Upon exiting Guyana I’d like to share a few notes I took along the way. No particular order.
Georgetown
Notes on Guyana:
Overall, Guyana is a great place to visit, especially for its jungles. The people are extremely nice and friendly. It’s relatively safe. I had no issues but had heard about fellow foreigners getting robbed. I’m not sure of the status, but I suspect it is still Third World. You decide for yourself.
They don’t speak English. It´s Creole. Not English! Like a half foreign language.
They make babies like they’re forming an army…to secretly invade the US and steal our fried chicken? (KFC, Kentucky—oh no!) I haven’t met a single middle-aged and older male who has collected fewer than 6 children. Most boasted numbers of 8, 9, 10+ kids. 11, 12 kids. A cook with 11 kids…7 with his wife, 4 on the outside (outside?). Do you refer to it as a pack after the 10 mark? So the opposite of China, right?
Post office knife – something about a customs post office worker opening a package (mine) with a half-broken wooden-handled kitchen knife.
The rain forest is the wettest place on earth. (Like in forest gump but just straight down.) And I thought sailing was wet…
10,000 years ago, apparently, 20′ tall land sloths roamed the jungle. Twenty feet tall.
They have Pizza Hut here, you know, the kind with the funhouse appendage on them. They serve beer (Banks) on tap also which is too bad because the whole experience is a total ripoff. Go figure.
Guyana's national flower the Amazon Lily (or giant Victoria Amazonica lily)
65% of their diet contains either sugar, fried foods, fried sugar, or sugared fried foods. That said, pure sugar cane is amazing and way better than its by-product!
The fruit is fantastic! Best pine (pineapple) and MANGOS ever. They have many different kinds as well depending on the region. They are all smaller though and one kind, “suck mango”, is so sweet and soft when ripe that you can just wash the skin and then go at it like an apple until you are sucking the fruit off the seed. (But don’t plan on ordering them for breakfast at a hotel or inn. Street vendors only.) That said, they can’t get berries anywhere down here; that goes for strawberries too. Purgatory. I’m going to start a trade business when I return home that exchanges strawberries to Guyanese markets in turn for mangos for me only.
Sedentary comes to mind.
Their currency is currently floating at 200:1 USD. The largest bill they print is $1000GUY. So, god forbid, you have to buy something that, say, costs $1000USD you’d have to bring 200 $1000GUY bills to make payment… in $GUY. I’m still looking for guys carrying around suspicious suitcases..maybe the Bob Marley sacks are filled with cash.
Essequibo River and Jungle from the air.
The Indian food is delicious but more expensive. (Just like in NYC huh?) They serve prawns! (they only call the small ones shrimp…hmm), curry, dhal puri and roti, and sweets like pine tart, cassava pone, and gulab.
People scavenging through the ruble of a burnt down house. Smoke still rising.
The buses. The buses aren´t actually buses. They are vans (by most definitions). Though, they serve as buses. They are 15-passenger…or I guess in one case, 17-passenger, vans on ‘roids which zip around the country making up the only method of public transportation. And they do work, quite well. They are easy to catch and cheap. The drivers will “pimp” them out to their own likes putting pictures of pop stars or women or kid’s cartoon figures all over the walls and ceiling. Once you’ve mastered how to squeeze in and out of them, they´re great, for about 10mins. The experience does supply a nice family effect though, like on subway trains. Everyone is a stranger, but a person, and we´re all very close to each other, physically.
Pedicures, manicures in street. Hair cuts in the street for all to see.
