The population today reflects its troubled past. Only three percent are native Amerindians; the genes of the remaining human stew have come from pirates, pioneers, and pathans; seekers of gold and salvation, Scottish herders, Irish adventurers, Indian and Chinese labourers and displaced slaves. The Abolition of Slavery Act and the refusal of the native Amerindians to work the sugarcane plantations (too hot, too arduous and too demeaning), brought in indentured labourers from Ireland and Scotland; the famine in Portugal of 1848 brought in 30,000 Portuguese which was followed by 11,000 Indians and, in the early decades of the twentieth century, some 15,000 Chinese. Sugar production was gradually reduced, cotton could not compete with the US and rice took its place. Whites now make up less than one percent of the present population and Indians more than 50 percent.
I took a look around the capital Georgetown first. Perhaps it was a midday, midweek lull but the city seemed empty and unloved. For the most part the buildings are low rise, wooden, and have charm and personality. The exceptions are the city hall designed by a Father Scholes, with a turreted, concave spire and multi-balconied façades that would sit within Disneyland without further embellishment and St Georges Cathedral – the largest timber building in South America. It seemed to be inside out with an interior lavishly furnished in black and white timber and a plain painted exterior. With its plaques to previous British notables, it was as if an overgrown Shropshire parish church had sprung up in the tropics. Apparently, the roof timbers are of English oak but, if true, this would have been a bizarre extravagance when a forest of hardwoods the size of Britain was on its doorstep. So full is the town of fretwork, spindles, clapboard, porches and turrets that it gives an impression of fluttering but another church, St Andrews Kirk, provides an anchor of ecclesiastical and architectural severity. Built in 1818, it nevertheless displayed the original sign- ‘No negroes or animals allowed’. Andrew Gimlette in his entertaining book on the Guianas, Wild Coast, says of Georgetown ‘…there was something about the city – its breezy architecture, its see-through homes, its open arms and its open drains,… here was a place with nothing to hide.’
My taxi driver was called Vicky (inspite of being male) and had a voice of such rasping tone it could probably penetrate walls; it certainly drilled straight through my brain. I hesitated to ask questions in case my hearing was left damaged. Not that many questions were necessary since information came in a sustained stream like firecrackers at a Chinese festival. However his opinion of Georgetown tallied with my own. It was like an iced fruitcake; the icing was chipped and although the cake was largely intact the fruit had all gone bad. Now it was only edible for the dogs of corruption and the scavenging poor. As we drove through the town, Christmas trees were springing up at every cross roads and piles of rubbish malodorously littered every corner. Christmas is taken seriously as the Hindus and Chinese join in as well; there is mutual religious tolerance and the country takes a day off to celebrate each religion’s main feast days. We picked up Vicky’s three year old daughter from her nursery school. At the end of her day she was still neat and clean in a blue gingham uniform, polished shoes and hair tied in bunches with matching ribbons. She stood on the torn moquette of the car’s back seat, leaning into the corners like a slalom racer.
In 1977, the Rev Jim Jones founded The People’s Temple of the Full Gospel. He bought 27,000 acres (11,000 hectares) in the north of the country, called it The Promised Land and himself The Prophet and persuaded 900 kooks and the dispossessed of all kinds to follow him from California to build a utopian nation. But a utopia with a watchtower and a barbed wire boundary. A year later, in 1978, following an investigative visit by a US senator, Jones gunned down the senator and his team and declared that all his followers must die too. In a mass suicide, mothers cut the throats of their children, men squirted cyanide labelled Flavor Aid into the mouths of women and themselves and others blew out their brains. 909 died, including 276 children, dogs, cows and Mr Muggs, a chimpanzee. Since that day, no one has lived in Jonestown, that promised land; it has been erased from the land and the Guyanians pray, from memory.
I shared the two hour flight to Karanambu Ranch with a Guyanian cattle man and his 20 stone (128kgs) wife. Also on board were two dead chickens and two small children; these last being very much alive. The smallest of these children at maybe six months old, made it clear that it was lunch time and this was provided from an exposed milk bar so conspicuously full and all enveloping that the child almost disappeared from view. My fascination got the better of modesty, as I watched to see if the poor mite would surface from underneath this balloon of succour. As he did so, the other child was sick. In a six-seater Cessna some activities are a little too neighbourly for equanimity and indifference.
