English binds most of the spoken languages but there is tribal language too and Makushi was the unintelligible dialect of the Rupununi but in and around Georgetown, the lilt of the Caribbean is in the markets, the wayside shops and the bus tops. Elsewhere, in the wild countryside, the conversation was often in Talkie-Talkie. To hurry up is mekie hesie, a boat is boto, tomorrow tamarra, enough is onofo and when everything goes wrong it’s alasoni fuk-up. I was not here long enough to discover more of its idioms and sounds but the nationalities that have passed through so far – English, Dutch, French and of course the African slaves – must all have contributed. Now, the Indians, the Chinese, and educated Amerindians may add their influence.
Reports of the shoot-out at Melinda’s Beauty Spot were carried on national radio into my taxi from the airport. Four policemen and the parlour receptionist were dead and another four were on their way to hospital and all this next door to my hotel. I spurred the driver on. Roads were blocked, crowds were gathering and blue lights were flashing including those of an unwanted fire engine. Holding up my Press Pass and my long lens, I surged through the crowd. “London press! London press!” I cried. “BBC, let him through. Go man!” the crowd yelled encouragingly. This was terrific. I climbed a barrier, jumped a storm drain and took multiple pictures of bullet holes, armed police and assorted senior officers in crisply creased beige uniforms and polished shoes. The police presence included a number of disreputable looking fellows who seemed to be a mixture of the Con-golese Lord’s Resistance Army and the Tonton Macoutes of Papa Doc. Dressed in T-shirts and shorts they strode around with revolvers in their waistbands. Since it then turned out that the gunman was still in the building, my enthusiasm for on-the-spot reportage took a more cautious turn. I crouched behind a battered pick-up that itself might have survived a previous shoot-out, with a nervous cameraman sporting several plastic identities round his neck. I suggested to him that his job was to be out in front photographing the blood and bullets. “Hey, man! Are you crazy?” he shouted. “I don’t wanna get shot. I’ll wait ‘till they get the bastard.” When one of the track-suited Macoutes dropped a revolver the crowd yelled enthusiastic abuse. Even in the pursuit of a deranged and dangerous gunman and with four of their colleagues dead, the corrupt police were still jeered.
On the trip to Kaieteur Falls obesity followed me again. My seat neighbour was another overflowing passenger but this time in three shades of pink and ringlets like a cascade of candyfloss. She reminded me of Victoria Woods’ Winnie, ‘Like barracks in a pinny’. Additional shades from her raspberry palette were added in nails, lips and shoes. On the pre boarding scales, she checked in at 130 kgs (290 lbs) (I was 90 kgs (210 lbs), including a hefty camera). When I complimented Miss Piggy for brightening the day, her laugh showed that she had no teeth. In contrast, there was a pale and willowy English girl from Manchester amorously entwined around a Rastafarian as shiny black as she was chalky white and there was a German from Manheim who spoke only of the immigrants who were robbing his country of jobs. The willowy Mancunian told me that her father was a Methodist minister in Guyana and I asked if he ever felt the pressure of gathering into his own exclusive flock different souls that worshipped the same god. This is a country where evangelical diversity is rife and the telephone yellow pages in my hotel had listed 26 different Christian denominations. “Oh no,” she replied loyally, “He is grateful for any that knock on his door.” Her own part in this work seemed limited to procreation as the chinkies got down to some serious smooching. The falls themselves were impressive-twice the height of Victoria Falls and five times the height of the Niagara Falls. They were scary too; the vertical cliffs on either side of the approach to the falls had no protection and a too enthusiastic look over the edge would have been fatal. I stood at the lip of jasper stone as every second, an Olympic swimming pool was tipped over to cascade 30 stories before fluttering away into the abyss of the Potaro River where the water recovered its poise and benignly sauntered on its way.
Sir Walter Raleigh, Melville, a thousand hopeful colonisers, and those with whom I stayed loved this country with its undoubted wild beauty and extraordinary diversity but the past provided the prospects for the future. The failed sugarcane, rice and pineapple industries; the Dutch, French and English who came, never conquered and left. In the South Rupununi, the Dadanawa Ranch is one million acres (404,000 hectares) – twice the size of Suffolk – and has been another failure, at least on the grand scale originally envisaged. The plan to fly out frozen carcasses proved far too expensive; now the planes fly out the quick but not the dead. The ranch also used to lose 400 cattle a year to jaguars, which were shot as pests. The Guyanese diaspora have a distinguished record in many fields but they found nothing to stay at home for. In the end, the countless schemes and colonial ambitions foundered, defeated by the heat and humidity, the people’s indolence and the onslaught of the rainforest.
¤¤¤
I stole away to Tobago and the little village of Speyside on the island’s eastern tip, where the water spread itself over the sand like liquid lapis lazuli. In the gloaming, I walked down a rainforest track whose leafy borders sparkled with fireflies to celebrate my arrival with a lobster at Betty’s Tree House but was deflected on the way by a group of youths who sat on a log and were also in celebratory mood. The dress code for this band of ruffians was dreadlocks, plaits, great bundles of hair stuffed inside a woollen cap and T-shirts emblazoned with blood-dripping daggers under some unintelligible gothic text.
“Hey, man! Dat’s a real spicy outfit you’d be wearing. Comes and say hello.”
In my red check shirt, I put one foot forward.
“Is this a party?” My Oxford accent was poorly disguised.
“OK, man! Always is a party. You drink rum?”
