April 10, 2009: Final thoughts

The trip home was mostly uneventful. My experience with the Georgetown airport was not a good one. There are many, many layers of security checks. Apparently Guyana is the #1 exporter of cocaine to Europe. I (with a couple dozen others) was selected to have my check on hand searched. We had to wait in a line because for some reason we had to be present for the check. The guy told me that it was the large books that he had to look at. Apparently in X-RAY, City of God looks like it could command a small fortune on the streets of Amsterdam.

I got into NY at 10:30 pm and stayed at an airport hotel (for the government rate). It was midnight before I got to bed and my wakeup call was at 4:30 for a 5:00 shuttle. 4.5 hours in a NY airport hotel cost more than 4 nights at the Grand Costal in Guyana. I contemplated just crashing in the terminal, but I wanted to be as rested as possible for my family this weekend, and I did end up sleeping soundly for the 4.5 hours.

On the final leg (the 1.5 hour Salt Lake City to Sacramento flight) I got upgraded. This seems almost comical, but isn’t a bad way to end the trip, and I got extremely lucky for booking so late…In 6 flights I didn’t have a single middle seat.

So I have a few random pictures and a list of random thoughts I wanted to expand upon to wrap things up:

The other engineer (who is Korean and grew up in Asia) remarked how surprised he was to se almost no one smoking during our entire time in Guyana. He was right. My experience with Asia, Africa and even Europe is that smoking is more common than not. I did not see a single person smoke and, in the abundant trash, cigarette butts were conspicuously absent.

I was generally quiet during the meals. There were up to ten of us, and half were very extroverted and knew each other. They also came from a military culture that was pretty foreign to me. One of them didn’t even know that you could get a Federal job without being military first. But on the field trip I told a story that became a recurring joke and I was asked to retell like a party trick. I mentioned how I didn’t think I would ever buy a Kindle (Amazon’s digital book technology). I just liked books too much. I like how the look and feel and, especially smell. One of my favorite things is to get a book out of the library and discover that in the last 40 years it has only been checked out 3 times[1]. The musty smell of a book like that is the aroma of rarified knowledge…the scent of an intellectual frontier…a sensory affirmation of mastering a topic. I was just telling a story…but to them it was a comedy routine. I might as well have been Mitch Hedberg.

This was the most military thing I have done in my career of receiving paychecks from the DOD (something I have always been just a little uncomfortable with). I was comforted by the idea that there was no possible way we could have a military interest in Guyana and that, even though I wasn’t working for USAID (like the other trips), it was as if I was. Well after many drinks one evening, the group started talking about why Guyana is actually a hugely strategic ally. Turns out there is a really important military reason we are cultivating an alliance with Guyana. You know what…I’m ok with that. Whether or not you agree with our strategic maneuvering, I am doing helpful work for a people who need it with military funds…I call stuff like this ‘riding with the Pirates.’ One of my favorite figures in Church History was Francis Xavier.[2] Xavier traveled the Portuguese empire with reckless abandon. Sometimes, to get where he felt God wanted him, he would hitch a ride with Pirates…actual Pirates. So, whenever I forge pragmatic alliances that I feel mildly uncomfortable with (though I mostly support our military alliance with Guyana) Amanda and I have come to call it ‘riding with the Pirates.’

I had cheesecake every night while in Guyana…Most of the time with cinnamon chocolate pudding. It was fantastic.

Horse pulled trailers were pretty common in Guyana. One of the Guyanese engineers pointed at one and said ‘this is our version of green vehicles.’ Jokes were made about methane emissions and horse power limitations…but he has a point. Hybrid SUV’s are placebos for the yuppie conscience.

