The sun was going down at the Maipaima Eco-lodge and flamboyant scarlet Macaws the size of eagles were flying overhead and settling into the tops of the heavily vined trees that surrounded me. I was reclining in a chair, sipping a cup of after dinner cocoa while peacefully watching this strange new world convert itself into night. The chair was on a raised wooded platform, abutting the central thatch covered Benab in the middle of a cleared circle of the tropical rainforest. The circle was about 200 yards in diameter, beyond which vision was cut off completely by the darkening wall of the ancient woods. Miriam was inside washing the dishes from the dinner I had prepared (Chicken ala Orange- the chicken carried in with us raw, wrapped in newspaper, the orange picked from a tree in a nearby village).

There was a sudden alarm raised by some unseen birds nesting nearby, followed by a long sustained roar. The sound originated from close enough that it distracted me from the neon spotted preying mantis on the rail in front of me, which I had been watching eat a squirming insect head. It occurred to me that it actually was possible that the noise was coming from a terrifically large wild cat that was very close. My first impression was enhanced by the sight of Griffin and Harper (two young men from Nappi village) who came running out of the forest very close to the sounds origin. They, however, didn’t keep running to the security of the Benab, as I would have thought prudent, but turned almost immediately and disappeared back into the wall of green, headed, I guessed, closer to the sound. Well Griffin was our guide, he had walked us in the 7 miles from the openness of the savannah and talked with knowledge about every tree we passed, and Harper was the caretaker of the lodge for the month on the rotating village schedule, so I figured if they wanted to rush into the darkening forest towards a sound which makes me nervous in a zoo, then they must know what they’re doing.

I took another sip of my cocoa and resumed my observation of, what I might have failed to stress, was truly a ferocious, neon spotted preying mantis, which was at that very moment ripping the flesh from a still living creature. Sure it was only about two inches long, but up close, real close like I was now, its mandibles were extremely vicious and moved with lighting speed.

Griffin came running back out of the forest; Harper didn’t reappear. The birds started screaming again in alarm; the jaguar paused in its maiming of Harper and roared again. Griffin saw me and started yelling excitedly and motioning for me to hurry over. I got up slowly from my chair, cocoa still in hand. I didn’t feel the need to rush into anything, I hadn’t after all told them to go into the Jungle (lets drop this educated rainforest crap) after a Tiger in the dark. Griffin’s shout became audible.

“A family of Howler monkeys is right near by, do you want to see them?”

Oh. Monkeys. We had been hearing them all day long declare the hour at their eternally set times. Monkeys, nice, not as cool as a Jaguar of course…But Monkeys in the neighborhood, that’s great. I started to take another sip of my cocoa. Then it occurred to me that Howler monkeys are large primates that live entirely in the tops of trees, hundreds of feet off the ground, and if I hurried I could actually see some before it got completely dark, because they were only a few hundred feet away. I ran through the kitchen and told Miriam and we both ran out across the sand of the clearing and into the rainforest close on the barefoot heels of Griffin. We dodged around roots and over logs, through a rain gully or two, and then stood still straining our necks upwards trying to locate them way up in the canopy. In the quiet, just before my eyes made out the first hanging silhouette, I realized that both Miriam and I were barefoot as well: barefoot in the jungle at dusk, looking up into the trees for monkeys.

Ever since we learned we would be coming to Guyana, Miriam and I had been hoping to get into the interior. Not that the majority of Guyanese get a chance to see the savannahs and rainforests of their own country in their lifetimes. For most it is a trip they cannot either afford to make or don’t feel compelled to take. But for us now nearing our time of departure we had begun to think seriously about how we could make a trip. A few casual conversations had put us in the enviable position of having a Guyanese family decide to take us under their wing and show us some of the variety of their land. A woman in the Lutheran church up the Corentyne had a sister who lived in an Amerindian village called Nappi, located in the Rupununi Savannah at the foot of the Kanuku mountains, near the town of Lethem on the boarder with Brazil. If we could get to Lethem they would meet us there. If you’ve ever been shown the overwhelming hospitality of the Guyanese, you will already realize that we were going to be shepherded and given to feel like family from the moment we met the first relative in Georgetown until we were returned to our own home in Stanleytown.

