour of the Mahdia project on a quad bike and explained the gold mineralisation to me.
There were two areas of alluvial gold, spread out in old river channels over several kilometres. The shallow one had already been worked once by a dredge, and indeed the old dredge (about the size of a large truck and complete with lifting buckets) from the 1950s was still there as a wreck. The other project was higher grade, as it had not been worked, but was covered by up to 30 metres of barren sand.
The grades of the shallow project were around 0.2 to 0.6 of a gram of gold per bank cubic metre (BCM) – that is, a cubic metre of dirt or rock before extraction. Although this grade may seem low, the cost of dredging this material was only around two dollars per BCM. So good money could be made, especially if you ran into a glory hole (a rich pocket of gold).
Golden Star was not the only operator in the area. Mahdia was a gold-rush town and swarms of Guyanese plus the odd Brazilian were working the surrounding areas. We stopped to look at one of the numerous land dredges that were busily mining gold.
The land dredge operating area was a moonscape of mud and water, and in the middle of the site a diesel engine thumped away. The engine powered a gravel pump, which was connected to some robust, flexible 4-inch tubing.
Holding the end of this tubing was a near-naked man in a pit, and he was sucking up gravel and mud. This material ran over a sluice box about 3 metres long, which caught the gold. The land dredge got me thinking; like the river dredge, it was the scale of operation I could set up if I could get hold of some modest capital.
We walked upriver to the next land dredge where they had just finished cleaning out the sluice box and concentrating the gold (a clean-up). The crew of five showed us the result of three days work: about half an ounce of gold ($600 at today’s prices), which would have barely covered fuel costs. They were clearly disappointed about that and said they were going to move on to another site.
(Leandro told me some weeks later that he had found a lone pork-knocker panning at this same spot. He was working the area where the sluice box’s tailings – the treated and discarded material – had washed onto the ground. The guy had recovered an ounce of gold from one day’s panning. The land dredgers had been passing too much water through their sluice box and had been flushing the gold out. I learnt the lesson: no matter how big or small your operation, always check your tailings.)
Leandro and I returned to Mahdia town. We met up with Keith at one of the bars and sat down to drink some local Banks beer.
‘Are the miners making much money here?’ I asked.
‘Land dredging is the biggest activity; the rest of these guys are just pork-knockers,’ Keith said.
‘The bastards are not organised, their fucking pumps break down, they use dirty friggin’ fuel and the scunts are always fighting each other. It’s a total clusterfuck,’ Leandro added.
‘But every now and again you get a shout.’ (Guyanese slang for a mini gold rush.) ‘One of them hits a rich pocket of gold or diamonds and all hell breaks loose,’ Keith said. ‘The whole town rushes to the spot and goes mad till all the dirt is gone.’
It sounded like exciting chaos to me. As the old saying goes, ‘Out of chaos cometh opportunity’. Maybe Mahdia was the spot I should try?
As dusk fell, we moved on to the local nightclub where things were warming up. There were about eighty hoary miners drinking hard. The only women were two plump prostitutes sitting at a table. The music blared out the ubiquitous reggae.
At regular intervals a miner would stagger over to one of the girls, negotiate, and the pair would go outside. She would return a few minutes later, sit down, and without a trace of self-consciousness, remove a small towel from her bag and wipe herself down – all of herself.
A couple of minutes later she was off again. In the hour we were there, both girls sauntered off about five times each. Keith said they went all night. Some people were indeed making money in the Mahdia gold rush.
Now, prostitutes have never really been my thing. But over the years, I have observed a common nexus between artisanal mining and prostitution. It seems understandable in these remote spots where money and loneliness collide.
Good luck to people making a living out of prostitution, providing it is by their own free choice. In the open and easy mining camps I have lived around, prostitution did at least appear to be by free choice, albeit borne out of economic necessity. But we were all there out of economic necessity.
I returned to Omai. A few nights later one of the drill holes was due to finish and so in the middle of the night I had to get up, drive out there and survey the hole so the night-shift drillers could then pack up the rig.
As I drove back to camp, I saw movement in the lights of the quad bike. I stopped and was rewarded by the sight of a jaguar on the road, just 10 metres away. It was lithe and stocky, about 2 metres long, and its coat was covered in dimpled spots. The cat looked directly at me, its golden eyes reflecting off my lights, and then it slunk off into the bush. What a rush.
At Golden Star, the geologists did six weeks in the bush followed by two weeks off; that was the deal. So after my six weeks, I left Omai for my break. The dry season was coming and the river level had dropped considerably. We headed off in a packed boat for Rockstone Landing. There was always a bit of a carnival atmosphere on the leave boat and we were all in a jocular mood.
I for one was pleased with how things were going. I was learning a lot and felt that I was making progress towards my goal of setting up my own mining operation. I planned to use some of my pay to buy a flight to Miami, to surprise Sarah at Disney World in Florida, where she was working.
The usual boat captain w
as on a break, leaving his deputy to run the show, and we zoomed off at full pelt. As we approached the rapids, we were still hammering down the river when I got an uneasy feeling.
I looked back at the boat captain. He was sucking hard on his cigarette and appeared to be intent on breaking a speed record. As I turned forward, there was a terrible splintering noise and we came to an almost immediate halt. I was flung into the river rapids, as were two others. Our boat had hit a submerged rock and stopped, but we had kept going.
I was underwater, not sure which way was up. I tried not to panic and lunged towards the light of the sun, gasping for air as I surfaced.
Guyana may mean ‘land of many waters’, yet not many Guyanese can actually swim. I helped the guy who was struggling close by me and we got to a nearby rock that we clung on to for dear life. The boat was still operational and I saw it pick up the third man who was flailing. They dragged him aboard and then we got the same treatment.
Remarkably, no one drowned. We all put on life jackets and the chastened boat driver slowed down. We limped on to Rockstone, madly bailing the damaged boat as we went.
When I flew into Miami, I rented a car from Hire-a-Heap and drove up to Orlando. It was all a bit surreal after Guyana: roads without potholes, cars without dents and people with less sincere smiles. I went into Disney World’s Epcot centre and sought out the Rose and Crown pub, Disney’s contribution to British culture. There, outside the pub, despondently manning a hot-dog stall, stood my love.
‘Hello darling, I missed you,’ I said.
Sarah looked at me and it didn’t really compute. I was now heavily tanned and weather-beaten, my formerly short hair grown long and turned blond from the sun; more the windswept gold miner than the pale soldier she had waved goodbye to some four months earlier. Then her eyes widened and she jumped on me and kissed me in a very un-Disney-like manner.