The last evening our dinner conversation revolved around hiring a lawyer, ceasing mortgage payments, and leveraging military credibility to renegotiate mortgage principal with your lender (not only for a primary residence but also for rental property). One of my co-workers had done this and at least 5 others were very interested – including 3 rental properties. I was uncomfortable with the whole conversation. Federal bailout funds are making up the difference. Which means that Charis will be paying these mortgages. I understand we have to keep things from collapsing (I think I understand, actually, I have very little idea what is going on despite doing a lot of work to understand it) but it seems that it is not just AIG that is privatizing profits and socializing costs.[3] This disincentives the last shred of fiscal restraint our culture has. I think, even Nic could admit that this is evidence that I still have at least one conservative impulse left.

The hotel played music from the 80’s and 90’s every night loud enough that I could hear it in my room. I wish that we could all just agree to put the vast majority of what was on the radio while I was growing up in a soundproof box somewhere in Nevada. Its really really horrible stuff.

I overheard one of my co-workers describe his recent conversion to Christianity to another one. The story listener asked ‘so would you consider yourself ‘born again?’’ The story teller, obviously unfamiliar with the terminology, replied ‘no it was the first time.’ This made me smile.

The story listener was a really interesting guy. He has a Masters Degree in Literary Criticism[4]. He said that when he was getting it he took a lot of slack for acquiring a ‘useless degree.’ But when he got his first espionage job he knew I had been a good choice. He said that critical, investigative reading (often for subtext) formed the vast majority of his job as an intelligence officer. He recommends studying literature as perfect training for military intelligence.

Ok, with that, I’ll wrap things up. I’ll revive this blog if I go back in July. Otherwise, thanks for joining me to the country that sounds like it should be in Africa but isn’t. It is an honor that you took time to read this little journal.

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[1] This was back when they used to stamp the due date on the inside flap. Computers have almost entirely augmented the library experience…except for this idiosyncratic hobby of mine.
[2] We struggled wildly to come up with girl names, but we have had a boy name for years. If we had had a boy, his name would have been Xavier.
[3] Heads I win, Tails you loose…as this phenomenon has recently been called.
[4] He was also recently divorced and spoke better of his ex-wife than most guys speak of their actual wives.

April 9, 2009: The Zoo

The zoo is a small part of a larger park. So when I got to the zoo with 30 minutes left before it opened, there was plenty to take in. Like most ‘developing world’[1] countries, garbage removal is not a high priority or a strong cultural value.[2] I remember when I was in Nepal, we took the children from the orphanage I was at to the park for Easter. The ‘park’ may not have had houses or open sewers, but it was overrun with trash. Not this park. This park was huge, beautiful and clean. It was also almost empty. My favorite part was this bridge which almost seems like a mean prank for drunk people[3]:

But it did provide a good vantage point for the trees which were teeming with local birds.

I made my way to a very nice bridge, island, moat system surrounding the zoo but as I crossed the final, precarious seeming bridge, something enormous, slippery and grey thing surfaced right next to me. I never saw a face or flipper, but it surfaced right next to me several times. I later learned that this is where they kept the manitees and that was the last I would see of it.

So, I love zoos. When I get to travel to a new city I will try to do the following things (in the stated order):

1. Climb a nearby mountain
2. Go to a baseball game
3. Go to the Natural History Museum
4. See something the city is famous for
5. Go to the Zoo

Madison, WI had a free zoo. My first semester there I was single[4] and working really hard. I started a Masters program in Engineering without an engineering degree and, as with almost every stage of my education, I felt like I was just treading water until I was exposed as a fraud and unceremoniously kicked out. I was taking the Engineering pre-recs (for which I didn’t have pre-recs[5], so I was actually had to learn twice as much material as the coursework). Anyway, all of this is to say, I used to go to the zoo to study. I mostly liked being around families having fun but taking study breaks to watch the lemurs is remarkably rejuvenating. I understand the ethical objection to zoos, and I think care should be taken to build them well, but I like them.

