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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
We pass coconut and papaya trees ripe with fruit, grind through ruts deep enough to swallow a couple of Honda Civics and watch as tegus -- 2-foot-long carnivorous lizards -- scuttle across our path. Three boys with vine-woven reels and stick poles fish in a ravine. A barefoot man with a machete saunters by on horseback. There is no other traffic. Then we enter the rain forest, bucking and heaving through troughs of mud. The low scrub turns into towering jungle walls studded with red and yellow heliconia. "Adventure travel is going through the jungle in a vehicle without brakes," says Colin, always cheerful.
Surama is in a clearing just ahead, a modest collection of thatch and wood homes, banana and cassava plants, dark red chickens and domestic peccaries roaming free. Two larger buildings are set aside as the school ("Be Regular Punctual" written on the side) and the clinic. Barefoot Mikushi children surround us, laughing and smiling. Everyone is in Western dress, but otherwise the scene might be lifted out of another century. We pile out and walk with them to a behab, a sort of open roundhouse, which serves as the village meeting center. It has started raining. "If the rain is coming from the south, from the Amazon, it will be heavy," says Colin.
An official ceremony has been planned. Kamesh, the schoolmaster, introduces the children, who welcome me with two songs that they sing first in English and then in Mikushi ("Surama sitting in a valley/Surama you make me so happy/Brown-skinned people everywhere/Friendliness is there"). They are holding hands and swaying, their voices ineffably sweet and winsome.
All of nature seems to offer utility, myth or solace for the Mikushi. For instance, the Mutu (the blue-capped tanager) is burned and its ashes rubbed on the skin to relieve a sprain; the Korokoro (the green ibis) is seen as a barometer of rains; if you mock the Arawo (the long-tailed potoo) by imitating its cry, your hammock strings will burst. Some 30 species of ants are used, alternately, to make the bones of babies strong, to cause pari kari (an alcoholic cassava drink) to ferment, to roust a lazy man to work.
The elected village "captain," Sydney Allicott -- brother-in-law of Colin -- stands for his official greeting. Outsiders are welcome here, says Sydney, choosing his words slowly and deliberately. "It is another means of educating our people to the situation in other countries -- sometimes you tend to believe the whole world is like this." And then, as if to shatter any shards of ethnocentricity I might have remaining: "Sometimes, visitors bring photographs and you see the concrete jungles and understand what can happen to a place when the people forget what is important."
I ask Sydney what the kids do to amuse themselves, here in this non-Nintendo world. "They play ... games. The fruit game -- one child will be the fruit, maybe a soursop, and he ripens. When he ripens, his voice changes and everyone runs and hides. If you are found, then you must be the fruit."
With that, we're off into the rain, which is now falling in thick sheets. Sydney, his brother Lionel and Kamesh squeeze into the Land Rover with us and the day suddenly seems more festive as we head deeper into the forest, the soggy trail gradually leading us down inside a dark corridor of jungle. "In the rainy season, this trail would be underwater," says Colin. Soon, a narrow stretch of brown water appears. It is Taramu Creek and it will lead us to the Burro Burro. On the bank is a long wooden boat with a motor. We pull the boat into the creek, climb aboard and head upstream.
Almost immediately, a long silvery fish that looks like a small barracuda jumps into the boat. "Fox fish," says Sydney, admiring its sharp teeth. Later, a silver dollar -- an aquarium fish back in America -- follows suit, rocketing into my wet shirt and flopping about in the few inches of water in the hull. "Piru [piranha] in the river too," says Sydney. "Maybe we will catch one."
In addition to a cooler full of curry-flavored noodles and cassava, Colin has packed wild limes, a bottle of El Dorado rum and a mahogany-colored bow with three arrows, each tipped with a slightly different, razor-sharp metal edge. "One is for fish, one is for birds and the other ... for anything larger," explains Colin, pouring himself a healthy dose of rum. If Guyana has itself been creolized -- created from a racial and cultural stew -- this Brit expat has been as thoroughly transformed as anyone. Peppering his conversation with Portuguese and Mikushi, he sits barefoot, one arm around Velda, rain soaked and happy here at the edge of the Lost World, adrift somewhere between "Swiss Family Robinson" and "Lord Jim."
Upriver on the Burro Burro we go for nearly two hours, in and out of the Cashew Rains, past keel-billed toucans and macaws, tapir wallows and a tall ceiba tree with the hollow of a harpy eagle. A flock of green parakeets passes overhead and gigantic kingfishers dive and squawk. We have passed effortlessly through one set of rapids, but another array is just ahead, churning and spitting angrily. Instead of trying to run them, we wedge in between a slew of giant black boulders. By now, we are as ragged as wet dogs. And then, the glorious tropical sun returns and all is again right with the world. I climb from the boat onto a rock the size of a small house, welcoming the chance to stretch my legs. Upstream, through the narrow foliage corridor, the Akaiwanna Mountains materialize from the steamy mist. Howler monkeys bellow off in the distance. "Keep your eye out for a jaguar," says Colin.