Main highways are sometimes red clay roads, or red loam as it is called. The only downside is that they can’t handle the load. And it doesn’t always work out. The drivers constantly have to dodge giant pot holes before on-coming traffic wins. (On-coming traffic: “Mack”-type trucks called Bedfords that were imported by the British military years ago and flatbeds loaded with 50′ lumbered trees as big around as a doorway and stacked six high.) Sometimes vehicles will have to come to a crawl in order to diagonally navigate a series of craters that make the road appear as though it was hit by spray from a 50-cal helicopter air raid. (This isn’t Vietnam.) Or when—this is my favorite—a bus doesn’t have enough “umph” to make it up a moderately steep hill and comes to a stop. To re-strategize, the conductor (guy who collects money for the driver and runs the show) will ask some people to get out to lighten the load, maybe half. In one experience that meant about eight people hoped out. Now the tricky part here is which side of the bus your on. If you’re still sitting, you can just remain that way and pretend as if nothing is happening. If you found yourself outside then you had better be prepared to play a game of let’s-push-this-thing-until-it-starts-and-then-chase-after-it-like-we’re-late-for-school. People jumping through the sliding door one after another and everything—it’s great. I’ve been fortunate enough to have been on both sides. The push-and-run is more exciting and gives you a chance to reinstate blood flow to other parts of the body; stretch those Lincoln legs. In either case, I didn’t know what the hell was going on.
Main Street, Georgetown
Sandals are slippers; shoes are boots.
Uhm, sometimes the bus or taxi cab drivers will feel like doing errands en route your destination. No biggie if we make a few stops, eh? On one bus trip some lady kept directing the driver to do things and go places. Finally we dropped off two large sacks of food at some house. She didn´t get out, the sacks were gone, and I think money was exchanged. Another time a cabbie stopped by to pick up a pizza he had ordered and proceeded to take it to a school for his little brother´s lunch. When he finally got around to dropping me off and charged me for his time, I then charged him for my time. We both smiled and agreed on a price. More on the scandalous side, I´m pretty sure I witnessed a bus drug deal in the middle of the jungle. I´m on a bus packed with sweaty people headed into the interior and all of a sudden we stop in the middle of the road. Then a guy appears out of freaking nowhere, runs up to the bus and slips his hand in through the window making an exchange with the passenger in front of me. I mean, on either side you just have clear jungle for miles and miles. How the driver knew to stop, who knows. I guess this is how they get contraband passed the drugs-n-guns check points. Speaking of weird stops. On several occasions the bus would stop in the middle of the night to let some people out, usually Amerindian folk. And I´m like, where do they go? Where!? There are no roads, no lights, nothing. They just disappear. Ok, this may take the cake though. I friend of mine, Dusty, who I sailed down here with, was taking a cab home late one night when the driver turned to him and said something like “care if we make a stop?” The driver then took him to his grandpa´s 90-something´th birthday party complete with food, family and dancing. May have turned out to be worth his fee: he got a meal, a beer, a dance with some old lady …and maybe even a piece of cake.
Corruption.
Bribes. Saw. Witnessed. Was a part of…?
Traveling long distance by bus on the dirt roads is an exercise in both self-preservation and vibrational tolerance; a blend of tough yet flexible. You have to be able to find the elusive trance of being conscience and lost at the same time, otherwise, you might not make it. 2 hours into a leg-numbing 9-hour trek, you may start to come out of it. Don´t. It´s not worth it.
A bus after an all-night trip back from the interior (covered in loam).
I haven’t seen a single incandescent light bulb in the 104 days I’ve spent in Guyana. Haven’t had a hot shower since I left NYC (December 2010).
OTB seems to be an occupation.
Would you like some coffee with that milk and sugar? Served the caucasian again. Got me. “Black” when ordering a cup of coffee is taken literally here, with no milk, just several heaping tablespoons of pure cane sugar. “Hold the milk and sugar and just give me my plain hot water and instant coffee” in your head, equals, “plain coffee please” reinforced with “no sugar, no milk babes?” “Correct!” in reality. Oh, the coffee here is all instant, all of it. No beans here. Not a single coffee pot or coffee maker. What’s that country that’s real close and makes most of the worlds coffee beans…oh, yeah, Brazil. (Must be an export-inflation thing like how I can’t find prawns (shrimp) hardly anywhere in Georgetown even though the harbor has fleets of shrimp boats that go out daily. It all goes to the US, apparently. I think I heard something crazy like Guyana alone produces nearly half of all the shrimp for the US—sounds a bit extreme to me. I guess that’s Ecuador and Bolivia’s struggle with quinoa.) Anyway, would you like some tea with that milk and sugar? I once had an awkward moment regarding tea here. I was in some one’s hut at a camp who I had just met. The nice man offered me hot tea with a hand gesture directed toward a table with food stuff on it. So I accepted and went for it. As I recall, “ok, there’s a mug, got it, uhh tea…looking for the tea… Ok there’s the milk and the sugar…but can’t find the tea..” After a few seconds of silence and obvious struggle, the man gave me a look that read “this mon must just be all around incapable; it’s just tea”. But he was kind and showed me the ways. He proceeded and said “here you just—” and then took a big tablespoon of powdered milk [you're getting it now, right?] and stirs it in the mug of hot water [real water] then takes two monstrous spoon fulls of sugar and throws them in. Voila!—tea. How could I have been so confused? So, tea, as it turns out, can really be any hot (..or cold…jesus people, who adds sugar to fresh fruit drinks!? Sweetest fruit in the world!) drink that one puts sugar into. If I had to generalize, which I´m going to, I’d say that most of the Guyanese I’ve meet would unconsciously define bitterness as the taste or experience of lack of sugar. I once threatened some locals with real coffee (plain black), bitter beer (IPA) and 85% cocoa dark chocolate. They cringed.