So Georgetown’s zoo was modest, but it was the best possible kind. When it comes to both Natural History Museums and zoos, local is better than spectacular. One of my favorite natural history museums of all time is actually Cleveland’s. In addition to an exhibit that featured a song devoted to each geologic strata[6] Cleveland had a smallish fossil collection (which is why I go to Natural History Museums). But instead of collecting as many dinosaurs as possible from Wyoming, the Gobi and Secatachawan[7], all of their fossils were from Ohio. Much of my mental map of the Devonian comes from that exhibit.

Anyway, all that is to say, though modest, the Georgetown zoo was very good. It was composed entirely of animals that lived in Guyana.[8] I grew up obsessed with animals.[9] It is actually a little surprising that it has taken me this long to consider a biology degree.[10] But it seems that the non-North-American animals were blurred in a haze of exoticness. I remember being shocked to learn, at a relatively advanced age, that there were no tigers in Africa. So to experience animals in conjunction with their general local (if not their actual habitat) really accentuates the experience pedagogically and recreationally. The jungles of Africa and South America actually have really fascinating similarities and differences.

So, the zoo started with birds and lots of them. Colorful parrots, oddly proportioned toucans, ominous vultures and austere eagles.

Then came the smaller mammals. I really liked this guy…The Mustelidae

Then, finally, the main event. The big mammals:

I have always liked tapirs (here they call them cows, even thought domestic cows have their run of the streets). But whenever I think of them I think of a hilarious moment in Gibson family oral history[11]. We were visiting Washigton DC (or maybe it was Toronto) and were at the end of a very fun day at the zoo. But I had never seen a Tapir and we had missed it, so we backtracked and found an enclosure that the Tapir shared with a Rhino. I was entranced with the Tapir, but Nic pointed at the Rhino and asked, loudly, ‘what is that big thing hanging from the Rhino?’[12]

I usually really like monkeys, but these monkeys actually creaped me out.

The most famous Gyanese mammal is the ‘giant otter’ which is about half the size of a Sea Otter but was still playful and extremely fun.

Finally, after the otter were the jaguars (one of eight different kind of cats they had labled – of which I only saw 4). They are impressive, but the best moment is the interest they seemed to take in their neighbor the otter.

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[1] In undergrad I tried to do an unofficial minor in the ‘developing world.’ I took Third World Sociology, Geography of the Developing World, Music of the World’s People and History of the Non-Western World. The latter made me self conscious of all the possible ways to refer to the 2/3rds of the world that do not have the material prosperity of US/Canada/Europe/East and North Asia. (Note, I find this so difficult, that that previous sentence of this footnote took me 5 minutes to write – and I still don’t like it.) He went through all of the ways and found them each ethnocentric and imperialistic, deciding non-western was the least offensive, and, therefore, adopting it for his class. This knowledge has left me linguistically paralyzed and requires a paragraph apology for the use of ‘developing.’
[2] This is actually a huge problem in flooding because the floodwater isn’t just physically dangerous, but becomes chemically and biologically dangerous as well.
[3] Alaska politics also comes to mind.
[4] Amanda was student teaching in Texas, we got married the following December and moved back together.
[5] I have always believed that pre-recs are overrated. For being so academically insecure, I sure was cocky.
[6] Each strata actually got its own genre too, so the Silurian was hip hop, the Devonian was country and another was Opera. I remember fantastic pieces like “I’ve been wishin, that I was fishin, in an Ordovician sea.” And the Operatic “O, Trilobite.”
[7] There is a temptation to simply collect the most dramatic specimines regardless of origin in each museum. This ends up with all fossil collections looking more or less the same, however, like a sprawling tract of suburban chains that is indistinguishable in Virginia, Nebraska or California. There is no sense of place or pride of specificity.
[8] There was one pen labeled ‘African Lion’ but it was empty.
[9] When we had friends over and we would go through the strange socialization experiment of reaching a consensus of sixth graders regarding their next activity…my suggestion was usually, I kid you not, write animal reports (which I regularly did for fun and was never selected by a jury of my peers).
[10] I will be applying to UCD’s Masters Program in Restoration Ecology for 2011.
[11] I call it an oral history because, before Dad died, this story got told often. Well the oral history is now text, and I assure you, higher criticism is unnecessary. This story gets the 'highly probable' ink.
[12] In his defense, I remember thinking that the Rhino’s ‘package’ was unnecessarily enormous to the point of impracticality. But I’m sure the Rhymenoseris would disagree.

