bicrom abroad

a strange but satisfying week. the guianas are anachronistic, wild, infuriating but ultimately rewarding. wandering the streets of st lauren or paramaribo is to see a brief history of european colonialism acted out before your eyes, the naked descendants of long discredited imperialism nonchalantly living and breathing in the twenty first century. there have been struggles with transport, accommodation and food but also incredible highs in lauren the leatherback and kaiteur. most of all the guianas have always been interesting, with attempts to achieve even the simplest of things having the capacity to produce unintended consequences which might take your breath away. fascinating rather than enchanting, i doubt we will be back but we are certainly glad we came.

getting the flight from parbo to georgetown may not have been such a girly option after all. having been dropped off at the small domestic "airport" by our beerchugging taxi driver we were greeted instead by what looked like a large, freshly painted warehouse staffed by bored, unprofessional looking surinamese. it felt more like the headquarters of an amateur flying club, an impression which was heightened when we saw our winged steed, a rickety old twelve seater cessna which looked like maintaining its structural integrity was a challenge, even before it attempted something as rash as trying to get airborne. we crawled our way into the seats directly behind the pilot, like schoolchildren getting a lift to school from dad, and watched with nervous anticipation as he twiddled some dials, pulled some levers and eventually rattled us into the air. having been on small planes before i was expecting a bumpy ride but it was actually a relatively comfortable hour cruising over the atlantic coast, and we arrived in georgetown pleased to have avoided a twelve hour bus/ferry journey.
georgetown is a funny place, with a dark reputation which casts a long shadow. it has an unpleasantly edgy feel, as though wandering the streets could, maybe even is likely to, lead to a criminal encounter. part of this is no doubt the preconceptions created by various warnings on the internet but it was unfortunately reinforced by the fact that we were continuously warned by apparently friendly guyanese to hold on to our bag or our camera tight. i would say we are relatively blaze about horror stories of street crime but in georgetown, for whatever reason, the warnings just felt like they stuck. it is the first place in the world that i can remember feeling uncomfortable walking the streets, especially as the sun began to go down. rio, bogota, other places have the reputation but georgetown seems to have the menacing ambience to back it up as well.
this atmosphere coupled with the absence of any real sights of note to view, wooden church aside, meant that we didn't really do very much on our first day in georgetown, holding fire instead for our trip to to kaiteur falls the following day.
kaiteur is one of those places that you read about in guidebooks but never truly believe you will ever witness: (allegedly) the longest single drop waterfall in the world, ensconced by virgin rainforest jealously hiding it deep in the amazon. a short hop in another tiny plane and a quick walk later however we were peering over a crumbling stone plateau at a cascade of water bellowing over the rock ledge and tumbling into a fine mist 700 feet plus below. the falls are an unbelievable, absurd experience, an assault on the senses which has to be felt to be believed. they lack the infrastructure of iguazu, which succeeds in giving them a particular haphazard charm. there is absolutely nothing to stop you ambling right over to the bare edge of the rocky outcrops directly to the side of the gushing water, and one false step on the occasionally slippery rock would have only a solitary inevitable outcome. we peered at kaiteur with nervous wonder from a few viewpoints, each time egging ourselves on to go closer and closer to the ridges at the very end of the ledges from which we tentatively dared ourselves to take photos, amazed on every occasion by the sight of hundreds of gallons of water casually thundering into the amazonian wilderness below.
after a few hours we got back onto our plane and headed back to georgetown, suitably amazed and pleased to have ended our time in the guaianas on such a high. a quick guyanese creole curry later we were rubbing our eyes at 3am and heading to the airport to get on our flight to miami, out of the heart of darkness and back into reality.