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Guyana - country #94 for Betsy Schwartz
More: Best of 'What Do You Do On A Friday?' Holiday Reading 2004
Betsy's done it again! As we said in Betsy Tours Uruguay (June 2003), Bets has what is probably the dreamiest job of all - she travels the world for 6 months of the year, then spends the other 6 months as a schoolteacher showing kids her slides and talking of faraway places... With a job like that it is no wonder she has visited 98 countries and still counting... more often that not with her Crusoe called "Pumpkin".
April 21, 2004 The Guiana Cycling Adventure
Hi!
I have just returned from my awesome trip and felt the urge to write a summary letter to you all.
In April of 2003 when a colleague and friend at school, Sarah Corfield, told me she was going to take a two year teaching assignment in Quito, Ecuador, I began dreaming about doing a bike ride in the Guianas and getting her to go with me. Since we had had such good rides in Japan, South Korea and Greece, I figured it was time for us to do another bike adventure.
Well, here it is April of 2004 and Sarah and I have just completed what turned out to be a delightful bike ride. However, the trip certainly wasn't a piece of cake. I received more warnings and negative information on this trip than on any other trip I can remember. Part of the problem was that you can not use credit cards, ATM, or even Traveler Checks. You must take all cash. Now that's hard for any trip, but if you are on a bike and everyone knows you have a lot of cash on you, it puts you right away at a disadvantage. Added to this problem are the poverty of the area being traveled and the high incidence of armed bandits on the roads. We followed the advice given of hiding the money in various locations on both our body and bike, and also of carrying a fake wallet never containing a large amount of money. Pumpkin, my Bike Friday is especially easy to hide money on as he has some additional folding places for storage.
I had received crime warnings, put out by the State Department, from a caring friend in Trinidad; crime warnings from people who had previously lived in the area (returned Peace Corps volunteers as well as people who emigrated to the USA), and more crime alerts daily from the locals as we pedaled our way east along the two lane, flat coastal road from Georgetown, Guyana, through Suriname, into French Guiana, and then back to Paramaribo (Suriname's capital) to fly back to Trinidad and ultimately return home.
The roads are narrow with large potholes that are usually filled with water as rainy season starts in April, and even though we managed to escape the torrential downpours, we did have to deal with the after effects on the roads.
The majority of the people are of West African origin, with many Indians (from India) as well as Chinese and Javanese (from Indonesia). There is a small % of Amerindians living way far south in the rainforest. Very few tourists visit this part of the South American continent. I remember meeting only two: a young man from Sweden; the other, an older British woman from the USA.
All three countries have beautiful old colonial style buildings. In Guyana and Suriname, these large wooden buildings all need paint and fixing up while in Fr Guiana, still a colony of France, the French keep everything spic and span. There is a tremendous difference when you cross the Maroni River from Suriname into Fr Guiana. Everything works! The roads with sidewalks are well paved; shops are all open with shelves full of delicious morsels including yogurts, cheeses, and wonderful French pastries. As a French colony, the currency is the Euro, so prices are twice as high as in the two neighboring countries. Driving is on the right side unlike Guyana and Suriname where we had to quickly adapt to left hand drive. English, Dutch and French are the principal languages as you travel east across the Guianas. 'Taki Taki'is the language spoken by the blacks to each other. It was invented centuries ago so the blacks could talk to each other without the slave masters being able to understand them.
Georgetown Church
THINGS THAT I LOVED:
* Cycling in Guyana with everyone smiling and saying in the typical double language, 'Hello. Hello.' Or 'Good Morning. Good Morning.' Or 'How are you? How are you.' Then answering my 'How are you's' with 'Okay. Okay.' * Finding a Chinese restaurant (the Chinese all got into having restaurants) just as a giant downpour would start.
* Cycling along the northern edge of the rainforest on long straight roads lined with palm trees, pink and white lily pads in the Dutch built canals, flowering trees of every color, small wooden houses built up on stilts for protection from flooding, innumerable varieties of tall hardwood trees, large leafed vines climbing up the trunks of mangroves at water's edge, and children. Our two-week trip coincided with Easter vacation so lots of children were everywhere but NOT ONE child begged or asked for anything! No throwing of stones either as I have had happen on previous bike trips in Tunisia, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.
* Well- behaved dogs, never thinking of chasing us, continued sleeping in puddles or the hole they had dug in the sand to try and cool down from the average 90 to 104 degree F temperature. (Actually, one day two dogs ran after me but when I kicked the head of the one who was ready to bite my right ankle, the one who was going to bite my left ankle ran away yelping also.)
