LIFE

Guyana might not rate highly on most lists of places to visit or invest in right now, but it probably will one day.

As an eco-tourism destination, it's almost perfect – endowed with exotic animals, plants, people and geography of unparalleled beauty and diversity. Few visitors crowd the attractions. Things look so natural, it's easy to imagine they've been the same for hundreds of years. In the forests monkeys chatter, rarely seen jaguars (known locally as tigers) sometimes roar. Huge rodents like pacybaras and agou-tis are sometimes spotted. Many visitors get nauseous when told that the exotic curry “Laba” they ate in the village and assumed was beef or chicken was actually agouti. Tiny and amazingly colourful frogs sing while hop-ping distances many times their length in the underbrush. Their gorgeous hues would chal-

Guyana is a country with its share of problems; but it is also a country that holds great promise. Carib Xplorer writer and photographer Wayne Bowen spent some time there recently and shares his views about this extraordinary land mass, by far the largest territory in the English-speaking Caribbean.

Sleeping Beauty could be Economic Giant ?

GUYANA

By Wayne Bowen

“Life abounds in and around the water, including human life. Here, instead of minibuses, people flag down watertaxis.”

lenge the descriptive inventiveness of those who make up names for colour crayons. Even more beautiful birds flit through the skies and not just in the jungles. One of the most unusual is the Canje Pheasant or Hoatzin (Guyana's national bird). Spying it in its natural habitat near riverways is thrilling. This unusually coloured creature has a slightly prehistoric look which has been described as lizard-like. Did these birds once share the skies with Pterodactyls or other flying dinosaurs? Guyana's waters are also home to the world’s biggest river otters, the world’s largest freshwater fish and possibly even a rare species of freshwater dolphin! Most of these areas have few roads, rivers taking their place. Life abounds in and around the water, including human life. Here, instead of minibuses, people flag down watertaxis. The riv-ers double as highways to the “inte-rior” (which is what most Guyanese call those areas outside of the capital). These rivers are long, particularly by Caribbean standards. Some are truly huge and wide. If you stand on one bank you can’t see the other side – instead you see a horizon, just as if you were on a beach somewhere else and looking out to sea. All you see is water. These are rivers vast enough to contain islands larger than Barbados or Antigua! Some of these islands are populated, but most are not. Along the banks of some of the rivers live Amerindians, including Arawaks and Caribs – the peoples Columbus supposedly met and who are said to be extinct, according to countless history books. The name Guyana is said to be Amerindian, meaning “Land of Many Waters”.

Several place names in the country are Amerindian in origin, including Kaieteur Falls – one of the world's tallest. And the national dish “Pep-perpot” uses casareep sauce as a

flavouring. The dish itself is a sort of meat stew that can be kept going for years by simply heating at least once a day and adding ingredients to it. It is an Amerindian creation too. They also showed other peoples how to eat rodents like agouti or Laba. This can now be bought prepared Amerindian style with casareep or with curry, East Indian style. The food reflects the country's racial mix which is blended with African, Chinese, Euro-pean etc. – a real pepperpot.

While the Amerindians are moderniz-ing, they tend to live mostly in specially designated areas which outsiders can visit for a unique glimpse into the past. You will still find Amerindians using dug-out canoes. But maybe only one tribe still retains traditional dress for every-day use. For most of the nine nations, traditional outfits are brought out only for traditional celebrations. Some of the villages now have Internet access and piped water but it’s still a far cry from urban areas like Berbice or George-

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town. The interior still gives one a definite feel of the past.

Georgetown, the capital, while way ahead of other parts of the country in modernity, also presents a bit of a time capsule for the traveller. It’s common to see a mule-drawn cart – a touch of the past – waiting beside the region’s most modern solar pow-ered traffic lights! These lights con-veniently give both pedestrians and motorists a countdown of how many seconds are left before the lights change! Here you will find several dozen mule-drawn carts (or drays) commonly used as transport options for people shopping at hardware stores across the city. But it’s the hundreds of wooden buildings, most painted white, that give the capital a charm and beauty second to none. The houses are mostly falling apart now. Years of economic hardship would have probably meant that not many of these old houses could be replaced by more modern concrete structures. From a photographer’s perspective, however, this is great, for while many Guyanese feel a tinge of embarrassment at the ramshackle appearance of so much of their city, there is a beauty in these buildings that’s hard to escape.