Diane McTurk is a Guyanese living legend. Now in her eighties, she came down to the river to greet me at the landing stage of Karanambu with a sprightly step. Her face, deeply furrowed by the ravages a lifetime in the tropics, broke into a wide smile.
“How lovely to see you. Did you have a pleasant river journey?”
She has similarly put a thousand guests at ease. Her ranch of 102 square miles (265 square kms) is largely coarse savannah grass and scrub but her legendary status and the reason that these guests come is rooted in her work with giant otters. Orphaned pups, damaged mothers and a one eyed male have now slipped away into the Rupununi River, directed by instinct for the wild ways. Micro-chipping proved useless and tagging collars slip off their oily fur and in any case do not work under water, so the intimate details of their lives remains largely unknown. Princes and presidents, Attenborough, Durrell, all the world’s best zoos, have come to Karanambu to kick off their shoes and succumb to the gentle and persuasive charm of its willowy chatelaine. I was her only guest for two days and listened enthralled to her quiet voice recounting the ranch’s history. Diane’s father, Tiny McTurk (he was six feet six (2 m)) built the ranch in 1922. He had ‘an appetite for hardship’ and taught himself to hunt with bow and arrow. When Brazilian rustlers stole his cattle he followed them across the border, took their guns and burnt down their houses. You didn’t mess with Tiny. One of his three children was Diane, born in 1932 and now the incumbent of Karanambu. Educated in Jamaica and Oxford, a one-time member of the Savoy Group PR Department, Chelsea party girl and drama student, she devoted herself to the welfare and protection of giant river otters for many years. When she told her tales in the crisp consonants of an English education she smiled often and even more creases than seemed possible came across her fissured face. “I was born here, a wild child,” she said.
A bookshelf that screened the kitchen from the dining room was full of old classics. Here was Waugh, Cooper, Walmisley-Dresser, Cecile Hulse Matschat et al but almost all had their bindings exposed to the bookbinder’s string and cotton webbing. I had assumed this was from the corrosion of the tropics, bookworms and parasitic wasps. The reality was more prosaic; a pet goat had discovered that the glue was palatable and overnight had stripped the books of their titled spines.
Each single-roomed benab was of a size that would have been welcomed by a whole Amerindian family and was constructed on a timber frame. There were brick walls nine feet (three metres) high but they were only there for privacy and did not reach to the eaves, allowing for ventilation. A small colony of bats shared my accommodation hanging in a line under the ridge of the thatched roof. A large sheet of plywood was suspended over the bed to catch their “precipitation”, as it was modestly described. During the night they flew around with much squeaking as they gorged on night-time insects and there was a little pitter-patter of their “precipitation”. A tarantula, like a hairy hand, sat in a corner waiting for an unwary bat and frogs belched in some nearby ditch. Food was always cold in these lodges and here it was colder than most. It came from oven to table via chat and pleasantries and then lay panting on a side table until someone became aware of its existence and rang a bell or banged a log whereupon diners shambled towards the table, sorted out the
ir preferred place, took a seat, were given a cold plate and then stood up again to help themselves from the once-warm dishes.
On a Sunday, I found myself in the nearby village of Yurupakari, a few miles upstream. A team of BBC wildlife film makers had arrived at the same time and while they shifted their mountain of gear, I looked in at the three churches in the village. With only 750 souls to provide for, there was an element of competition. The Christian Brethren offered a keyboard and familiar A&M hymns sung in Makushi, the Blessed Church of Christ had a couple of guitars but the Anglicans offered nothing except half-hearted a cappella singing, but two woolly dogs and a cat added an inclusiveness that was absent at their rivals’.
