The pace of life, the greater openness of people and the delight in simple pleasures gave me a hint of the country living that some Guyanese Georgetown residents speak fondly of when reminiscing of childhood days:- playing out at night under a full moon; dancing in the torrential rain; bathing naked in the canals and creeks: all beyond the experiences of this urban creature.
In the words of the worn out "Strictly Come Dancing" cliché- its the journey that counts.
The journey- while not the highlight- had its interests.
A`shared taxi, safer and only slightly dearer than the regular mini- bus service- was the chosen mode for travel. Limits on passenger numbers apply to paying adults only. My return journey reminded me of family days out in the 1960's, with two nursing mothers and their babies, one father and a toddler crammed into the back of an average saloon vehicle. I obeyed the driver's instruction and sat in the front seat.
While in town taxi drivers are chatty, but once on the main highway, the serious business of driving at over 100kph along the two lane road takes over. Bob Marley was the entertainment on the CD system on Friday and as the man sitting to my left was a grade A student of Mr Marley's lyrics, I enjoyed trio-phonic listening for the duration of the journey.
In addition to anticipating Police radar traps, the driver would slow down for:- the occasional animal on the road- lumbering cows, trotting goats, lean dogs and puzzled hens; farm tractors and horse drawn carts; minibuses collecting and dropping off passengers and squads of brightly uniformed school children.
Villages string along the road in quick succession, their names revealing Guyana's past. Good Hope and Success suggest settlements of newly emancipated slaves or indentured labourers. Places like Onverwagt were originally Dutch, Essex, Buxton and Bath were English, Strathspey was Scottish and Non Pareil (which I continue to mistranslate as "without umbrella"), French. I cannot account for Bachelors Adventure or Lovely Lass.
Adjacent to the bridge over a small river is the rusting skeleton of an old railway bridge, one of the few remainders of the small railway network abandoned, scrapped and sold off in the 1970s.
The surrounding countryside is not intensively cultivated, but there are plantations of coconuts and sugar cane and rice fields. Near a rice processing factory were burning mountains of spent rice husks, and workers raking the wet processed rice on the roadside to dry, before shovelling it into bags.
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