Guyana fishin' trip - Part 2

sunset over annai

I was staying at the volunteer teachers’ quarters at the secondary school by Annai, an Amerindian village on the main dirt road linking Lethem with the capital city of Georgetown. Dan, a volunteer health worker, just rode in from Surama village. His plan was to go out with Bryan, one of the teachers at Annai, and throw handline for hasa (armored catfish) at one of the ponds out in the savanna. As I said, I had just left my PhD position – no more job – which meant no more money, but it also meant no more job. So I did what any sensible Guyanese would do in the same situation – I went fishing.

Dan cruising his Monark through the savanna

It was late March, 2007. Early yet for the rainy season so the savanna around Annai was dry and the roads good. Perfect condition for a bike trip. With the prohibitive price of vehicles and fuel in the Rupununi, motorized transport is very limited for most locals, any volunteers and certainly for an unemployed grad student. And while motorbikes, jeeps, and Bedford cargo lorries do travel the roads, the most prevalent mode of wheeled transportation in the Rupununi is the Monark: the burly, steel-framed Brazilian-made bicycle complete with single gear, fat spring-loaded seats, welded fenders and cargo rack, and no functional brakes to speak of.

Feral humans.  Dan and Bryan enjoy a Rupununi energy drink

Dan and Bryan Williams (no relation) had been in these parts for a couple years, victims both of the Peace Corps. By the time we met, they were well-seasoned Rupununi cyclists. A year earlier they decided to bike to Lethem for the annual rodeo. Rather than pedal the 60 miles along the main road from Annai, they planned to cut north into the Pakaraima hills and then turn west, heading for the Amerindian town of Karasabai before cutting back south to Lethem. For three days and nights they pedaled and dragged their bikes laden with camping gear over mountain passes, snuck through tiny villages by twilight, traded cigarettes for cassava bread, and pushed their way through the Pakaraimas. Finally, rather than take the jeep trail out of Karasabai, they paid an old Amerindian lady to paddle them and their bikes across the Ireng River to better roads in Brazil.

google earth projection showing Lethem, Annai and Karasabai (click it for a larger image)

On the morning of the fourth day Dan woke up in their derelict campsite on a lonely track in the state of Roraima. He looked over at Bryan still sleeping and lit a smoke. As he took his first drag he looked up and nearly shat himself. Coming down the road was a line of shiny white trucks, too many – definitely too shiny – for locals. The Brazilian Federales. Here they were, two white kids, a couple of beat up bicycles, no passports, no portuguese, barely any cash, a bag of ganja stashed somewhere, and the region’s entire federal police force bearing down on their campsite. Holy shit.

typical terrain in the south Pakaraimas 

Jaw gaping and cigarette burning to the filter, Dan guessed about 60 vehicles were on the approach and awaited certain disaster. But the first truck passed them by. And the next. One after another – white Chevy Suburbans alternating with white pickups carrying ATVS – the entire entourage kept on going with not a glance in their direction.  Apparently the police ha bigger business up north.  Bryan slept through the whole thing.  Holy shit.  So what to do? Breath again. Wake up Bry. Light another cigarette? Hell no – roll a joint and beat the hell on back to Guyana.

the tiny village of Paipong.  Dan and Bryan passed through here at 4 am on the way to Karasabai

Dan told me that story over rum and poker in his wooden house in Surama village. He never figured out why there were so many federal police in such a remote part of Brazil and why they wanted nothing to do with a couple feral gringos huddled on the roadside. Funny thing was I knew exactly what they were doing. You see the very research project that had so recently transported me to Guyana was originally planned for Brazil in the same lands where Dan and Bryan spent the night. However, exactly one year before, the President of Brazil officially returned those lands to the Amerindians of Roraima State, giving the squatting ranchers and farmers 365 days to vacate.

singletrack through Karasabai

The ranching and farming families, some having been there a couple generations already, were not happy. A school was burnt down in an Amerindian village. People on both sides organized and protested. While the President remained firm, the Brazilian military exercised its jurisdiction along the international border and sided with the squatters. A research project examining Amerindian hunting practices? No need for meddling foreigners - the military claimed the situation was too dangerous. My ex-PhD advisor spent the better part of the year and many round trip tickets between Hawai‘i and Brazil trying to wrangle research permits.

looking across the Ireng River to Brazil

The last day arrived for the ranchers and farmers to move out.  Two gringos crossed the Guyanese border in a dug-out canoe. President Lula foresaw violence.  For a long, sickening moment, Dan foresaw Brazilian prison. Thankfully, no one that day was harmed. Dan and Bryan and their bicylces made it for the party at the Lethem Rodeo. The ranchers are still squatting on Amerindian lands. We were never granted permission to work in Brazil.  And I met these jokers in Guyana.

heli ride home

just trying this out...

a quick clip of our flight home from limahuli last month.