A neat tropical tree or something like that...
Blackouts are typical. Frequent.
I don’t really have the energy to go into the fine details of ordering food here, I just don’t. But I will mention a few things relating to dining out in Guyana. The Chinese restaurants—hysterical—generally carry names like Beautiful Chinese Restaurant, The Best Chinese Restaurant, and The New Thriving Chinese Restaurant and so on. Even longer and more elaborate, more detailed than I can recall. I don’t know what they’re called, but these must be the messages that came before subliminal ones.
Ok, there is a restaurant in Georgetown that is Upscale…because that´s the name of it. And they have this extensive and pretty menu with photos and everything. The trick is, and this is a good one, that there is no telling what they actually serve. The menu is more like a guide, a symbol of what could be. So when you go to order (toe-n-toe with the server) it quickly to turns from Upscale to whack-a-mole with the menu items, Chucky Cheese style. “Ok, let’s see what I won’t be having for lunch.” It´s always good to have four backups.
The customer service industry rivals even the bitterest of the Polish for their “thrilling” experience.
Every meal is served with ketchup and hot sauce—breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The ketchup is imported from the US while the hot sauce is made locally in Georgetown. It’s a beautiful jungle-orange that screams “I look appealing but am as hot as the fucking sun and will burn you in more ways than one! Caution.” However, the peppers used to make the sauce fall under “mild” in their culture’s taste bud habits. They get way hotter. Trust me on his one, I found out the hard way. That’s a good way to get the Amerindians rolling—”Sure I’ll try some of that. Just a little bit.”
You order, they ask “take’n or use’n?” Excuse me what? Would I like to sit down? No, not to take-a-way. To stay, for here. Oh, use’n, u-s-i-n-g. Yes, I will be using the food. What else am I going to do with it?
Everything comes in plastic or styrofoam. Everything. It doesn’t matter if your eating in (use’n), taking out or buying fresh. If a drink doesn’t already come bottled in plastic then, for example with the fresh squeezed cane juice, it is served in a baggie with a straw. You have to beg through so many eye rolls just for a plate and silverware. When I refuse yet another plastic bag from a merchant (“No thanks, got one.”) they shoot me an off look like I’m wearing a jetpack. And it all ends up in the streets, open sewers, canals, water ways, vacant lots, backyards, and on the coast etc. I see it all. They, however, seem to be completely bind to the fact, or by blinded by it. I can honestly say that this is the only issue that bothers me here. It’s so short-sighted, so lazy. Your culture, babes, is different and this time in a BAD way. I’ve even seen some Amerindians throwing Coke bottles in the river. I didn’t learn to shit on my living room floor, so I don’t. Where did you learn to crap on your land, or at least pretend like it doesn’t matter?
After weeks of trying to track down the Pepper Pot dish, Guyana’s only food staple as a whole culture (meaning it doesn’t come from East Indian, Chinese, etc. cultures.), I finally nabbed some. It was delicious, fantastic even…sitting there in styrofoam.
