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Home/ stevenwarran's Library/ Notes/ August 9, 1997, Seattle Times - Chicago Tribune, Beyond Jonestown -- South America's Guyana Rewards Those Who Can Take The Heat, by Laurie Goering,

August 9, 1997, Seattle Times - Chicago Tribune, Beyond Jonestown -- South America's Guyana Rewards Those Who Can Take The Heat, by Laurie Goering,

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August 9, 1997, Seattle Times - Chicago Tribune, Beyond Jonestown -- South America's Guyana Rewards Those Who Can Take The Heat, by Laurie Goering, 

KAIETEUR FALLS, Guyana - The waterfall is stunning, an unbroken 741-foot drop of tea-colored foam that seems to hang for ages in the air before crashing onto the rocks below, sending a swirling mist into the surrounding rain forest.

At dusk, swifts dart by the thousands behind the falling curtain of water, to their nests built on the sheer rock face. When the sun breaks through the clouds a rainbow sprawls across the mist-filled chasm.

The real thrill of Kaieteur Falls, though, comes when the pilot of our small 10-seater plane roars upriver a few hundred yards, banks hard just over the jungle treetops and then brings us back downriver right over the black water's surface, headed for the falls.

As we roar off the edge into the gorge, the plunging water crashing away below us, everyone in the plane whoops with terrified delight.

Guyana, a tiny former British colony on South America's northern Caribbean coast, is hardly a tourist mecca. That, in itself, is a perfect reason to go.

Last year fewer than 3,000 tourists visited this country, best known - if it's known at all - as the site of the worst mass suicide in modern history.

In 1978, more than 900 American followers of cult leader Jim Jones consumed cyanide-tainted drink at their commune in Guyana's northwest jungle, convinced by their leader that they were about to be massacred by CIA-financed Guyanese troops.

Even today, "Jonestown is the only thing that puts us on the map," complains Colette McDermott, executive director of the struggling Tourism Association of Guyana.

But poor Guyana, the public relations victim of am American madman, has much more to offer.

It's the only English-speaking nation in South America, an attraction for anyone interested in discovering South America but dreading fumbling with Spanish or Portuguese.

Its vast rain forest, part of the greater Amazon basin, covers millions of acres and is among the richest in South America.

Its ocean-front capital, Georgetown, heavily populated by the descendants of freed African slaves, offers a taste of Africa combined with still-lingering British influence and a rich Caribbean culture.

And, of course, for the more morbid-minded, there's Jonestown in all its decaying glory, just a short plane ride from the capital.

Why isn't Guyana swarming with tourists? Well, in truth, this unique country has a few drawbacks.

First, it's hot. Not just hot - but steamy, humid, jungle hot, particularly in Georgetown at midday. Ask anyone tourists? Well, in truth, this unique country has a few drawbacks.

First, it's hot. Not just hot - but steamy, humid, jungle hot, particularly in Georgetown at midday. Ask anyone in town whether it's possible to walk to your next destination, and they'll look at their watch for the answer. Noon means three blocks is too far. Better to take a cab.

Air conditioning is rare in all but the best hotels. But there are other ways to cope. The best, unquestionably, is a rum drink poolside at the posh Guyana Pegasus Hotel, with a Caribbean steel drum band teasing out a calypso rhythm nearby. After dark, Guyana's steam bath turns into a delicious warm tropical breeze.

Air fares to Guyana are relatively high and flight schedules unattractive. Flights from Miami often make two stops en route, in the Caribbean nations of Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago. Morning flights back to the U. S. on British West Indies Airways come with a 3:30 a.m. wakeup call.

But for the traveler willing to suffer a little, this nation offers more than compensatory rewards.

Giant bromeliads, tiny frogs

Kaieteur National Park, which surrounds Guyana's central Portaro River, is perhaps the easiest place in South America to get a spectacular glimpse of the Amazonian rain forest.

