Guyana

February 15–18, 2008

Homo sapiens’ ancestors were black—isn’t it obvious?

Kaieteur Falls

The country’s main tourist attraction is Kaieteur Falls. Like Canaima, they can only be reached by plane. Here’s my favorite suitcase being carried out onto the tarmac. I bought it back in China for its color: no one’s going to grab it by mistake.

Kaieteur is five times higher than Niagara Falls, but only a quarter of the height of Angel Falls. This doesn’t stop the Guyanese from claiming it’s the highest in the world. The fine print specifies that it’s the highest single-drop waterfall.

A particularly poisonous type of frog lives in the leaves of some palm tree that grows by the falls. They say one frog is enough for the whole party it’s six hundred times more toxic that heroin.

No one has come up with anything else to see here, although the country is distinctive, interesting and full of surprises.

The British legacy here is the English language. Guyana is the only English-speaking country in South America.

The Dutch left behind a system of canals and drainageways.

There’s water around the houses literally everywhere here.

The Guyanese can’t live without their canals. At a minimum there has to be a drainage ditch.

Georgetown

The capital, Georgetown, still has some beautiful wood buildings from the past.

Horses graze right in the center of the city, in front of facades decked out with unicorns and lions. Their herder is hiding from the rain under a dumpster lid.

You can’t park—but you can pasture—across the street from police headquarters.

Guyana is a village of a country.

Half the population is black.

The other half is Indian. Hence the huge number of Hindu temples here.

Nonetheless, the guy on the independence monument is black.

By the way, people in the Caribbean really love vodka for some reason. Guyana even distills its own.

The country’s national heritage includes a special window shutter design called a Demerara window, invented by Europeans suffering from the sweltering heat. The space between the openable outer louver and the inner shutters contains a special tray, which in the past would be filled with ice. A breeze from the street would pass over the ice as it went into the house, making life inside more bearable. Ice was shipped down here from the north, so only the very rich could afford it. The houses of the proletariat, therefore, wouldn’t have Demerara windows.

New traffic lights were recently installed here (I was already unable to find any of the old ones). They’re very fashionable, with solar batteries. The whole idea of the solar battery is supposedly to conserve electricity, yet there’s a streetlight two steps away that no one bothers to turn off during the day.

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia contains a picture of Georgetown that depicts the end of a boulevard. Well, it doesn’t seem like those bollards in a semicircle have changed much over the past 50 years. Even the trash can is still in the same place.

The local pedestrian light pictograms are the most ridiculous in the world.

The main type of public transportation is the minibus. Custom dictates that it be embellished and titled.

Anyone can get license plates made right on the street (like in Pakistan).

The plates consist of pieces of dark Plexiglas, to which they affix letters made out of film or a mysterious home-baked cheap plastic. Naturally, I bought a specimen for my collection.

Many drivers engrave their car windows and side mirrors to discourage theft. They really go all out.

The Guyanese letterbox for incoming mail always looks like a little house.

The post box for outgoing mail looks more like a trash can.

A poor neighborhood.

A swanky neighborhood.

There’s trash everywhere. The Guyanese just can’t resist throwing an empty can out the car window.

Admonitions to keep the city clean look like a joke when the trash cans have such big holes.

The Guyanese couldn’t care less about cleanliness and tidiness. That’s why there are dead seagulls floating in the water by the shore here.

And it’s not any better on land.

All of this hardly differs from towns in the south of Russia.

In both places, you might see someone cooking corn right on the ground (compare to Swaziland).

Or find web designers advertising their services on the wall of a snack bar.

Many young women carry umbrellas to protect themselves from the sun.

And the typical Guyanese motorcycle helmet resembles a Nazi helmet (neighboring countries all have helmets of a different shape).

But the most interesting specimen of material culture here is the vehicle inspection certificate displayed on every windshield.

There currently isn’t a more beautiful (on both sides!) government-issued document anywhere else in the world. It’s a true masterpiece of graphic design and typographic art. Just this detail alone made it worth coming here.