Anita, the woman from the church, first met us in Georgetown at the ticketing office. She gave us some materials to take with us to give to her sister Eleanor in Nappi: yards of mosquito netting mostly. Anita had waited at the ticketing office for over three hours for us as the Berbice river ferry had broken down and delayed us considerably. We purchased our bus tickets, which are not available in advance except at a small unmarked office miles from the bus depot and then only on the day of the journey, and even then the woman behind the desk shook her head and said it was impossible, before printing out tickets for us a moment later after some amount of silence (just a hint never ask why it is not possible just wait quietly for a few minutes and often it is easily done, I can’t explain it that is just how it is with paper work here in Guyana, saying anything makes it worse). A niece picked us up and drove us to her sister’s house, which was a block from the bus station (these women were both daughters of Eleanor). We stored our bags there for the afternoon and then took a quick shower later that evening before getting on the bus, and then another a week later when we would get off the return bus considerably hotter in the mid afternoon sun. As I said we were shepherded.

To enter the bus station is to suddenly feel like you are in South America. The costal areas of Guyana do not evoke South America. Everyone speaks English and the population makes me think I am either in India or Africa, or even an island in the Caribbean, but not South America. But once in the bus station, the language changes to Portuguese and the people buying tickets are suddenly now either Brazilians, with their instantly recognizable sense of style and quick, smooth sensuality, or Amerindians, whose features you see in everyone in the country even though they themselves are fairly hidden on the coast. There were two older Amerindian women who stood silently in line in front of us waiting to check in. They both wore dark blocky wrap around sunglasses, even though it was nighttime. In fact they kept them on the entire trip and the blankness of their eyes contributed to a perception of great stoicism, which I often project onto those who carry themselves with such repose. I later learned that cataracts are quite common in the remote villages (perhaps due to diet) and more than likely it was for this reason that the women wore the dark glasses, which I have also seen on my own grandmother before and after her cataract surgery. But on that night, in the waterfall of Portuguese and amidst the peacocks of a new country, I thought the grandmothers were observing much on the sly and I envied them their unobstructed vision.

If you have taken a Greyhound bus for any length of time across the United States, then you will understand something of the trip that took us in for the next 18 hours. I personally have taken many Greyhound trips, some of which lasted many days, and I consider then some part of my education on America. Likewise I would recommend this bus trip, at least one way. If you can afford the plane fare, I would be envious of the trip back from Lethem over the vast track of rainforest, but without driving through it I am not sure how it is possible to understand the actual distance.

As I said the trip started out as something familiar. The BMW bus was comfortable with large seats and overhead compartments. No chemical toilet on board, so none of the unpleasantness of the smell near the back seats where we had been assigned. We drifted off to sleep on the Linden highway, which is the best-paved road in the country, and I only woke again after we stopped in Linden itself. A stop in the middle of the night on some back street in a middle sized town. Hazily remembered except for the vastness of the lit up and operating open pit mines that surround the town. These mines are what produce the great quantity of dust that flies so liberally in Lethem that peoples eyes start to develop creeping patches of scar tissue in the corners, which slowly grow over the pupil and render them blind. The eye seeks to protect itself from the ravaging of the earth, while the raw materials get shipped down river and then made into aluminum in some other country.

Then much drifting in and out of sleep through the bumps, as the road became dirt shortly after Linden and darkness took over all around. Around two in the morning we stopped at a building with bathrooms and snacks and nothing else to be seen in any direction but more darkness and the shadowy outlines of high encroaching trees.