April 9, 2009: Georgetown

I slept through the night, but the 7:00 alarm hit me pretty hard. Still, I dragged my sorry butt out of bed for a little adventure before my flight home. I got a fruit plate for breakfast which was just about right. It was cool and raining. It would rain for about three minutes and then stop for about three minutes, and then repeat. I was tempted to just get a book and read while I watched it rain. But I overcame the pleasant inertial and called a cab. Our hotel is very nice, but it is about 10 miles from town, so it really isn’t reasonable walking distance. I remembered from the website that the zoo opened at 7:30 (which struck me as pretty early, but really convenient for wanting to get an outing in before my flight). I didn’t recheck it. So when we arrived (around 8:00), they told us that the zoo didn’t open until 9:30. I was bummed, but it turned out to be a positive development. I asked the cab driver to take me across town to the market. My plan was to walk across town, hit the major ‘attractions’ and make it back to the zoo around opening time.

On the way I saw the statue to commemorate independence (in the ‘60’s, but my friends here really look at the early ‘90’s as their actual independence since that is the first time they feel like they had free and fair elections).

So I started at the market, on the west side of town, bordering the major river (the Essequibo). The land mark here is the big wooden 4 faced clock.

Outside vendors sold mostly fruits and vegetables…shops sold shoes and cloths inside.

The next stop was the old Dutch Courthouse.

And then the ‘Gothic Cathedral’ made entirely of wood. The guide claimed that it was the tallest structure made entirely of wood[1] but I find that pretty hard to believe.

I also ran into these guys. Notice the bird on the left head.

Then I started the couple mile walk across Georgetown. I stayed on Church Street, a wide road with a greenway in between the lanes of traffic. I noticed that this was a pretty common feature of Guyanese urban planning. Many of the main streets had greenways in the middle. I am a big fan of this. It is relatively common on the more attractive streets of rust belt cities. It seems like it improves things aesthetically 400%. Sometimes the greenway was a drainage ditch, for a while it was a tended arboretum,

for a couple of blocks it was a market

and then it was a park.

It stayed nicely overcast (I had some minor sun burns from the previous day) and didn’t rain, but my shirt was still completely soaked by the time I reached the zoo…the humidity is unreal. The weather was so much more pleasant in Nairobi, despite the nearly identical latitude.

Once again, I was the only white person I saw the whole time, but I did not feel like I was attracting attention. No one seemed to notice. Even the kids would look up, just for a moment, and then proceed with whatever they were doing. I literally walked all the way across time and only had one encounter where a guy asked me for money. No one else seemed to notice. It is hard for me to express how refreshing this was. I’ll cover the zoo in the next post.

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[1] The brosures also say that their main natural attraction, Kaieteur Falls, is the largest single drop waterfall in the world, while the ‘official waterfall registry’ argues that its claim is much more nuanced than that.

April 8, 2009: Site Visit

I went to the gym and lifted after dinner. I was hoping to run, but I’m afraid I have become a treadmill snob…so I settled for lifting with the very good free weight selection. I was very responsible and went to bed at 10…but I didn’t fall asleep until 2. My body is still a little confused from the minor time zone change (3 hrs) and the early morning arrival a couple days ago. I got up for a while and read about Polycarp[1] to put me to sleep. ‘Sadly’ it was really engaging, and didn’t really do the trick. I should have gone with City of God.

We convened at 8:00 to visit the flooding sites. This turned out to be far cooler than I anticipated. We drove about half an hour to a dock, where a large flat boat waited to take us all upstream.