Guyana Fishin' Trip - Part 1

map of Guyana (meatnpotatoes.com)

The Rupununi region is named after the river which bends through the landscape of southwestern Guyana to meet the country’s largest waterway, the Essequibo. It is truly a mysterious, uncharted corner of a continent – literally the land of El Dorado, marked on a map by Sir Walter Raleigh sometime in the 1600s. Despite early explorations, most of Guyana’s interior was left largely undeveloped by the Dutch and later British colonists apart from a few ranching operations still carrying on. Sadly, since independence in the late 1960s, much of the land has been concessioned to timber and mining companies by the Guyanese government.

over the river and through the woods - the Essequibo crossing on the Georgetown-Lethem road (photo by Joel Strong)

Fortunately the road connecting the coast to the interior – a dirt track winding from the swamplands surrounding the capital of Georgetown, through thousands of hectares of rambling rain forest, out into the wide open savannas surrounding Lethem on the Brazilian border – is so poorly developed that the mining and timber companies can’t afford to access these resources – yet. For the moment, the land still largely serves the needs of the local Amerindian people who have hunted, fished and farmed here for centuries.

in need of improvements

It is a difficult place to portray in words, the Rupununi. I can tell you about the open grassland savannas sweeping as far the eye can see, the sunsets that make the sky burn bigger than any sky on earth. I can write about the deep deep forest looming at the savanna’s edges, along the rivers and covering the hills. There are the creatures of this landscape – cayman, jaguar, giant armadillos, tapir, brocket deer, tamandua, ocelots, giant river otters, bushmasters, howler monkeys, capybara, macaws, anacondas, etc. – still so chock full it would make David Attenborough drool.

poison arrow frog

jabiru storks out in the savanna

Then there’s the water, confined within the banks of great rivers, oxbow lakes and ponds for the dry season, and confining the fish that filled our bellies. With the rainy season, the water swells in flood, breaching the banks of rivers and lakes to transform the same savannas into an inland sea. While the fish now disperse thin across what was once land, terrestrial animals themselves become concentrated, trapped on islands making easy meals for hunters. The rains come so full and heavy that somewhere out in that wilderness the waters of South America’s two greatest river systems, the Amazon far to the south (via the Rio Negro and the Ireng) and the Orinoco up north in Venezuela, actually intermingle.

the Rupununi by "engine-boat"  - a motorized dugout (photo by Joel Strong)

queen victoria water lilies are found in still-water ponds

folks fish here with bow and arrow

hosts and friends Paulette Allicock and her son Frank parch farine - a local staple made from bitter cassava

I can describe the Amerindians that have shaped the very landscape of the Rupununi, setting fires to clear farms and flush game, inadvertently, or sometimes very advertently, thinning the trees that would encroach upon the grasslands. Villages lay scattered loosely across the savanna, with homes never too far from the edge of high forest and “bush islands” where they plant cassava, chilis, beans, gourds and melons and other fruits. The Macushi and Waipishana people of this region smile from bicycles on the road or dugout canoes on the rivers, walking always with cutlass, usually bow and arrows, and often slinging warishis (woven backpacks) loaded with food and firewood.

night-time savanna fires running up the hillside and into the forest (photo by Bryan Williams)

There is a spirit realm there too – implicit and real in the lives of most local people, yet scarcely visible to me, someone who just skimmed the surface of the Rupununi over 8 months. Was it sinister? Nineteenth century explorers wrote about the “demon landscape” of Guyana’s interior, told stories of travelers who disappeared or lost their minds in the wilderness. Despite the influence of missionaries, tales still abound of both Piaimen and Kanaimas - shamans “doing their work” for both good and evil.

a quiver of arrowheads 

In the 1990s, an anthropologist documented the “poetics of violent death,” the ritualized murder of Amerindians and outsiders alike by Kanaimas in the Pakaraima mountains on the northern fringe of the Rupununi – he was actually poisoned and survived (check out the book Dark Shamans). Rituals much less macabre – communion with plant and animal spirits for farming and hunting, charms for luck and skill, the appeasement of mischevious forest spirits – were related in bits and pieces, barely revealed in passing conversation and only after months and months talking with local families.

jeep trek into the Pakaraima mountains

why aren't other beer companies catching on to this? (photo by Sean Giery)

Still, this all fails to convey the mad mad potential energy that permeates the place. Potential is the key word here because one passes a lot of down time in the Rupununi. Waiting for friends, hitching rides, whatever is happening happens only “just now” – an interpretive phrase that ranges in meaning from a couple minutes to a couple days. During that down time you gaff (talk story) and generally consume obscene amounts of good Guyanese rum or cheap Venezuelan beer (in fact the Guyanese beer Banks is highly superior, but we were continually suckered in by the Venezuelan’s brilliant advertising). All this downtime is almost a necessity, however, because when it comes to movement through the surreal landscape of the Rupununi, adventures tend to happen in epic proportions.

hen napping in a warishi

hunting fish

the Rupununi side of the Georgetown-Lethem Road

dugouts near the village of Yupukari