Sleeping upright in a seat, weither it be on a bus, car, plane or train, is an acquired skill. I learned it best when I was a cab driver in my early twenties. After a few months on the job I could tip back the seat just slightly, cross my ankles underneath me, and drift off with the radio receiver in my hand, only disturbed when I heard my car number squawked out by dispatch. It is a form of meditation done properly.

As the dawn’s light started creeping in I began to realize that I was not on a Greyhound bus. The road had gotten extremely narrow in the night and heavily rutted. Both sides of the road were lined by hundred foot tall trees, any low spots in the track were standing water. The driver apparently considered this a mandate for appalling speed (in the rainy season the bus probably needs as much momentum as it can get to wade through the water holes). The result was that we were hurtling through a tunnel of trees, with light and vision flickering nauseatingly and branches reaching in through open windows tearing at flesh, all while plunging up and down with the unexpectedness of a carnival ride. People were starting to vomit. I had the worrying sense that I might just join them at any minute. I locked my eyes forward down the aisle and out the front windshield in an attempt to settle my stomach and so that at least I would see our impending death as it rounded the next blind corner. But looking down the aisle was not dissimilar to being in heavy seas on a large vessel. The horizon dipped in and out of view and my stomach tried to hide each time in my throat. The only possibility was to close my eyes and practice that meditation I preached a moment ago. Occasionally bags would work themselves loose from the overhead compartments and fling themselves violently on those at peace below.

We came to a river in the middle of the morning and got out to watch the barge make its way across to us. Boards were laid out at rivers edge, where the bus and a large truck backed down and across them onto the barge, where there were more boards thrown across huge gaps in the steel decking. The passengers all stood by the railings and tried not to be crushed by the loading vehicles. A small motorboat pushed its nose against the side of the barge to turn it around in the current and then the pilot took us across. A nice hour long diversion in the fresh air, then back on board the space mountain roller coaster for a few more hours, till suddenly, with the abruptness of a line, the trees stopped and we were in the wide open savannah. Instantly grasslands stretched out towards distant hills and my vision was unobstructed because the only trees were scrubbed cashew trees, which had dispersed themselves evenly as far as my eye could see.

In the open, and on the sandy smoother roads, the driver really let loose. I didn’t realize you could four-wheel drift a bus with eight wheels, but, on those winding roads with nothing to hit, the driver repeatedly proved it could be done. Occasionally we came to small creeks crossed by narrow slat board bridges exactly wide enough for six out of our eight wheels. Once we all got out and walked over before the driver crept across all alone while we watched the bus sway precipitously.

Before we arrived in Lethem we stopped by the side of the river, which is the border with Brazil. All the Brazilians got off and went through customs in a canvas tent set up on the side of the road. Two large pillars of a steel bridge rose out of either side of the river, but it was hard to tell if they were being worked on currently or had been abandoned. Somebody is going to need to build a pillar in the middle of the river for it to be finished. Currently there are small boats to take you across to Brazil, all of which I am sure only cross at this point and then seek out the little tent for their approval. What we had seen is the road, which connects the capital of Guyana to Brazil. It is about 500 Kilometers long and takes about 18 hours on those days when it is passable at all. There is no road at all connecting Georgetown with Guyana’s northern neighbor Venezuela.

The streets of Lethem are wide, like any western town with more land than it knows what to do with. After winding around town, dropping off almost everyone else on the bus at their front doorstep, we got off finally, crossed the street and were met by another relative (this time a son who works for the Guyanese Geology and Mines Commission). He had someone take us in the back of a pick-up truck to an empty house where we could stay the night. When we arrived at the house a woman came over from somewhere nearby and showed us how to use the shower and pointed out the large pot of food that she had made for us to eat. We were stunned by all of this, which was completely unarranged by us and freely given. The son stopped by and said he would come get us in the morning. Miriam and I walked around town for awhile and then sat on a cement bench on the edge of town and watched the sun go down and the mountains fade from view. It felt like we were on the mesa in Taos, New Mexico and we were instantly at ease in this new, but familiar topography.