We spent about two hours covering the hydraulic study reach, stopping at data collection points in various states of repair. My favorite one was the first rain gage we stopped at. To get rainfall information, the local meteorology department simply puts a gage in someone’s front lawn and pays them about $13 a month to take daily measurements. The meteorology representative took the gage apart for us to show us how it worked. To our great delight, a certain kind of commercially available bottle works perfectly the dissection of the rain gage and not after hours festivities.

This is a small river by Guyana standards. Many larger rivers snake upland from the mountains splitting the coast, but the Mahaicony has an inordinate amount of rice production adjacent, so minor flood stages do substantial economic and residential destruction. In addition, flood waters introduce duck weed into the rice paddies which reproduces rapidly and displaces the rice. You can see how far the latest flood waters raised by the water damage left on this fence. Since the land is so flat, that sort of flood stage corresponds to millions of dollars of damage.

Apparently, even this close to the coast (at the most we were only 15 miles inland) there are very few roads. People get to work, transport rice and go to school using long row boats. The river is the main conduit of human transportation. More than once, we saw very small children paddling boats many times longer than they were tall. Also, many of the houses along the river were built on stilts. This strikes me as a far better solution than levees. Levees create the illusion of security, but when things go poorly, they go catastrophically. By allowing the river to periodically flood, no one forgets what it can do.

Here are some more pictures of the site visit:

From the dock

The water is supposed to leave the city through this outlet at high tide. But because it is blocked with Amazon mud, the water cannot get out quickly. It is a big problem. But I also just like the picture.

So, apparently the water is full of piranhas. And apparently, this isn't one of them. Let me get this straight...there are scarier fish in the water than this. Actually, the Guyanese found our mythical piranha lore to be quaint. They say that from time to time you meet someone missing part of a toe or finger, but they all swam in these waters as kids without incident. One of them did say that a common childhood tradition was to throw some sort of carcass into the water and see how long it would take the piranhas to strip it. Good times.

A father a daughter and some rice.

I really liked this tree.

This is me 'georeferencing.' When we passed a town on the map, I pointed to it and took a picture, associating a photo time with our location. Therefore, I could place the rest of the pictures by assuming a uniform velocity and interpolating. Yes, i know there are cameras that do this automatically. But, my way is still very clever and 100% nerdy.

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[1] For some reason, whenever I hear his name, I think of a dude composed of many, many bottom feeding fish…like the worst super hero ever. But he was a pretty cool guy and a central figure in the Apostolic age. In a time period with only like 15 documents, there is a letter to him, a letter by him and an account of his death (the first of a genre of early martyrdom accounts).

April 7, 2009

Let’s start with a couple more Guyana Fun Facts:
-About twice the size of Mississippi with about a third of the population
-75% of the population lives on the coast
-70% of the economy is generated on the coast
-Brazil produces 40% of the world’s sugar
-Bauxite (aluminum ore – I guessed on my first try – my geological education finally paying off) and gold are mined here. According to prevailing plate tectonic theory, it is the same gold deposit as is mined in Canada.

Today began the meetings. There were about ten Americans and about as many Guyanese. For most of the morning the Americans laid out the schedule and goals of the ‘experiment’[1]. The basic idea is that will use a numerical flood model that I build for them, to help manage a simulated flooding disaster, to help them prepare for the next actual disaster.

The most interesting part of the morning was when the Guyanese presented their flooding problem. Apparently 2005 was their ‘Katrina.’ Their system can handle 2” of rain per day. In 2005 they got 36” in six hours. 34 people died and 275000 people were impacted. Until Katrina, flooding deaths in the US were relatively rare. I remember my first project ever, a tiny flood insurance study through Attica, NY, was precipitated by the 1996 flood of record where someone died trying to rescue cats from a vet basement. It changes things. Locals talk about the event differently. The river takes on a much more ominous specter. Anyway, flooding has actually been pretty bad each year since. Now I’m a scientist. I know the difference between anecdotal and systematic evidence. But that is pretty compelling anecdotal evidence for climate change.

