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.