I like reading travel books. Not travel books that are little more than guide books but rather books about journeys that present a challenge in some form or other. I have been to many countries around the world but now, in retirement, I feel no great urge to travel any more. More than anything I am put off by the hassle at airports — even in the best of conditions — but also I like home comforts. So I read travel books. I read most about bizarre journeys by motor-bike or on foot into unknown territories; places off the beaten track that rarely appear on the radar of international affairs. Recently I have started reading a book by John Gimlette,a much travelled writer who practices as a barrister in London. The book Wild Coast — Travels on South America's Untamed Edge — takes us to Guyana — formerly British Guiana — a country about which I knew next to nothing. It is the only British Commonwealth member in South America and the only country in South America in which the official language is English. This seems an immensely practical decision by a post-colonial country. The locals actually speak a Guyanese Creole, an English based creole language with an added flavour of Dutch, West African, Arawakan and Caribbean influences; not a language that could be used easily for communicating with the outside world. Guyana is quite a large country although still one of the smallest in South America. It has an area of 83,000 square miles — which on the international scale of measurements, makes it ten times the area of Wales. But no one lives there. The population is only 770,000 and one third of these live in the capital, Georgetown. Of the remainder 90% live along the coastal strip which accounts for about 10% of the country's total land area. This leaves the rest of the country seriously under-populated. And with good reason. There is nowhere in South America quite like Guyana says John Gimlette. Something like 900 miles of muddy coastline give way to swamps, thick forest and then — deep inland — ancient flat-topped peaks. The forest covers over 80% of the area of Guyana and even now there is no way through it. Without an aeroplane it takes 4 weeks to get into the interior and then things get difficult.
The unspoilt and often unexplored interior has resulted in the defining of a wide variety of bio-diverese regions — coastal, marine, littoral, estuarine palustrine, mangrove, riverine, lacustrine, swamp, savanna, white sand forest, brown sand forest, montane, cloud forest, moist lowland and dry evergreen scrub forests All this means that much of Guyana is mainly impenetrable jungle.. The country is bordered by Venezuela to the north and west, Suriname to the east and Brazil to the south. There are many on-going border disputes, many of which date from colonial days when the various European powers occupied Guiana and its neighbours on and off for centuries.
The social life of Guyana is odd. Almost the whole population has been imported over several centuries. I say imported because most were brought in forcibly. In its days as a sugar producing British colony, its agriculture depended on slavery. With the abolition of slavery, the ex-slaves walked out of the fields and refused ever again to work growing sugar cane. The British brought in Indians to take the place of the Africans. They were not slaves but they were treated almost as badly. They worked hard and regarded the Africans as lazy. The antagonism exists to this day and there is little contact between the ex-African and the ex-Indians. The two communities dream of returning to their homelands in India and Africa — places which none of their ancestors have seen in 200 years. Gimlette says that most of the population don't want to be there. The government is parochial and corrupt and now almost bankrupt.
Gimlette's book is a good read and I recommend it to all.
#