Just before lunch, I presented our software that I will build their model out of. It was before lunch and we were all tired, but many of the Guyanese sat up and started taking notes. After my 15 minute presentation, the Guyanese representatives made a case to bring me (or my co-workers) back to teach a class. To my surprise, the guy with the money agreed pretty quickly. There are a couple other guys from my office who would like to come (and, are ahead of me in program seniority), so we’ll see, but I may get to float the river yet. Speaking of floating the river, I found this blurb to describe Guyana’s tourist scene:

“Virtually untouched by tourism, Guyana is the only country in South America where English is the first language and cricket the national sport. Dubbed South America’s "Final Frontier", it is one of the least visited corners of the planet.”

MmmHmm. I think that sums it up. Since so few people come here, you need to make plans way in advance. I got a phone call 2 weeks ago…and my wife actually signed me up[2] (I was backpacking with college students). But, at lunch, some of the guys gave me tips on who to go with and said I could e-mail them for advice if I returned.

Speaking of lunch, I think it was my favorite part of the day. Most of the Americans sat inside in the air conditioning and most of the Guyanese sat outside (they found the AC uncomfortable). So I sweat it out (literally) and sat with three local guys. We talked about the project for a while. They were all, obviously, very smart. And then they started fielding my general Guyana questions. Here are some of the things I learned.

1. The population is split primarily between those of south Asian descent (hence the Indian influence) and those of sub-Saharan African descent. The latter were brought as slaves to work the sugar plantations. After slavery was outlawed, the South Asians and a few Chinese came in as Indentured servants (“they essentially just changed the name” said one of my new Guyanese acquaintances). Less than 8% are what they call Amero-Indians – or persons of indigenous descent, including two nomadic tribes.

2. Apparently politics splits down ethnic lines…but it is getting more complex with the rise of mixed-ethnicity marriages and children. The ‘other’ category is now the swing vote. Of my three highly successful lunch companions, two had significant Chinese heritage and one was a quarter or half white.

3. One of the guys worked for three months in DC doing biodiversity mapping for the Smithsonian. (Unsurprisingly, he turned out to be my most valuable technical point of contact).

4. There are an equal number of Guyanese living in the US today as currently live in Guyana.

After lunch we went to the local office. After a tour I sat down with the two technical guys and hammered out the issue of scant data. They wanted me to build two models: a hard one and a really hard one. In the end I managed to get everyone to agree to just the hard one.[3] The data is sparse, but it should be sufficient for a rough model.

After that we went to the University, which was really attractive and then back to the hotel. Here are some pictures I took from the van:

Floodwall art.

One of the really attractive things about Georgetown is that the drainage ditches are home to flowering lillies.

The University. I like visiting Universities wherever I go. They feel familiar and different. I guess kind of like the beer.

The cemetaries were composed of above ground crypts like in New Orleans...and for precisely the same reason. Did I mention that Georgetown is below sea level. If you are below sea level, and you don't want to see your loved ones again in this world, it is a good idea not to bury them. I liked this one because there was a random horse grazing.

This was my favorite sign of the day. It was on the campus. I am pretty sure I am missing a bit of data to bridge the cultural gap. Still, if you were ever in high school band, it is pretty funny.

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[1] What I didn’t know was that ‘experiment’ has a totally different technical, military definition than ‘exercise.’
[2] How cool is that. We have an 8 week old and my wife, not only knows I would want to go, but gives the go ahead to start the paperwork that had to be started that day.
[3] It is not a matter of it being hard. I love hard work. But I am fully booked through the end of the year. Doing work like this actually just cuts into the time I have to do my other responsibilities

April 6, 2009

We finally got in at 4 am. It was a 45 minute ride in the dark to the hotel. A couple preliminary observations: All of the roads in the city are single lane. The houses are all raised foundation, presumably because of flooding, but there was also a hypothesis that living upstairs, business downstairs, is a legacy of Dutch architecture.