In the morning we loaded into the back of the pick-up truck with our packs, two five-gallon bottles of water, and two frozen chickens. Eleanor’s son had suggested we buy chicken when we asked if we should bring any food in with us. The water is the privilege of the traveler, yet at the same time the stigmatism of the alien: our bodies will reject the water that is clean to you. We thundered out of Lethem holding our hats against the wind, eyes squinting, teeth tasting dirt.

Riding fast across the open expanse of a savannah in the back of a pick-up truck is, I believe, one of the great pleasures in life. It makes you understand why dogs are so damned happy to go for a car ride. Once after being in the mountains for 14 days away from the human world, I hitched a ride on a small county road in Northern California in the back of a pick-up truck. At that moment I might as well have been an astronaut, such was the expansiveness of the worlds suddenly zipping by my eyes. After a time the chicken started to thaw and the pink water began to roll around the bed of the truck mixing with our packs. But in the back of a pick-up truck that kind of thing just doesn’t really matter, because it is necessary to concentrate pretty hard on just staying IN the back of the pick-up truck as the driver unleashes across a dirt expanse with the cavalier freedom of the raised axle four by four.

The road crossed draws, which would be four foot full in the rainy season, and wound through eight-foot high conical termites mounds. After about forty-five minutes the clouds started to close around us and hard fat drops fell. The driver stopped the truck and put our bags inside the cab and kicked the younger passenger out to the back to make room for Miriam and I to sit, her on my lap, inside the cab. It was tempting to turn down the offer and pretend that it didn’t matter to us if we got soaked. But we had no idea what we were going to, and showing up wet didn’t seem like an intelligent choice, so we gratefully accepted and drove through the rain while the young man stood outside, erect like a bird letting the water bead down his back. It is little gestures like this that put me into my place of honor here and remind me that I shall forever return the hospitality of strangers to those who are strangers in my home.

Nappi Village is one of three villages in the Macushi territory on the Northwestern side of the Kanuku Mountains. The center of the village is on a small rise and consequently looks over the wide grasslands around it that is dotted with numerous homes. There are two gigantic Mango trees, which provide shade and snacks to the school children of the nursery and primary school located with-in a stones throw of their heavy laden branches (for one school day we took successive classes outside under these trees and sang songs with them and told the story of How the Macaw Got His Colored Wings, which I had perfected on the walk out of the rainforest after having my first real glimpse of these birds just before the monkeys came roaring). There are also three churches in various states of construction, which was surprising for such a small population, and according to Eleanor was also causing some division in the community. I suggested that perhaps we should stay away from all three so as to not enter into the division, but Eleanor put paid to my sly attempt to skip out on church by quickly announcing that we were her visitors so we would attend the Catholic church the next morning. We did attend that Sunday morning service, done in both English and Macushi, while the breeze fluttered the pieces of colored cloth and cut strips of newspaper that truly beautifully decorated the space overhead with the spirit.

It is a small place, Nappi Village, less than 500 people I’d hazard to guess. There are no electricity lines here at all. The water comes from wells dug in the ground or is collected from the sky. The truck we rode in on was the only vehicle I saw that week, besides bikes, a motorbike or two, and bullock carts. The main forms of transportation across the 35 km into Lethem are bicycle and oxcart. We had seen a farmer, loaded up with 100 lbs of plantains, pedaling into the Lethem market as we were coming in that afternoon. When Eleanor was the head teacher not that long ago, she would take a bullock cart into Lethem and back spending the entire day on the road to pick up the teachers salaries. The houses are made with either a local adobe brick or an imported red brick and they are roofed tightly with the fronds of a local palm and occasionally the rust ready zinc. There were no mosquitoes, or at least so few that we could count them, which was freeing in a way that I’d forgotten. It was currently the end of a dry season though and we learned that it was a different story during the rains. About one in five villagers get malaria in their live and those often more than once. In the rainy season sometimes it is not easy at all to get to Lethem and even the paths in the surrounding area can be under thigh-high water. As with the blocky dark glasses on the bus passengers, I can place an unflinching gaze on the faces of the villagers of Nappi as they look towards the immortal sunset from under their thatch covered doorways.