Travelers arrive by small plane - there are no reliable roads - to a dirt airstrip cut just a few hundred yards from the falls. From the airstrip leads one of the grandest short trails in South America.

Between glimpses of the 300-foot-wide waterfall, the path passes through forests of giant bromeliads, the largest on earth at more than 10 feet high. Inside the towering plants live tiny golden frogs, inchlong bright yellow jewels that are hatched in the up-to-2-gallon pool of water at the center of the plant's leaves.

The path also winds among, and sometimes through, granite boulders hung with strangler fig roots and the rich humid smell of jungle decay. Such boulder ecosystems are the home of the bright orange cock-of-the-rock. On a previous trip to neighboring Suriname, I spent hours hiking through the rain forest and then standing in clouds of mosquitoes to see a group of the exotic birds. In Kaieteur, we happened on one just 25 feet off the tourist path.

"Here we don't need any music," says Laurence Gibson, our Guyanese guide. "The birds do the singing, and we have the frogs for bass."

Other denizens, other falls

Deeper in the forest, for those willing to stay beyond a few hours, are other rain forest denizens: tapirs, anteaters, monkeys and ocelots.

The main trail, which takes just an hour at a slow pace, offers a variety of views of the falls, most from spectacular granite outcrops. The last stop is at the top of the falls, where a handful of youthful Montanans in our group leap from boulder to boulder in the racing black river, just feet from a drop five times bigger than Niagara.

There are no safety fences, no rules, nothing to stop the adrenalin rush. Our guide notes that the huge granite boulder we're standing on at the precipice's edge no longer has any support beneath it and is hanging more or less simply by friction.

We smile and, as soon as it seems seemly, take a few quick steps back to the safer side of the gaping crack.

From Kaieteur, day trips from Georgetown continue on to Guyana's smaller but equally interesting Orinduik Falls, which lie on the border with the Brazilian state of Roraima.

Orinduik, on the equally black Ireng River, is a series of smaller tiered drops over a stepped bed of terra cotta red jasper. Over millennia, the water and geological uprisings have cut the jasper into fantastic patterns, a sort of mad geometry of etched squares and diamonds.

Orinduik, as accessible as Kaieteur is remote and exotic, is a swimmer and rock clamberer's dream. The rushing water, crashing over short drops, fills endless small pools and offers a cool shower or back massage to those willing to wade out on the watery terraces.

Above the falls, a dry grassy plain thick with lizards and desert flowers stretches to the Pakaraima Mountains in the distance.

Then there's Georgetown

At the other end of the spectrum of Guyana's delights is Georgetown, a grandly decaying and improbable Colonial wonder.

Georgetown, the best preserved of the Caribbean Colonial capitals, was built in wood, an unlikely choice on a termite-plagued continent.

Its Gothic City Hall, a huge red-and-white gingerbreaded wonder, looms over the central Avenue of the Republic, not far from St. George's Anglican Cathedral, at 143 feet tall allegedly the tallest wooden building in the world. The president's mansion and Guyana's congress building also are built in wood.

Called the Garden City of the Caribbean, Georgetown boasts huge botanic gardens and city streets lined with spectacular flowering tropical trees. One, just outside the president's mansion, dropped such a profusion of bright yellow flowers during my stay that it looked as if the street were covered in drifts of daffodils.

The city, below sea level and protected by a series of dikes, is cut at nearly every block by a small canal, some choked with pink-tinged blooming water lilies - and others with trash. Sidewalks, broken by the protruding roots of tropical trees, tilt at odd angles.

Streets are filled with a dizzying variety of traffic, from speeding taxis to donkey-drawn carts. On Friday afternoons what can only be described as a middle-age scooter gang of well-dressed office workers cruises downtown Georgetown, showing off on their way home.

Colonial legacy

The capital is a predominately Afro-Guyanese city, a continuing legacy of the country's British colonial days when descendants of freed slaves filled many government posts. Even today Georgetown's food - and its street markets - have a decidedly African flavor.