* Cycling by rice fields on both sides of the road reminded me of the scenery cycling down Highway #1 in Vietnam. Water everywhere.
Betsy and Pumpkin On the dusty trail
* Cycling by the sugar cane fields and having people ride alongside me, conversing, reminded me of the wonderful conversations I had had on my 1999 bike ride through Cuba.
* Reading the positive slogans written on billboards about compassion, being kind to people, ansd making the right choice brought back memories of similar billboards all over Ghana, West Africa. Actually, I was told that researchers believe the blacks in this area most likely were transported in the 1700's and 1800's from the slave castles along the coast of Ghana to the sugar plantations in the Guianas.
* Cycling west with a tailwind to return to Suriname's capital after miles of heading east into a predominant 15 mph headwind from the northeast. The headwind served to dry up the gallons of sweat shed everyday but it also kept our daily average speed at about 9 mph. Pretty devastating average when the road is as flat as a pancake!
* A minibus drives by, slowing down from his 100 mph and yells, 'Hey, I saw you yesterday! Remember me?' A great improvement over our first minibus driver comment of 'White bitches, you have the right of way!' * While waiting for the ferry to carry us across a big river, a man walks over to me and says, 'Hi! How's your trip going? I overheard you talking about your bike ride on the plane from Miami, and since I recognized you, I wondered how everything is going for you.' It's so nice when people take the time to acknowledge you.
Leatherback turtle in action
* The Turtles. In French Guiana we cycled to the small coastal village of Les Hattes. There on a 7 km stretch of beach three kinds of turtles come up on shore nightly to lay their eggs during the months of April to July. They give a 4 hour window to observe them as they usually come out of the sea anytime from two hours before the high tide to two hours after it. The hightide was scheduled for midnight so we left the Youth Hostel where we were staying, at 9:40 PM and with our flashlights, we went out onto the beach to search for turtles. Flashlights from many people were already shining.
We soon came upon a giant leatherback whose shell size ranges from 4 to 7 feet and who can weigh up to 2000 pounds. She was about 20 feet above the tide line, and busily using her rear flippers to dig a deep hole where she would then deposit approximately 100 white eggs the size of ping pong balls. Once the eggs were deposited, she lost no time covering them and patting down firmly the sand, all with her rear flippers. Then she began thrashing about throwing sand all over those of us who were watching her. Actually, she was trying to disguise where the eggs were hidden and we were in her line of fire. People began flashing photos of her as she continued with her job. The lights from the flashes were too much for her and she became confused, not knowing which way the sea was. Only when we had all walked away and left her in the dark silence was she able to find her way back to the big Atlantic Ocean, all muddied from the many rivers emptying into it. Sadly, in 6 - 8 weeks the eggs will hatch, and only about 2% of the hatchlings will mature to adulthood. We walked on and found several more turtles that evening. A memorable event.
Easter Sunday dinner Guyana style
Most of all I loved meeting so many of the people in Guyana and Suriname with whom I had been in contact months before the trip, by email. Many people I didn even know were instrumental in making this trip a success: Jerry, lives here in Santa Cruz County, a former Peace Corps Volunteer, Guyana, 1966 who said it would be a very difficult trip due to the crime, and was kind enough to put me in touch with Robin, a Surinamese who drives the coastal road frequently and warned us what parts we must avoid cycling; Jeremy and Megan, two current PCVs in Guyana who helped me to understand the nature of the crime in Guyana but who also believed we could do the trip; Art and Sue, a couple in their 60's who had left PC Suriname last year after having an armed robbery in their house, but who truly loved Suriname and put me in touch with Rachel who hosted us for a marvelous Easter Sunday dinner with all her family, and Angelic who was the health and safety advisor for the PC and provided me with a list of the names and addresses of the few hotels along the coastal road so we would be better able to plan our route.
I thank all of these people for their assistance and patience with me as I constantly fired emails to them with questions about their area of expertise. Without their help the trip would have been very difficult. It truly amazes me how with great perseverance, or a desire, the outcome has an excellent chance of being positive.
I hope you have enjoyed this little summary of my bicycling adventure through the Guyanas, and hope it has helped you learn something of these 3 tiny countries, each with less than 1 million people.
Love,
Betsy Schwartz bikenbets at yahoo dot com Teacher at E. A. Hall Middle School in Watsonville, CA when not on the road...
For more information, follow this link http://www.bikefriday.com/bf/holiday-reading2004.