Three quarters of a mile from the village center we were dropped at a house surrounded by palm trees and set against the glorious panorama of the Kanuku Mountains. Grandma Eleanor came out to meet us. I overplay this just a little tiny bit, but I can think of no other way to describe the hospitality given to us by this wonderful woman: a bed in her house, home-cooked meals, long talks on her porch, and introductions to all her friends. We learned just small fragments of her life over the course of those conversations. Although not originally from the village of Nappi, and of east Indian decent, Eleanor has lived in the Rupununi for 36 years or more and raised nine children here. She came originally as a schoolteacher. She lives alone now, so much a part of the village that she is on the council of elders, and her husband and children, who live in Georgetown, come back to Nappi, to Eleanor, and to their original home whenever work and money allow. It was this home that became our home for the week. We slung up hammocks outside on the porch and swung in them for hours reading and looking up occasionally with disbelief that we were near the mountains again.

On great aspect of Eleanor’s house was that she had a generator, one of two in the area. Every night, a little after dusk, a neighbor would ride over on his bike and fire up her generator for her. Plus she had a television. So every night children and adults came over and sat around for a few hours watching images from around the world. We would meet people on the road during the day walking barefoot and driving oxen, talk a little and then say goodbye, only for them to say, “I’ll be over later for the show”. It was like a cinema in the days before television. At the end of the show the generator would be turned off; the whole world quieted with only the heavenly bodies as light, in and among humans dwelling.

After two days of walking around the village, laying in the hammocks reading, eating tasty food and watching the evening show, Eleanor decided that we were rested from the bus ride and made arrangements for a man we had met named Giles to take us on a walk into the mountains, to the headwaters of Nappi creek. She gave us directions to his house and we set off in the morning behind a bullock cart loaded with school children.

This way my first chance to look closely at the construction of these two wheeled carts. The axle a single golden rod of the trunk of a hardwood tree, the wheels cross-cut disks: two sturdy things put together with hand tools and rolled across rocky roads and through waist high creeks by a team of oxen. It takes a certain amount of disbelieving witness to remember that wheels, good wheels, can be made without metals.

We turned off at Giles path and he came out of his home to greet us, threw on a shirt, grabbed a small cloth bag in one hand, a cutlass in the other, and off we went. Never did find out what was in that bag, but I learned pretty quickly to stay a few yards back from Giles as his cutlass arm struck quickly and with out warning at anything starting to invade the path. I must also mention that Giles wore no shoes.

We learned that everyday Giles walks five miles back and forth to his farm barefoot. Earlier I had noticed the children of the village playing football, some with a ball others with an empty plastic coke bottle ½ filled with rocks. The children were running full speed on a rock-strewn pitch and kicking a rock-filled bottle as hard as they could with bare feet. The villagers of Nappi have tough feet.

I, on the other hand, do not. Though my favorite footwear is a pair of flip-flops, and though I’ve been known to wear these until the snow builds up a few feet, I have been a ginger foot all my life. A gravel road might just as well be broken glass for the slow steady way in which I must place my bare feet upon it and limp across. For this hike I was wearing my only pair of shoes that were not flip-flops- my football boots. I have written previously about how these shoes give me pretty bad blisters if I do not tape my feet. So now I was following a barefoot older man into the forest with tape wrapped around my pale dainty toes and shoes on top of that. To make matters worse, at first we were just walking in savannah lowland and the path was muddy and blocked by large pools. So while Giles just barefooted though them, I had to jump around looking for a roughly dry spot to land on if I wanted to have dry shoes, which I did.