Afro-Guyanese, however, are no longer Guyana's largest ethnic group. Today that country is dominated by Indo-Guyanese, the Hindu and Moslem descendants of Indian indentured farmworkers brought to Guyana to replace the free slaves.

Until recently most Indo-Guyanese lived in rural areas, particularly Guyana's rich coastal sugar and rice-growing regions. Increasingly, however, they are moving to Georgetown to take advantage of business opportunities opening up under the country's new free-market economy.

A few sunburned British faces also color Georgetown's streets and hints of England are everywhere, from the Guinness sold in bars to small suburban weekend farms with names like Covent Garden. Growing numbers of Chinese have immigrated to Guyana in recent years, adding to the country's ethnic variety.

Despite its ethnic exoticism, however, Georgetown is not rich in tourist attractions. The central Stabroek market, built in 1880, offers a mostly utilitarian selection of clothing, shoes and other goods of little interest to tourists - apart from some Indian-inspired gold jewelry, a product of the country's rich gold reserves.

Well worth the price of a visit - free - is the Guyana Museum. With perhaps the most diverse collection worldwide, the museum offers everything from a life-size model of a Pork-Knocker, the somewhat mysterious name given to Guyana's mainly Afro-Guyanese wildcat gold miners, to a piece of moon rock kindly sent by Richard Nixon in 1973.

There's an alabaster model of the Taj Mahal, a stuffed giant black caiman (South America's cousin of the alligator), a bust of Dr. Harold Pacheco Fernandes ("Tuberculosis health officer, British Guiana, 1948-52"), a vicious-looking leather Dutch slave whip and a Chinese mechanical flytrap (exhibited courtesy of Mrs. Woon-Foo).

Upstairs the museum offers a large collection of stuffed Guyanese wildlife. One display case features "Principal Rodents of Guyana." The median size of the creatures - including agoutis, pacas and capybaras - is a foot and a half long.

Just across the street from the Guyana Museum is Georgetown's post office, a must stop for philatelists. Tiny Guyana produces some of the most beautiful stamps in the world, and the post office sells a selection that ranges from exotic fish and wildlife to a tribute to Boutros Boutros-Ghali.

Nightlife

As is the case in many tropical cities suffering from daytime torpor, one of Georgetown's best attractions is its vibrant nightlife.

The city is thick with discos. At the Trump Card, a largely African crowd dances every weekend to live music that swerves from pop to rap to calypso to reggae. At one point in the show a group of three young rappers dancing beside the band drop their rap personas, pick up instruments and become a horn section.

No one knows the Macarena.

Equally entertaining are the numerous small karaoke bars across the city. At the civil servants union club, dancers in their 40s and 50s swivel together in sensual collision late into the night as the crowd downs rum drinks and talks cricket, Guyana's national passion.

Finally, Jonestown

Perhaps no destination, however, is quite as exotic as Jonestown.

The rapidly vanishing former commune sits deep in Guyana's northwest jungle, a 45-minute flight from Georgetown. Now part of a 4-million-acre Malaysian and Korean logging concession, the site is five miles from Port Kaituma, a muddy Indian river town of thatched huts.

Loggers have cut a new red-earth road through the center of the old compound and scavengers have long ago hauled away most of the remains of what once were neat wooden dormitories and a huge, tin-roofed central pavilion, where the vat of poison grape drink once sat.

The jungle has crept back, covering the abandoned concrete basketball court and obscuring what some in Guyana still swear are the entrances to underground storage vaults still packed with gold and cash.

But hints of Jonestown remain, from the breadfruit and almond trees planted by Jones' ill-fated followers to rusted tractors, an old flour mill and bits of electrical insulators poking through the grass.

Somewhere in the tangled growth where the pavilion once stood, the commune's decaying piano and Jones' throne still lie, locals say.

Where the bodies lay, clouds of yellow butterflies now flit in the steamy tropical sun.

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