As dawn crept over the Karanambu mountains (at a lowly 3,000 ft (920 m)), I set out on a hunt for a giant anteater. We bumped over the tussock grass of the savannah disturbing hawks, pippets and other avian early risers until we arrived at the homestead of a vachero. In this single roomed, single windowed, shingle-roofed, breeze blocked, dirt floored, stained, grimy, dusty, home lived the vachero and his wife, two teenage boys, four small girls and a babe in arms. The mother was pregnant again. A tin roof covered the veranda under which a wood fire was heating a great metal griddle that glistened with oil and on which cassava bread was baking. These were flat, steering-wheel-sized rounds and several had been tossed onto the roof to dry into a long-lasting crispbread. A horse with open saddle sores waiting to heal stood patiently in the shade of a huge mango tree. The two small girls were in plaid frocks and played with a puppy and a pet toucan whose clipped wings condemned it to hopping. I photographed the children, looked at the penned herd of Brahmin cattle and waited for the crackle of the short wave radio. In an hour or so it came – an unintelligible mixture of Creole, Makushi and English, all distorted by radio squelch – but an anteater had been found. I could see the vachero and his sons on their horses two miles or so away and as we reached them, the poor creature was clearly exhausted from being harried for so long. As I crouched for a picture it ambled towards me, its bizarre snout leading the way and its rudder of a great hairy tail waving behind. With its poor eyesight it probably thought it had reached the sanctuary of a tree. As a nocturnal animal it had had a rough morning and I left it to find peace in the shade of the scrub.
I moved on to Surama, down the Rupununi River, whose high clay banks were perforated by the nesting holes of many varieties of kingfisher – Amazon, pied, ring-necked, little and pygmy. The village sat in a wide and lush valley bordered by the Burro-Burro River and the Pakaraima Mountains and in the morning, I set out to climb Mount Surama. The fact that its summit was shrouded in cloud should have warned me that this was not going to be a stroll and additionally, it was smothered in forest. A fellow guest, as dark as a southern Indian Tamil (it turned out he was a southern Indian Tamil but came from Coventry) had earlier knocked on my door to beg something for his stings – eight livid spots on his face that astonishingly had turned white. He had been walking through the same forest that shrouded the foothills of my mountainous destination.
My guide was to be with me at 5.30 am and I looked around for a gnarled and craggy forester with a parang stuck in his waist band but there was only a slip of a girl in tight jeans and a tighter top. As it turned out, the curvaceous Melissa was my guide and she carried a handbag decorated with raffia roses and a plastic sack that contained our breakfast. She wore flip-flops, had painted nails (red on her feet, and blue on her fingers) and a mane of hair to rival an anteater’s tail. She was impressively knowledgeable on birds and rainforest inhabitants and at a welcome pause on the vertical route, she told me that Brown University was funding her course in Avian Calling as part of her Master’s Degree in Biodiversity. At one stage she made such strange guttural sounds; I thought she was vomiting, but this was the call of the black spider monkey. I stumbled along behind, along a path tunnelled through the jungle caverns and with sunbeams trickling through the canopy. From time to time I was caught on razor grass, snared on ‘catchme’ – a sort of green and growing barbed wire with extra spikes, avoided the spiny palms, slipped on boulders that seemed smeared with engine oil, crossed streams on rotten logs and miraculously reached the summit sweating so profusely I was wetter than an otter. Melissa was laying out breakfast and repairing her nails.
Back at the lodge, replacing the lost perspiration with a gallon of fruit juice, a swarthy and disreputable looking fellow dressed all in black rode up on his trail bike to a skidding halt. He flashed a lascivious grin at Melissa and produced a revolver from a back pocket. Melissa did not seem too impressed until he proved its working order by firing off a couple of shots and then scattering the remaining bullets over the floor. This country is full of oddballs and dropouts but bullets were a different matter. Before I had judged that the dining table was the safest refuge if things got nasty, he had packed away the pistol and sped off to whatever banditry and seduction he had planned next. Melissa simply studied a broken nail and said he came by every week.
Melanie’s aunt had invited me for lunch and on the way, a man with a face like a squashed strawberry crossed the road towards me. “Where you from?” he asked. When I told him he thought about it for a while as though mentally arranging a geographical puzzle and said, “That’s nice,” and shuffled away. He wore a black baseball hat that said ‘Connect with Christ’ in silver letters. On the back was a telephone number.
Aunty Paulette was round from every angle and spoke in a torrent of humour, information and wisdom. Her five children and nine grandchildren all lived in the village and came together for each evening meal. Cooking for this family platoon was as nothing compared to the meals she cooked for an army of committees and social gatherings of all kinds. She had two cookers, fuelled by bottled gas, and an open wood fire but no refrigerator. Fish, meat and vegetables were dried or salted. Her husband Drango was a hunter and used only a bow and arrow; three types of bow and four types of arrow all fashioned by himself with great skill and beauty. Different designs were required for game, animals and fish – pimpla hogs, dogs and sakiwinkis in Drango’s language. Three words were a conversation. “You eat guan?” (the forest turkey that had been prepared for lunch). “You come far?” That was it, he had exhausted his repertoire and went off to fashion more weapons and construct a mini fortress to protect his chickens from foxes and vampire bats.