At the line where the forest started the world was quickly blocked out by that all encompassing green that still makes me a little nervous. The path narrowed and then became many paths, all of them about equally used. The paths are not hiking trails but ways to get from one section of farm to another. We might have been able to find the headwaters, if there was a map, but we most likely would have walked in circles a few times in the process. Farther in the path became less clear, less packed dirt and more tangled with potentially sharp things to step upon (there is one type of seed that falls from a tree that looks as if it is specifically designed to impale a wayward barefoot). Giles’ pace didn’t slow at all. We crossed the Nappi creek once; Giles and Miriam (who had highly engineered sandals on) waded straight across, while I picked my way across hopping from rock to rock. I was feeling pretty good about my dry feet until five minutes later when we had to re-cross the creek and there were now no rocks to hop upon. I waded across resigned and, it might have been my imagination, but I thought I saw Giles give a grin. He didn’t talk much that whole day so I took every gesture as significant. We continued picking our way across stones and traveling on top of root systems as much as on the ground and I became convinced that Giles feet were made of something other than flesh.

In the end we came to a waterfall in a channel carved through stone and Miriam and I stripped down and dove into the coldest clearest water we have seen in Guyana. I know some people like the ocean, and others large lakes, but give me a cold mountain river flowing over boulders and I’ll pick it every time. The headwaters of Nappi creek turned out to look something like any number of rivers on the North Shore of Minnesota and we ate hardboiled eggs and peeled a summit orange with the growing knowledge that the unfamiliar can turn out quite familiar after all.

On the way out we swung by Giles’ farm: a number of different hectares burnt out of the jungle at different intervals over the years and at different stages of crop planting. Again at first it appeared very unusual to our new eyes: Banana trees and Cassava trees against the back wall of the tropical rainforest, and such rapid hungry growth that I couldn’t make out sweet potatoes from the invading forest eager to reclaim its land. But as my eyes adjusted I found corn stalks in among the unknown vertical vines, and squash spreading out in competition with the tentacles of the forest floor, and finally tomatoes staked out with their green morsels just starting to speckle red. I did not know that slash and burn rainforest agriculture would be so familiar as a tomato. Giles showed us his main living quarters on the farm, a simple two walled structure with a thatched roof. He used to live here all the time with his wife and children, but when the kids became old enough to attend the village school he moved closer into the village so that he would have to commute to the farm and not them to school.

As we crossed the creek one last time heading back, I noticed that Giles’ right foot had two small cuts, just nicks really, but red and soft, newly made from that days walk. My own feet were now about at the point of blistering and as we walked, and as the path became a little smoother, I remembered a season in Vermont farming in a muddy clay barefoot everyday, flip-flops discarded till the ½ mile walk down the gravel road to home. I let Miriam and Giles get ahead of me and then stripped off my wet shoes, my wetter socks, and that athletic tape which I had sheepishly re-applied after the waterfall swim while Giles looked on. I strapped the shoes to the outside of my pack and put one foot in front of the other, so to speak.

The earth was cool and instantly soothing. Mud squished between my toes and made me slip here and there, but I only went down once. And I did step on something fairly prickly under my right little toe, but I picked it our pretty quick without even really trying and kept going on down the path. Turns out there isn’t anything particularly unusual about the material that makes up the feet of the villagers of Nappi. They just don’t start with the assumption that shoes are necessary. They start by placing their souls directly on the earth.

Sometime after Easter I received a gift of a cross with the instructions that I could keep it or give it to who ever I choose. I don’t own many crosses personally, though it is a symbol that I have lived with all my life. The only cross I can think of that I claim ownership to is one that I use for a clang inside a clay fired bell hung above our door to announce the arrival of the stranger. The gift cross is wooden and has a painting on it. The painting is of a man walking on a path with a cutlass in his hand. Technically the man has on flip-flops, but then again I do like flip-flops. In the painting there are large trees, mountains, and pathways through the mountains. There is a field of corn. I think I shall keep this cross, as I could not have a better souvenir from my time spent in Nappi village at the foot of the Kanuku Mountains. It hangs in our kitchen and reminds me of one of the ways that it is possible for my brothers and sisters to live.