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OVERLAND TO THE RUPUNUNI - 2001 “We’re leaving town early, you need to get to the assembly point for 5 pm the latest!” In true Guyanese fashion, we didn’t actually leave until 10:00 pm, finally getting underway after several stops and starts. “Do we need to bring anything with us?” “Nah, come as you are. Hammocks are easy to get in Lethem.” Someone neglected to tell us we should walk with industrial strength gas masks for the dust we were going to encounter along the way. Nevertheless, we set off, blissfully naďve and ignorant first timers. With the exception of the veteran members of the team, Sherwin – the cameraman and Sharla – the sound tech, it was myself, “the investigative journalist” and my friend Sheira who, after suffering a loss during the post-elections violence, was in desperate search of a more peaceful environment and was appointed honorary digital photographer, after a crash course from Sharla. Lethem, Rupununi is about 515 kilometres south of Georgetown and our trip entailed 15 hours of traveling through several villages, towns, rainforest and making a river crossing to get there. My last waking memory was of Providence, a village on the left bank of the Demerara River some 20 minutes out of Georgetown. Though I never knew a hard bench at the back of an open-cab pickup could be quite so comfortable, Sharla somehow fashioned a bed between the bench, a cushion, a milk tin, a bag, and Samuel our reserve driver, and seemed determined to sleep until we got to our destination. Our first stop was at Mabura Hill, as we had to pass through “customs” at the logging concession of Demerara Timbers Limited, 107 kilometres from Linden, an old bauxite mining town. At this point, we were still some hours away from the route which would ultimately take us into Lethem. I learnt that the route which we would travel – well trail actually, since that’s what it amounted to – had a significant bit of history attached to it. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, famous ranchers like McTurk, Melville and Hart drove their cattle the 500 kilometres overland from the savannah grasslands of the Rupununi, through the forests of the Demerara/ Berbice watershed to the Berbice River, where they would be transported by pontoon to the coastal markets and port in Georgetown. The modern laterite trail which runs from Linden to Lethem follows the forested Essequibo-Demerara watershed down to the savannahs, crossing the old cattle trail in the North Rupununi district en route to Lethem. Nial, our driver, apparently once had aspirations of being a race car or obstacle course driver, a demolition engineer, breaking the sound barrier or all of the above, because once we continued the journey after a short stop at Mabura Hill, he took off as if he intended to destroy anything in his path, with our wheels never touching the ground except to touch base with all the potholes, ditches and valleys along the way. Seven people at the back of a pickup heading for the last frontier – exhilarating! Definitely not for the weak of heart – or of stomach! Just before dawn, we arrived at the pontoon crossing at Kurupakari on the Essequibo river, bleary-eyed and stiff-boned, each of us vaguely bearing a resemblance to something which had just been unearthed from a dust-filled resting place. We would have loved to see the ancient Amerindian petroglyphs here (petro – rock, glyph – drawing) but they were much farther up river. To get to this point, we had traveled through the Iwokrama Rain Forest Reserve. Established in 1989 as a gift to the world from the government of Guyana, the 360,000 hectare reserve and research facility in the center of the country is intended to show how tropical forests can be conserved and managed sustainably while at the same time make significant contributions to local and national development. Bearing in mind the logic of tearing along the trail in order to get the first crossing, one would have thought our journey’s end was near at hand. But fate seemed determined to blight us – fate along with the renegade truck driver who insisted on driving his vehicle forward onto the pontoon rather than reverse as did everyone else. This resulted in the truck being stuck and everyone having to wait for about two hours while it was offloaded and then somehow hoisted off the pontoon. Some enterprising persons took the opportunity to fish, others to sleep while their insides were not being scrambled, others prepared breakfast, while some decided that since they couldn’t be moving on the water, they might as well move in it, and have a splash. Sherwin decided to catch some rather noisy Z’s, while the rest of us walked around in a somnambulant state while trying to catch our bearings. Well this turn of events significantly derailed Nial’s plans to get to Lethem before 2001 was much older, and so, determined to make up for this defect, he once again tore off down the trail. For another four hours or so, we pitched and bucked (not unlike the action of tossing salad). We finally arrived in Lethem just about 1 pm, a sorry looking bunch: Sharla had gotten sick en route, and still looked a bit green. I had a headache, brought on by severe caffeine-deficiency, Sheira’s nostrils had just about all the dust they could take and she was streaming like the Essequibo river. Sherwin, who looked an enticing shade of dusty orange, was filled with horrifying visions of his entire production team falling apart before we even set foot in Lethem. Despite being a bit shell shocked, we were full of excitement as we were unceremoniously deposited at Flo’s door. As all the guest houses were fully booked for the weekend, Sharla had managed to hook us up with prime accommodation at her friend’s place, from whose strategically placed verandah you could see the entire village pass by. Despite promptly falling into bed, dust and all, we were full of anticipation for what lay ahead – the rodeo, and couldn’t wait to discover the splendour of the Rupununi
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