Land of the giants
Jeremy Clarke marvels at the fauna of Guyana’s rainforests There was a punch-up in the cheapest seats on the flight going out to Guyana, three against one, women screaming, red wine flying everywhere. Afterwards, pouring oil on troubled waters, a steward came down the aisle distributing free copies of the Daily Mail. I hadn’t looked at the Mail for ages and I read it closely from cover to cover then afterwards lay back in my seat exhausted and slightly traumatised.
At Georgetown airport, Guyana, my suitcase failed to appear on the baggage carousel. So did the cases of half the other passengers. The tour operator’s assurance that it was fairly normal for tourists to arrive in Guyana minus their luggage, and that it was sure to be forwarded on by the end of the week, cheered me only a little.
Guyana is roughly twice the size of Britain. The rainforest, which covers 80 per cent of the country, is one of only four pristine rainforests surviving in the world. Of Guyana’s three quarters of a million inhabitants, half a million are trying their luck in the capital Georgetown, on the coast.
Our small package tour stayed overnight in Georgetown and early the next morning we struck out for the interior. Instead of roads Guyana has rivers. First we sped up the mighty Essequibo in big, fast motor launches; then we travelled in narrower craft with more modest engines; then, ducking under creepers and fallen boughs, we paddled our own canoes. From the mighty Essequibo we transferred by light aircraft to the great Potaro river. Then we crossed over again, via jeep and cattle trail, though clouds of yellow butterflies, to the Rupununi.
Along the way, we made day and night excursions into the rainforest. The creatures we saw were invariably prodigious, as if humidity of this magnitude is incapable of producing anything but the gigantic version. We saw a saucer-sized spider sitting in a web as large as a cartwheel, and a 15ft-long boa constrictor in a tree sleeping off its lunch. We saw monster ants going about the place as if they owned it. We saw Blue Morpho butterflies, which feed almost exclusively on the fer menting juices of rotting fruit, drunkenly wobbling hither and thither on strikingly iridescent six-inch wings. We saw a family of three capybaras (rottweiler-sized rats) contemplating us gloomily from a riverbank. And we were extremely fortunate, they told us, to see a giant anteater with a baby clinging trustingly to mum’s great hairy back. As for the birds, where shall I start? You want big? They’ve got big. A Field Guide to the Two Thousand Most Preposterous Birds of South America would be the book to take.
Our destination was Karanambu, a ranch on the upper Rupununi, near the Brazilian border, home to Diane McTurk, internationally famous for her work with giant river otters. Her father, ‘Tiny’ McTurk, settled at Karanambu in 1922. Evelyn Waugh was planning to visit during his solo journey across Guyana in 1932, but Diane’s entrance into the world two days before made the McTurks put Waugh off.
Diane McTurk, still frail after accidentally driving her jeep off a bridge and into a ravine, was standing at the jetty to welcome us. I stepped out of the boat, perhaps the first person since colonial times to visit the upper Rupununi in an ‘all new wool’ Marks & Spencer travel suit, lilac shirt, red silk tie, business shoes, and with a copy of the Daily Mail tucked under his arm.
The suit had played an absolute blinder. Each night I’d hung it from the nearest forest giant, and by morning the sweat had evaporated, the creases fallen out, and the suit was raring to go again. I was stinking and unshaven, but by golly I looked smart. ‘Of course you know Mafeking’s been relieved?’ I said, presenting Diane McTurk with my frayed newspaper, and thereby parting with the last of my worldly possessions.
As I’d hoped, she was overjoyed to receive so recent an edition of the Daily Mail. After rum punches all round we hopped back in the boats and she took us to see her colony of giant river otters. A half-hour walk from the river was involved, which Diane wasn’t feeling up to, so we left her sitting in the boat avidly reading her newspaper.
We found the giant river otters, 13 of them, comically human in their suspicion of us, in a small lake picturesquely covered with giant water lilies in flower. It was a sight I don’t think I shall ever forget. When we returned reluctantly to the riverbank nearly two hours later, Diane McTurk hadn’t moved. She was still sitting in the boat, engrossed in the Daily Mail. But as we approached, she looked up from her newspaper as one who has been to the gates of hell and back. ‘Thirteen!’ she exclaimed delightedly. But you could see that the gentle optimism that so obviously sustained that remarkable woman had taken a terrible bashing while we’d been away.
Jeremy Clarke travelled with Cox & Kings, which offers an 11-night tour of Guyana taking in Georgetown, Kaieteur Falls, Rock View Lodge, Surama village, Shanklands Rainforest Resort, Iwokrama Field Station and Karanambu from £2,837pp, including flights with British Airways/ Liat, full board accommodation, transfers and all excursions. Tel: 020 7873 5000; www.coxandkings.co.uk
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