The more ornate houses had a distinctly South Asian aesthetic. Our escort (who is from Freemont, CA) did not seem particularly enamored with Guyana (he hadn’t done any of the things that I hope to do if I get stranded here a couple of days) but he was very high on the rum. He probably mentioned it 5 times. Apparently it won some sort of international award. We even passed the ‘rum factory.’ I may need to bring some of it back for when I host poker night.

We are staying at the nicest hotel in the country, which runs about $70 US and I would describe as rustically charming. The water pressure was a literal dribble and there was no climate control (I should have brought more t-shirts – it is practically the equator) in the room but there is a comfortable, covered, outdoor courtyard that seems to get ocean breezes.

I woke up at 10 – which is a solid 6 hours – but between the time change and late arrival, my body can’t decide which way to be jet lagged…so it just settled for puffy, blood shot eyes. I did some work until noon, took a little nap and then heard some collogues[1] in the courtyard. I have a balcony towards the courtyard, so I can generally see when people are convening for meals. I had a ‘fried rice’ for lunch which came with beef, chicken and shrimp in a sort of barbecue sauce. It was very good.

After that, one of the guys in charge (I still don’t know who is who and who is in charge, just that I am one of the two scientists and the one expected to know about flooding) wanted to buy a trinket for his daughter. So we went to a primary drag for shops. This is something I still haven’t figured out yet about traveling with other Feds who travel a lot. I would have liked to go to the zoo or a museum or, well, anything but shopping…but don’t really feel like I have the social capitol to ask for a driver. So I went along just to get into the community.

It was interesting two walk around. I didn’t see any other white people, but I actually felt less out of place than in Africa or Asia. It seemed like there were very few stares, no requests for money and even the sales people used relatively soft sell tactics. It would have been cooler if they were selling local wares, but most import American goods from Miami and mark them up…so the stuff wasn’t even cheap.

We did see one of the famous landmarks from a distance. There is a gothic cathedral here made entirely out of wood. Apparently, there was some big injunction against using stone to build in Georgetown since lumber was their primary buissiness. (I included an internet picture that was far superior to mine)

Now for the part of the journal where I see how long I can talk about sediment until you skip the paragraph or click on some other site. (Still here after that sentence, impressive.) Guyana isn’t a successfully commercial Caribbean destination, in part, because it has no real sand beaches. The entire coast is rock and thick, not particularly attractive, mildly stinky mud. But here’s the thing…it’s not their mud. The northern currents bring the outwash of the Amazon River to the Guyana cost. It has something ridiculous like a 100 year travel time (so they are still not seeing the post-industrial loads yet) but they do not control their own source.

It looks like I won’t be taking a boat up the river. My Friday flight got canceled, so I am flying out Thursday afternoon (which is going to make for a pretty short journal). I am only mildly bummed. There might be great potential for ecotourism here, but there isn’t much of it on the ground. Only a couple companies that run mainly on the weekend (and then, only if they have a full trip). If it hadn’t been a last minute trip, I might have been able to plan for it, but with Easter on Sunday and teaching commitments in Davis on Monday and Tuesday, I’m going to be content with just the cross cultural adventure.

Dinner was fun but I was definitely odd man out. The others either knew each other or knew the same people…they each had military background…and I was the only one who isn’t fluid in another language. I also found that the more the rum flowed, the more of the conversation happened in Spanish. This I did not foresee. Go to an English speaking country, you can talk to the locals, but the regional specialists will all be fluent in Spanish. It was still interesting none the less. I learned a lot about how the humanitarian efforts of the armed forces (and a lot of our defense spending goes into that sort of thing) works…which is helpful as I want to be involved in as much of it as possible. I passed on the rum but had chutney snapper[2] and a local beer. You know that facebook application where you choose your 5 favorite beers…I could never do that. My favorite beer is the local beer. It is just another visceral level in which I can experience a new place that is similar yet different than other places. Tyler calls it the tyrwar (sp?).