These wooden buildings along with the unique canal lined roadways make Georgetown one of the CARICOM region's most beautiful cities. Instead of a white line, some of the capital’s roadways have canals running down the middle to separate the lanes. They’re usually about a lane and a half wide, with grassed space on the sides for pedes-trians to walk. They’re quaintly beautiful and definitely picturesque.

These canal lined roadways owe their existence to the Dutch, who were the first European power to occupy Guyana.

Later the British built on and main-tained what the Dutch had erected. The supposedly Dutch inspired grid plan of the major business hubs makes Georgetown one of the easi-est and most picturesque cities to traverse. The canals are located in the centre of the roadway with ample space for pedestrians. Each lane is somewhat like a one-way road sepa-rated by a canal from the other lane going in the opposite direction. Now some of the canals have been filled in and turned into pedestrian prom-enades which some think may have contributed to the flooding which has paralysed the city during the rainy season in recent times. The city, like much of Holland, is below sea level. With their unique engineering skills, the Dutch built dykes to keep out the sea. Modern Guyanese call these dykes “the sea-wall” and they have become prime spots for socializing of all types including exercise, lovers’ trysts and just watching humanity go by during weekend street dances and cook-ups. Water is let in and out of the city at various times via sluices and the canals to keep the water at bay and the city from flooding.

Guyana is a land of unfulfilled prom-

ise. It could undoubtedly be an eco-tourism giant. Even more so, it could be a major economic power. It has the mineral resources to be an economic powerhouse - diamonds, gold, bauxite, uranium and oil are but some of these resources. With the land space to produce agricultural and timber products on a global scale, Guyana should be one of the world’s richest countries. Instead, it is one of the region’s poorest.

Border disputes with neighbour-ing Suriname, Brazil and Venezuela have discouraged some international companies from exploring for oil in Guyana. But that might be a good thing since many companies have questionable environmental track records. And though they claim to help local economies by providing high-paying jobs, the benefits reaped by locals from mining activities in their communities have been a controversial issue. On a global scale, it is difficult to identify any mining companies that are serious about restoring the environment and ensur-ing that local people benefit as they should from the companies’ activities.

Guyana itself has had incidents of environmental contamination caused by mining companies’ indiscriminate use of mercury and other harmful materials. Today ‘El Dorado’ is the name of one of the country’s premier rums. It has won many international awards recognizing it as one of the world’s finest. It is the kind of world-class performance the country will have to reproduce in many spheres to achieve economic independence. In the 1500s (and centuries afterwards) the name El Dorado meant some-thing else, though. It represented a dream quest for wealth and success. Fascinated with the discovery of a ‘New World’ in the Americas, Euro-peans believed that a city with the world’s largest supply of gold existed in the jungles of South America. Lo-cal legends told of a golden man – ‘El Dorado’ –who once a year covered himself in gold dust and dived into a

lake for ceremonial purposes. Realizing that the Europeans wanted gold more than anything else, the local peoples often mentioned a huge city not far away, with paved streets and lots of gold. It was always at least a day’s march away. Somehow the stories got intertwined and the myth of ‘El Dorado’ – a golden city – emerged. Some believed it would be found in Guyana along with a ‘foun-tain of youth’ that would make drinkers live forever. Spanish conquistadors had found surprisingly complex cities in Peru and Mexico. It wasn’t hard to be-lieve that ‘cities of gold’ existed. Books were written attesting to El Dorado’s existence. Money was raised for search expeditions. In the end, it all proved to be a fairy tale. Guyana is undoubtedly a potential eco-nomic giant. The challenge is to provide meaningful, sustainable, healthy op-portunities for all its people. It is every country's goal to achieve this without killing or severely harming the geese that lay the golden eggs of prosper-ity. ‘El Dorado’ – refashioned as eco-nomic success – is now within striking distance for Guyana. Smart, hard work could make it one of the world’s richest countries. CX

LIFE