Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Travel

Daily Planet
Rio Carnival's 398-pound king put on a diet
His doctor pleads with "King Momo" to lose weight.
By J.A. Getzlaff
[02/11/00]

Vagabonding
Live from the trans-global Beach Nation
Leo's new movie may be fiction, but its portrayal of a crowded travel world is based in fact. Our correspondent reports -- from the unlikeliest of places -- on just what is happening.
By Rolf Potts
[02/11/00]

Beach nut
An interview with Alex Garland, bestselling and occasionally controversial author of "The Beach."
By Sue Wheat
[02/11/00]

Travel Food Feature
Extra-large, eat your heart out
Sanary-sur-Mer hosts the world's largest bouillabaisse. And lives to tell.
By Richard Goodman
[02/10/00]

Daily Planet
Czech man posts subterranean Valentine
A mystery Valentine kept riders of Prague's subway guessing last month when an anonymous man took out ad space in 105 subway cars in hopes of recovering his lost love.
By J.A. Getzlaff
[02/10/00]

Complete archives for Travel

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

A bank of cumuli steams overhead, sent up from this broccoli of wet jungle that stretches as far as I can see. The only interruption is the "brink," in which the Potaro River dramatically tumbles off a 740-foot-high scarp, down into a tumult of misty green. We head for a rock outcropping right at its edge.

These are the Kaieteur Falls, named for a long-gone Patamonas chief who, by legend, paddled himself in a dugout over the scarp to win the favor of the gods in a war against the ferocious Caribs. It worked.

My guide is Mike Phang, half-Arawak and half-Carib; he is the warden in charge of the land protecting these falls. We step across vast crevices in the terrain, dodge hanging lianas and spot carnivorous plants, waist-high termite mounds and a rare orange bird with a bit of a Mohawk, the Guyanese "Cock-of-the-Walk." It's no wonder Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional "Lost World," with its time-stuck ape men and dinosaurs, was set on Mount Roraima, not far to the west. Or that Sir Walter Raleigh once came looking for El Dorado, the city of gold. It still seems as if almost anything could be hidden here.

Hidden from everyone but Mike. "You are having the bromeliads here, 6 meters [20 feet] high," he says. "You are having the jaguar, the jaguarundi, the puma. You are having the howler monkey." All of this is delivered in a stoic monotone, not unlike that I have heard from other Amerindians -- the Seminoles back in Florida, the Cocama in the Peruvian Amazon. It resonates with a quiet confidence, the emotional knowledge of place locked timelessly inside each word. "We are also having the bushmaster snake," says Mike. "Step carefully."

A delicate plant the size of a tree looms, nurtured by the vapor plume of the falls. "Look deep into this bromeliad and you will see the golden frog. It lives nowhere else. In its skin is a compound ... 150 times as powerful as cocaine." A Scot in our small ragtag group -- head shaved clean and an accent like Sean Connery's -- squats down, puts his head into the immense green leaves and sniffs.

We have come here from Georgetown, the capital of Guyana on the northeast coast of South America, bouncing down on a dirt strip l40 miles inland via Trans Guyana Airlines. The lone pilot is German; the other passengers are the frog-sniffing Brit, his three mates and a Dutchman from Aruba. Guyana is a strange, strange place -- part Caribbean, part Amazonian. It doesn't much court visitors and I am thinking that our small white group -- individually gathered from around Georgetown earlier this morning by a minivan -- may be the country's entire tourism quota for the week.

With a long colonial history that ended abruptly when the British left in 1966, Guyana is not quite sure of its legacy. It is the only English-speaking country in Latin America. Beyond that, I'm uncertain about what unites its people, nearly 90 percent of whom are East Indian-African and live on the coast. The interior forest and mountains and vast savannas are the territory of its nine Amerindian nations. There is wealth here, everyone is certain, in lumbering and mining. But no one is yet sure how much can be taken before it runs out.

Folks like Mike Phang sense there is also an interest by foreigners in his country's virgin environment, so he will make a go of it as a warden for now. The traditional Amerindian knowledge of the bush makes it a natural for him. Gold and diamond mining paid much better, Mike tells me, but he got tired of being robbed. "Bandits are the only thing that moves fast in this country," says Mike, a slight smile revealing the pleasure in his quiet joke. Mike was robbed nine times; twice, he shot and killed his assailants. But Guyana is a desperate country, and they kept coming.

Tomorrow, I will begin a weeklong journey that will take me even farther into this odd heart of darkness. It will eventually lead me to a rain forest reserve called Iwokrama -- literally, a "place of refuge." It is a million-acre tract tucked away between the Akaiwanna and the Iwokrama mountains. Set aside by the Guyanese government in the early 1990s, its raison d'être is to preserve a massive oxygen-pumping terrain that helps abate the world's increasingly abundant carbon dioxide load, relieving global warming. I am, well, perplexed that a country like Guyana would attempt something this visionary.

Next page | Just watch for the bushmasters and you'll be fine