Thanksgiving Adventures

Thanksgiving Adventures

My first choice to celebrate thanksgiving is at home with my family and enough turkey to make you sleep for days. I hope somebody enjoyed my share of the stuffing and I am very jealous of anyone who ate whatever my grandma whipped up. My second choice is to fly out to the Amazon Rainforest then hop over to the savannah and spend the day looking at the beauty and power of nature. Though I was not at home for Thanksgiving, I happen to live in Guyana and it is only one hour by plane to Kaiteur National Park, home of Kaiteur Falls in the rainforest, and half an hour from there to Orinduk Falls on the Guyana/Brazil border. Perfect!

I saw a toucan!

There isn’t really more to that statement. He was flying. He was a toucan. I was too slow to get a picture (my finger was on the trigger after that). But I saw a toucan in the rainforest!

This past weekend was Emilia’s first and last weekend in Guyana. At first we were going to go to a resort in the interior or on the coast, but that type of trip requires the whole weekend, perhaps even a three day weekend. Though most of the population lives in Georgetown, they will all claim that Georgetown is not Guyana and to really see Guyana, you have to leave Georgetown. A quick call to Rainforest Tours showed that there were openings on their trip to see both Kaiteur and Orinduk Falls on Sunday – perfect! For those of you who don’t know, Kaiteur is considered to be the highest single drop waterfall at 741 ft and Orinduk is just pretty (it borders Brazil and Guyana and if it holds any records, nobody told me). Both are completely different (except they both involve water) and have their own beauty.

If you look at a map of Guyana, there are quite a few communities around the coast and located along the main rivers. I live in Georgetown and the farthest community south that I will probably travel to for work is Linden. That is also apparently where the road ends and a dirt road starts. Guyana is a small country, but what would take us three hours to drive from Georgetown (north part on coast) to the border with Brazil (southern tip) will take over a day to drive in Guyana because of the roads. There are two options to get to Kaiteur which has its own difficulties to get to because it is in the rainforest and is situated within a mountain range on the Guiana Shield (a plateau that is one of the world's oldest and remotest geological formations). Option 1 goes something like this: Drive until the road ends, get in a boat and then hike for three days. Option 1 is better if you want to see the fauna because most of them are nocturnal (it’s actually advertised as a wilderness trek), though I don’t know how I feel about meeting a jaguar or an ocelot. Option 2 is easier: get in a 12 seater Cessna and fly for one hour. We took option 2!

Again, I’ve been to Newfoundland and Guyana by plane. They weren’t big planes, but they were big enough. Moment of panic when I see the plane we will be getting into, but I had a talk with myself and this is something that I really wanted to do and this was how I had to get there. So I did. Emilia and I sat in the back for the first trip (and I mentally calculated to make sure the weight was evenly distributed in the plane). They loaded up our picnic lunch and we were off. I actually really liked it too! The windows are bigger than in a big plane (weird, I know) and you are riding below or through the clouds most of the time so you can see so much! I’d like to thank my dad for his ears because though they went a little funny sometimes, they always cleared.

I like planes. Flying over Guyana reminded me of models that people create of towns, etc. From the air, everything looks perfect in every detail. Houses are perfect little houses. Trees and grass look fuzzy and fake. Clouds look like cotton balls. Rivers wind in perfect squiggles. I had a little moment thinking of the song “From a distance…” and how true it is. I have seen those houses up close, they aren’t perfect and some I would hesitate to call a house, but they are somebody’s home. The newspaper in Guyana is more depressing than at home, and at times, much more graphic with descriptions and the pictures that they print. Flying above, you forget that.

Upon our arrival to Kaiteur National Park, we were greeted by our tour guide who I will let speak for himself: “I will be your tour guide today. Lawrence Gibson is the name. Welcome to Kaiteur National Park….. Remember to take nothing but pictures and leave nothing but your footprints behind”. He was a wonderful character. Full of facts on everything and even more stories to share, one of which I will try to remember. Kaiteur Falls is named after Kai. He was a chief of the Amerindian people in the area long ago and they were experiencing some difficulties with the gods. He felt that the only way to make amends with the gods would be for him to sacrifice himself which he did by throwing himself off the river’s edge. Kai is the chief and “teur” translates to fall. So really it is Kai’s fall Falls.

Kaiteur has three viewing areas that are designed to give you three different perspectives of the falls: Boyscouts View (full view of the drop and river below), Rainbow View (closer and can see rainbows in mist, as well as a full view of the “great green canyon” – we walked under the rainforest canopy to get there!) and what I will call River View because I don’t think I even looked at the sign (right on the edge of the river where it drops and becomes the falls). The last one has what I like to call “Freddie’s cliff” after a family friend who saw a picture of a man standing on it and wanted a picture of me standing on it. So I have one – sorry Freddie, it’s a different angle because I didn’t have a photographer at the correct location. I also took a video standing on the overhang for him and of the sign warning me to proceed at my own risk (I’m okay, Mom!)

We spent about an hour (hour and half tops) at the three viewing areas of the falls and walked back to the plane for our picnic lunch of potato salad, chicken legs, rice and veggies with the most delicious watermelon I have ever had. On the tour was Emilia and I, two guys from McGill, a husband and wife with their sister in law and mother in law from England/Scotland, a husband originally from Guyana with his American wife (now both from Brampton) and a husband and wife with their mother in law from Barbados. The last woman was over eighty, but you wouldn’t know it to look at her or to see her get around! It wasn’t an intense walk at Kaiteur, but not a flat walk for sure. One of the guys from McGill graduated from the University of Guelph in 2005 – what are the odds that out of 13 people in the middle of nowhere Guyana, two would be U of G grads? I thought it was cool. He lived in South and still after how many years, was jealous that I lived in Johnston.

It was about half an hour from Kaiteur to Orinduk by plane. The landscape changed completely. We were originally in the canopy of a rainforest, but it was like a line was drawn with one side being forest, one side being the grasslands of the savannah. Orinduk Falls is more of rapids, though definitely still beautiful. The rocks are all jasper. It was an interesting trek down to the viewing point with a rocky path that looked just like a pile of rocks, but we made it. The two guys took a swim which I would have contemplated except for being warned about swimming in fresh water by the public health unit and about the dangers of wet jasper. Dr Ramotar broke five ribs slipping on the jasper at these falls. I’m sure my insurance would cover it, but I’m not that adventurous to test it.

On our way back to Georgetown, Emilia and I sat at the front of the plane and the group from England was dropped off at an island resort. They were doing more of a bird tour by the sounds of it. One of the daughters and the mom would be returning to England for three days before heading off to do a polar bear trip – talk about temperature shock! We landed safely in Georgetown and took our little Rainforest Tours mini bus back to the hotel. Our Thanksgiving dinner consisted of veggie burgers from JR’s – little bit of spice, little bit of pineapple and so big that you think you can’t eat it, but so good that you do!