I moved on to Iwokrama where for many thousands of years the forest had been unmolested by man and was one of the few places on earth were his activities had barely left a mark. From a lodge that claimed sanctuary in a small clear ing, I set out to find a jaguar but the expedition was not quite the adventure I had been anticipating. This was no jungle trek, following a track and listening to the alarm calls of possible prey, nerves taut and eyes scanning the position of each unfamiliar noise; it was a drive down the north/south gravel highway. My guide was Viktor, a young man the size of the King of Tonga, who overflowed his seat in the Landcruiser like a beached whale. “Why Viktor?” I asked. “It is from the Italian,” he replied. This seemed unlikely but I was none the wiser and neither, it turned out, was he. Viktor steered his tank around the cratered road with a chubby finger from one hand while the other hand waved a spotlight into the wall of the forest to pick up the glow of eyes. I stood on the back seat with my body through the roof following the eccentric light as it moved from treetop to verge while Viktor, from his position on the front sofa seat, yelled upwards his life story. “My grandfather Theodolphus built Surama village,” he boomed up into the night air. After a catalogue of relatives, it turned out that his cousin was Melissa – she of the painted nails. There was no jaguar, but only a red rumped agouti, a disappearing tapir and an embellishment of red eyes but the forest noises as dusk fell were as magical as ever. Unseen creatures hooted and howled, there were cries of pain and the roadside swamps gurgled and thrummed with their colonies of amorous frogs. In this crush of vegetation, new species have continually emerged, most recently a frog that glows fluorescent purple. In
the evening, this belly worshipper guide fuelled up with pancakes, six at a time, loaded with cheese and slavered with chili sauce. Pitta bread stuffed with peanut butter and honey was taken away as a precaution against any hunger pangs later.
Flying from Lethem, Guyana’s second city, a spread of arboreal shag pile was draped over the contours. In between, the crushed velvet of the savannah, still green from seasonal rains, clothed random patches. Threads of Bisto-brown streams dribbled across the carpet and sun-silvered rivers wriggled their way to embroider the flat landscape. On still black lakes, little blobs of green showed up the metre wide leaves of victoria amazonica. Nature has strengthened them with an upturned lip and protected them with thorns but this is no deterrent to the nocturnal beetle that pollinates them at night, attracted by their huge, scented white flowers. Following pollination the flowers turn pink and four days later, die. Pockets of rusty earth showed up goldmines, scratched from the earth by garimperos; “One Brazilian, two girls,” as the locals named them. A single road jigged at eccentric geometric angles as though pursued by a fly. Then as Georgetown neared, there was the Essequibo River blotched by sandbanks and its edges serrated by forest as it squirmed its way in a great, grey gash across the land. This serpent opened its gigantic jaws in a twelve mile wide yawn at the shore of the Atlantic. Somewhere in the mysterious interior there were bands of maroons, the descendants of emancipated slaves and Kwintis, N’Djukas, Bonis and Saramaccaners – the tribal detritus of failed colonisers, indentured labour, buccaneers and mercenaries. Creoles were largely along the coast and the native Amerindians were scattered throughout the country. In the deep south, the Wai-Wai still used blowpipes and lived on bushmeat. Georgetown now had a majority of Indians and their temples were everywhere sporting king cobras, many headed serpents and the elephants of Ganesh. Once, while waiting for a plane, I heard a passenger turn to another to ask, “What mix are you?” To have a genetic potpourri is a standard ingredient here. Added to this racial salmagundi were colonies of Javanese and Chinese who had the capital to build hotels, roads and dams but all with labour imported from China. Each coloniser had left their mark on the urban landscape so there were areas named Nassau, Zealandia, Ruimveldt, Vreed-en-Hoop and Stabroek; La Penitence, Le Repentir, Affiance, and Mon Repos (yes, really). More recently, Doobay, Anamayah, Ganges and Chandranagar had been added and there were Scottish, Welsh and English names in profusion.
The Last Blue Mountain Page 38