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.