I came back to the hotel, finished my presentation for tomorrow, did some e-mail and read a little before bed. More tomorrow.

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[1] Did I spell check this right. I always want to use this word, but my first 6 or 7 attempts at it are usually so far away that spell check doesn’t have a chance. So I usually just go for synonyms.
[2] The server warned me that it would be hot and, out of character, I ordered it anyway…and it was fine.

April 5, 2009

Today started early…real early. Aletheia woke up at 1:30…I rolled over, and the alarm went off at 3:00. I was delighted to find left over strawberry shortcake in the fridge for breakfast and then I was off. I really enjoy driving freeways before 5 on Sunday mornings. It has a very ‘Will Smith is the only man on earth’ feel to it. My itinerary was Sac to Atlanta to Ft Lauderdale to Trinidad and Tobago to Georgetown, Guyana.

Guyana is the third smallest country in South America (the other two being its close neighbors). The library had no travel guides on it and of the three South America guides I picked up (including a pretty good one Charis picked out) only one of them had info on Guyana, and then it was <>

Most of the population lives on the coast (the whole country has ~850,000 people, roughly the population of the greater Sacramento area) with much of the rest composed of dense rainforest accessible only by air or one of their great rivers (which I why I am going, but more about that later). Guyana boasts one of the world’s most impressive waterfalls (5X higher than Niagara Falls, but much more flow than the other enormous drop falls like Yosemite). But most intriguing (from the standpoint of my limited Internet research) is the dense biodiversity. Like the Amazon ecotones of Brazil, Guyana contains one of the greatest density and diversity of species in the world including some famous ones like the giant otter, piranhas, and (according to native taxonomy) 18 distinct ‘big cats.’ Unsurprisingly, they are beginning to explore the ecotourism market. Also unsurprisingly, so am I.

But the most surprising facet of Guyana’s relative obscurity is that it has all of this to offer despite being one of the safest South American destinations and the only English speaking one. It began as a Dutch colony but was transferred to the British, making its post-colonial culture more like the Caribbean milieu than the Spanish or Portuguese speaking South American cultures.

I arrived at Ft Lauderdale mostly without event. I finished Andy Crouch’s Culture Making, Read a couple of Ignatius’ letters from my English Edition of The Apostolic Fathers, read a couple short stories by John Updike and did several hours of work. To say that I enjoy flying more than anyone else I know might be an understatement. Because of the last minute nature of this trip (I’ll hit that later too), I was scheduled for the worst possible seats. I am ‘silver medallion’ on Delta, so I hoped for upgrades. Didn’t happen, but I lucked out with seat changes.

In Ft Lauderdale I sat down next to an outlet to charge up the work cell phone. For those of you who don’t know, I am my generation’s last hold out on the cell phone. I am not a technophobe, I write software for a living[1], I have just not decided a cell phone would augment my humanness at this point.[2] Anyway, the friendly guy next to me picked up his phone and made a call…and mine rang. It was the other technical guy going, a costal sediment expert. It was incidental that they got two sediment experts, since their main concern is flood waning, and neither of us was their first phone call, but my companion seems to think that it was a happy accident since much of their flooding in exacerbated by a sediment problem.

As I write this fist installment, we are on Caribbean Air headed for our fist stop in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, then a couple more hours to Georgetown a little after 2:30 am. There is a 4 hour time distance (EST+1) from California so it won’t feel quite that bad. The embassy will pick us up and take us to the hotel.

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[1] Actually, it turns out to be about half my job.
[2] At some point, it will just be too inconsiderate to my friends not to have one since the social conventions for making plans has totally changed. But I have entropy on the thing now so I’m going to wait a little longer.