Guyana

I'd always been curious about the 3 tiny countries along the northeast coast of South America, crammed in between Brazil and Venezuela. Guyana, Suriname, and French Guyana don't get a whole lot of attention and that seemed like a great reason to go check 'em out!

Georgetown, Guyana. This is Stabroeck Market, the main shopping area in the capital city. It's a hectic mess but a very fun and interesting one. There didn't seem to be a whole lot that you couldn't buy here, including witchcraft supplies.

No kidding.

Georgetown, Guyana. Two gorgeous pieces of colonial architecture. This country was formerly run by the Brits and was known as British Guiana until 1966. I found that very few Brits actually live here now but some of the British influence remains, mainly in the language and the architecture. Most cultural relics are not being taken very good care of though, and many beautiful old wooden buildings were on the verge of just rotting into the ground. In this photo the near building had been restored but the tall church in the background was in pretty bad shape.

Kaieteur Falls, Guyana. This is Kaieteur Falls. No, I'd never heard of it before either. But this is the largest single-drop waterfall in the world, and it is spectacular. It's a 740-ft drop over the edge, about 4 times higher than Niagara Falls. I watched a small log go over the edge and it took about 7 seconds of free-fall for it to reach the bottom. The crazy thing is that you can just walk right up to the very edge and look straight down the vertical drop. You could never do that back in the good ol' US. But then again, there are no lawyers out here in the middle of the Amazon rainforest.

Amazon Rainforest, Guyana. This is one of the craziest-looking birds I've ever seen, with a crazy name to match : the cock-of-the-rock. A bird that looks like he's got a slice of an orange stuck on his face. They're pretty rare but here we found 3 of them, all calling out for mates in the dense jungle.

Amazon Rainforest, Central Guyana. Talk about a road through the middle of nowhere. We are out in about the dead-center of Guyana, deep in the rainforest. There's not much out here but some native tribes, a few widely scattered eco-lodges, and a whole bunch of large animals. Evidence of the latter is in the right-hand photo : jaguar tracks, found on our morning walk less than 50 yards from where I slept. My guide said based on the size of the footprint that's about as large as jaguars get. My foot is in the pic for a sense of scale.

Iwokrama,Guyana. This is the Iwokrama Canopy Walkway, a kind of suspension bridge system built way up in the trees as a wildlife observation platform. It's about 100 ft off the ground and provides a great perch to observe and photograph wildlife. And there's quite a bit of it. It's also a great place to just chill out and watch the sunset with an ice cold beer. That's my local guide from the Makushi tribe, way off in the distance on that platform.

Iwokrama, Amazon Rainforest, Guyana. To state the obvious, wildlife is abundant back here. The native tribes live in harmony with the surroundings and tread lightly on the wildlife, a balance they've maintained for ages. But changes are afoot : the Chinese have a strong interest in the old-growth hardwood trees back here and are pushing hard to build a paved road deep into the rainforest "for the benefit of the locals". Which really means for Chinese logging trucks of course. Favors from China do not come cheap.

So even with my good Nikon SLR/telephoto camera I had a tough time getting decent photos back here. Lighting was too dim under the dense forest canopy and critters were often just too far away. I got far better results using my iPhone camera and shooting carefully through the eyepiece of my guide's birding telescope. These bird-photos were all shot that way. I got clear, crisp images and the circular frame makes it...artsy? To the right is a pic of an electric eel, about 5 feet long. The pink end is its nose. It seems like everyone that lives back here has had at least one unpleasant (sometimes fatal) encounter with these things.

Surama, Guyana. Everyone coexists well with nature back here - you have to. The macaw is the school mascot in this tiny village. He's not caged or tethered and is free to come and go as he likes. Here he seems to be giving language lessons to the local kids.

Surama, Guyana. The view out my cabin window at another fine tribal site. This region is a little more open and savannah-like than the dense jungle of Iwokrama. Still plenty of wildlife though...

Guyana is a truly wild and beautiful place. But despite the large amount of nature and the small amount of humanity, significant man-made impacts are there for all to see. Above is an aerial photo of illegal mining deep in the Amazon rainforest; we saw several of these strip-mining operations just along our flight path. To the right is a literal 'drop in the bucket' of the amount of plastic floating down the rivers of Guyana and into the ocean. In this case the waves barfed it all back out of the ocean and up against the seawall as if to say 'hey you stupid humans - take all this crap back; it doesn't belong here!'. I was shocked to see people at Georgetown's main market just sweeping the day's debris - bottles, cans, cardboard boxes, food scraps, old clothing, all types of garbage - right over the seawall and into the river, without so much as a thought! Day after day after day... Technically both the mining and the trashing are illegal here or so I was told. But there is no enforcement, so on it goes.