After 2 months of suffering through pilot training in Miami’s frigid winter I finally finished my type rating for the Boeing 767. I looked at my schedule and saw that I had a full week off before any more training. And the training after the type ride is important but not tested like the type ride is. Before they had the opportunity to change my schedule I decided to hop down to Guyana which is about a 4 hour flight from Miami. It’s the first time in a long time that I’m visiting a new country. I guess I just wanted to catch another Pokémon after about 1.5 years of going to Vietnam. I also wanted to visit my buddy who dropped out of Atlas Air training and went back to Guyana where his wife Claudia and kid Renaldo live.
There’s now 2 American airlines flights in and out of Guyana every night. One from Miami one from JFK. Apparently Guyana has just gotten into the oil game with some offshore drilling and a lot of companies are monopolizing on that.
I got into the airport which reminded me a bit of Belize and the country comparisons to Belize would keep coming. Immigration was giving me problems for not having an address and return ticket and after asking me a bunch of times what the hell “jumpseating” was they finally let me pass. The lady was actually super nice and walked me outside the airport where I saw my buddy Chris! It was really good to see him and he drove me back to his place where we drank a few beers, he divulged all the Guyanese gossip, and we finally went to sleep around 3am. I woke up in the morning to one of the greatest breakfasts of my life. Chris’s Guyanese wife Paula cooked a smorgasbord of food including something called “breadfruit” which I never knew existed. It literally just tastes like bread that is a tiny bit sweet, but it is a type of fruit that grows in Guyana. It’s rather delicious. I also got to meet Claudia’s kid Renaldo who’s a super sweet little dude who was hashing out some book reports while I was there. I was still exhausted from the flight down but Chris put me in his car and we explored the town of Georgetown together. A reeeeeally strange place. The streets were lined endlessly with little market stands. It felt like being in Belize but a little more neat and organized, but everyone I looked at looked like they wanted to kill me. There are some enormous old buildings in town including one that is apparently the largest wooden building in the northern hemisphere(I still have to factcheck this), which isn’t as big as I thought it would be.
Walking down the street I get a lot of people that stare at me. It feels a little unsafe walking around town but maybe that’s just because the place I checked into the guy that owns the place said one of his guests got stabbed 2 days prior on the street and another got stabbed as 2 people tried to take his motorcycle a month prior. It’s the first time on my travels that I left my phone in my room while journeying around town. Being a hardcore Google maps junkie I wasn’t sure if I would be able to find my way back. The girls in Guyana are gorgeous. Extremely voluptuous. From what I’ve noticed so far about Guyana is that there’s 2 large communities. A black community and Indian community. The black community seems to outnumber the Indian community but the Indian community seems to own more of the infrastructure. Most of the stores and restaurants are Indian owned. I keep hearing word of an upcoming election where each community is promoting their person. This is leading to a lot of tension here across the 2 communities, and I continually here rather racist comments from varying sides. Apparently each candidate is offering people money to vote for them. Money probably coated in oil.
I checked into Julian’s hotel and restaurant which provided me a tiny room which is really just a bed, a chair, and a cold shower for $25. I was happy because the other hotels were all around $100 and I’m a cheap f*ck. I booked a tour to see the Kaeitur falls the famous local waterfall but that was cancelled almost immediately after booking. It was $215 for the flight to/from and about 3 hours staying there. I consistently heard the best tour agency was Evergreen Adventures (http://www.evergreenadventuresgy.com).
After resting a bit I walked around town. The entire city was a big market I think because it was Saturday. Everywhere I went there were people rolling around big speakers slamming subwoofers.
I went back to the hotel and ran into a Swiss guy named David who had just finished a bushmaster course in the jungle where you learn how to survive for a couple weeks and then they drop you off on your own for 4 days. Apparently he was the only one from his group that made it through the 4 days without pulling the plug. He was showing me his machete and some of the rope he made while bored during the 4 days. It instantly went onto my bucket list.
We drank a bottle of rum and started talking to another guy at the bar. His name was Andrei and he said he was a guide. I’m not totally sure if he really was but he said he was. He would call me multiple times every day afterwards. We drank a bunch more rum mixed with coconut water(I heard the name coco loco?). A pretty slimy drink but goes down easy. We got drunk pretty quickly and before long Andrei convinced me, David, our bartender and another person staying at Julian’s to go to a karaoke session. We arrived and it was a very small affair. There were 2 people there celebrating their birthdays so we sang happy birthdays between terribly sung songs. I sang country roads and wagon wheel and was surprised to find that some people sang along to country roads. Drinks were about $2.50 per drink. I ran out of money real quick as I tactically only brought a tiny bit.
Eventually we left the place and jumped into a taxi. We heard some amazingly loud music and asked the taxi to drive towards it. When we got to the music we saw 1000 people walking around at 2am with construction clothes on. Apparently there was this enormous thing called “construction party” where everyone dressed up and they had a bunch of old construction vehicles littered around the dance area. When we got there everyone was already leaving but I went and stood in front of the speakers and they were unspeakable loud with slamming bass. We left and retired back to our hotel rooms. I rested before my trek into the jungle.