Kaieteur Falls
The buses all play music, music of all sorts—usually some form of pop, reggae, or rap—and they play it loud. There is nothing like getting pumped on your morning commute to the club—sorry I mean to work or the market—to some heart-bumping tunes. Likewise, when sliding down mud roads and being serenaded by Celine Dion (the Canadian miners brought their shit down here and now it’s endemic) or Phil Colins while staring out the opaque window at all the green. Efficient, reliable, affordable and possibly pleasant depending on the drivers taste in music.
Cows, goats, chickens and even some horses roaming freely next to traffic.
Cargo transported via horse drawn flatbeds.
They have these radio stations or CDs that are made to sound like live radio feed, fuck I don’t know (radio stations can skip if the bump is big enough, right?), that feature a special kind of mixed music. It’s a mix that tries to mimic what a DJ might rub together in a club…except the transitions may represent more time than actual music. They just jump from one hit to another. It’s as if the they took all the “best” parts of classic/popular songs and stitched them together like a compressed audio experience of those “Best Of” or “Hits” music TV ads. If a song was a small loaf of bread they’d be like, “screw the end pieces, let’s just play the good parts…of all our favorite breads, together…for breakfast, every morning”. Except the experience comes off like maybe one of us has an attention span disorder. Just like this British man at my hotel last night, who enthusiastically commented to the hotel owner about his flickering TV over some Banks beers, [cue David Brent voice] “I don’t know how you can frick’en stand that!, ..feel like I’m comin’ down with bloody epilepsy!” It all adds to the experience.
“Ripped” DVDs, or as the sign above a certain section of discs in a video store reads, “Pirated” DVDs, is a huge business in Guyana. Anything that could be seen on a TV in some one’s home anywhere in the world could possibly have been recorded, ripped on a DVD, marked with an ink pen, placed in a black jewel case and covered with a 100dpi print-out representing the supposed content on the disc. And people watch them, a lot of ‘em. Everything, anything—anything. Like the time I was relaxing with some elders of a mining crew camping at a squatter village at the top of Kaieteur Falls (the country’s most prized attraction) watching a DVD of the 2009 World Championships as once broadcast live in the US, commercials cut. (I didn’t know if Usan Bolt was going to win or not…and so this was still kind of exciting, 3 years later.) Or when I was watching movies at a friends apartment in Georgetown and asked, “hey, what’s that word in white italic lettering that’s smudged at the bottom right-hand of the screen?”—Lifetime. Oscars, Academy Awards, boxing, weird documentaries, all kinds of sports, MTV, the news special that ran after Bin Laden was killed—they have it all. It’s like they’re unintentionally archiving the worlds TV broadcasts, and movies for that matter. At $200GUY (1$US) a pop , I may have assembled a small collection.
Mountains protruding from the jungle.
They have a cat call here that men and sometimes women do that is like none other. Not a holler, not a shout, not a whistle. It´s what I call a long distance air-smooch. Like blowing a kiss but with the sound too and not the hand gesture. The kind of smooch that can cross the road and smack a girl in the ass, you know. Still practicing.
Me sometimes replaces I in speech.
Sentences can end in “boy”, “buddy” and “mon”.
Scunt. (Pronounced like “hunt” but with an “sk” sound instead of an “h”.) That´s the curse word that is most unique here. Used mostly by men but don´t be surprised when you hear a waitress or grandma or child scunting this or that. It has the power that “fuck” has in that it can be used in any part of speech, ever. I´ve even witnessed people trying to possibly curb their habit by offering an “oh, skite” or just “sc—” instead. Scunt. Remove the “s”.
(My theory, yet to be confirmed, on the above is that the “s” was left behind from the original popular phrase “Mother´s c…”. Only Creole could do that.)
There is an abundance of yellow taxis, plain cars with the taxi signifier “HB” in the license plate, yellow cars not licensed to be a taxi, and just plain cars. The drivers of which are all too happy to shout across the road “hey whitey!”, “white head!”, “hey tall man!”, “hey Roger!”, or “hey Jim!” and take you for a ride. And they all want your company, bad. It’s sad when I’m just walking (you know, walking) down the street, so many refusals. Reminds me of the weeks leading up to Prom.
OceansWays1