He offered a bottle labelled El Dorado, the best rum of the Caribbean but I doubted its authenticity. “Actually, I would rather not,” cautioned my brain, common sense and prim reserve. To my surprise I heard myself saying, “Of course, what else is there to drink?”
“Spot on man. Comes and loosen up, we’re all God’s chillun.”
A draught of bitter but strangely sweet alcohol found itself warming my throat. Toothy, white grins split tangled beards. Back at my posh lodgings the bar would be crackling with, “Chin-chin. Such a lovely sunset don’t you think?” When Rastas Number Two offered a third slug, I slunk away from this thieves’ kitchen for another that would be more hygienic. Never has lobster tasted better.
Continuing north to Panama, I wandered the crowded canyons of the airport for an hour as I searched for a sign to Immigration or someone to ask. The Panamanian customs’ declaration form was inquisitive about money. Under Procedencia del Dinero, translated as Procedence of Money, there was a requirement to declare its origins – Negocios/Familiar/Personal/Juegos de Azar (Business/Relations/Personal/Games of Chance). A tick in this last box needed Especifique – an Explanation. At the centre of Central America and midway between the north and south Americas, it is at the hub of a vigorous and restless commercial wheel but also the distribution point for the drugs going from south to north. My driver, Mario, had skin as dry and wrinkled as a date discarded from a previous Christmas and was intent on ensuring that not a single fact or feature escaped me. While we cruised around, I asked Mario if there were guns and drugs. He gave an indifferent shrug as if to indicate that vices were an inevitable by-product of progress. Another question that enquired if the police were corrupt produced a similar shrug; but there were plenty of them – police that is:
Presidential Police in blue and red
Traffic Police in grey
Special Police in camouflage
and just Police in black.
All wore bullet proof vests and carried revolvers in open holsters.
The heavily accented torrent of information was regularly interrupted by one of his two mobile phones. One of them had a ring tone of the Honduras National Anthem (he just liked the tune) and was at such a volume
that it might have been played by a band on the back seat. There were new car showrooms at every junction and huge sixteen-wheeled trucks jammed the main roads. Tower cranes reached to the sky as did the office buildings they had constructed. Panama City had symbols in height and architectural exuberance to rival Miami. My depressing couple of days in Georgetown and another couple in Trinidad had prepared me for indolent inhabitants that lived in lackadaisical torpor, but here was the turmoil that came from a frenzy of activity where the people were building, making, selling and learning.
This small country of only three million people runs on money, lots of it and in spite of the requirement to provide en Especifique, it does not much care where the money comes from. It was not until I got to the Panama Canal that I saw the source of most of this money – an astonishing two billion dollars per year. Here was a treasure chest that was growing in size year by year, not just physically but practically guaranteed and Panama had the only key. The Canal itself is immense. It is impossible to see each end at the same time and, in any case, there is a huge manmade lake in the middle, but it seemed appropriate that when I was at the Miraflores locks, the enormous tanker that was inching its way through pulled by little electric engines either side was named Ocean Colossus. On each side within the lock, there was no more than 12 inches (30cms) between steel plate and stone walls but this monster left without a single scrape. Ships that are able to squeeze through the locks are known as Panamax vessels but this epithet of ‘max’ might well be more realistically changed to ‘min’. Its owners would have paid $250,000 for the shortcut.
Panama City was occupied by one and a half million souls of all shades, unemployment was a paltry 3 percent, car ownership was an amazing 90 percent, politics were largely democratic and unsurprisingly, President Domingo expected to be re-elected the following year. The Americans left a useful legacy when they abandoned the day-to-day running of the Canal. Apart from the currency of American dollars, they left behind a city-sized military establishment with all its attendant facilities of barracks, offices and workshops including a vast airfield and acres of tarmac and all in good working order. There was also, Mario whispered, a small mountain said to contain seven floors, excavated internally from solid rock. This is a green country of tropical rainforests and although in Panama City, glittering buildings punched the sky downtown, uptown and around town, the Parque Metropolitan was untouched forest. Its edges had been encroached a little by universities, the biggest of which was The University of Central America – The City of Knowledge.
The blue and red police were on every corner around a presidential palace that had clearly been expanded with every incumbent and now took in an adjacent block or two. My cursory ride through the adjoining streets of the old city showed up the charm of old Spanish buildings that were being extensively restored. The Plaza Mayor, like all Spanish colonial towns, had a church on one of its sides; in this case, it was the cathedral with a spectacularly elaborate chiaroscuro altar screen.
On the airplane to Havana, a party of Cubans was jubilant. They joked and laughed to the point of hysterics and one got up and danced in the aisle as others beat out a rhythm on their bags and parcels. They were celebrating a successful shopping trip in Panama; had they come from Guyana, they might have been celebrating a successful escape.
Postcard Home
They say the Guyanas will drive you bananas
But as humming birds hum, I’m near to nirvanas
As I watch them collect a selector of nectar.
Nature’s full throttle on this Mosquito Coast
(But the day starts at boiling and continues to roast!)
There are jaguars, ocelots, otters and tapirs
And waterfalls higher than many skyscrapers.
Next on this ramble is calypsoed Tobago.
Hey, amigo! Let’s tango and stomp the fandango!
Then up the canal that splits Panama
And Bacardi and rum in old Havana.
Published by Clink Street Publishing 2015
Copyright © James Chilton 2015
Second edition.
The author asserts the moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior consent of the author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
ISBN: 978-1-909477-51-3
Ebook: 978-1-909477-52-0
The Last Blue Mountain Page 39
