Caribbean Beat — 25th Anniversary Edition — March/April 2017 (#144)

You don’t have to be a topographer to figure out that Guyana is
unapologetically part of Amazonia. But, just in case you want
to be stubborn and argue beyond impenetrable rainforests,
jaguars, black caimans, and anacondas, the Pakaraima
Mountains will answer any lingering doubts. (For the sake of
free movement of people, trade, dancehall, and soca, however,
we’ll keep our Caribbean identity too.)
You may not have heard of the Pakaraimas before — but perhaps you’ve
heard of Roraima? Functioning as a triple border between Guyana, Venezuela,
and Brazil, Mount Roraima, with a peak elevation of just over 9,200 feet, sticks
out as the tallest in the family of table-top mountains of the western Guyana
highlands known as the Pakaraimas. These mountains stretch some 250 miles
across, measuring east to west, and the rivers that originate here plunge off
immense cliffs to form some of the most spectacular waterfalls anywhere —
including the famed Kaieteur, measuring 741 feet from top to bottom, among
the world’s tallest single-drop waterfalls.
Exploring the Pakaraimas offers the allure of unknown terrain, unfamiliar
indigenous Amerindian culture, and the exhilarating feeling that comes with
knowing that just under your feet are rocks hiding deposits of gold, diamonds,
jasper, and other precious minerals. But it takes some amount of — well,
balls, to attempt a journey across the tepui plateaus: one literal translation of
Pakaraimas, a Patamona name, is “giant testicles.”
These mountains were formed many millions of years
ago, and are now mostly inhabited by the Patamona, one
of Guyana’s nine remaining Amerindian nations. The name
Patamona itself means “People of the Heavens” — and if you
bother to check the elevation and temperature of some of the
villages scattered among these mountains, you’d have to agree.
At night, I swear it feels like below zero in some places. But for
Guyanese, measuring in degrees Celsius or Fahrenheit is just
not done. It’s either “hot” or “cold,” and in the case of some of
these villages, very cold. Once you take up a sleeping position,
you beg your body to stay in place without moving, for fear that
thousands of needle-size icicles will pierce through your skin.
So travelling across the Pakaraimas is no easy feat, but
the annual safari organised around Easter by Rainforest Tours in Georgetown
offers a planned route and instructions on how to survive and enjoy what tour
leader Frank Singh calls “an adventure of a lifetime.” The safari had its genesis
at the turn of the last century, when the Patamona decided to cut roads to
criss-cross their mountains and valleys. Of course, their intention was not to
have curious visitors passing through their villages, but rather to find a way to
trade their farm produce.
The mountains offer fertile ground for agriculture, and the temperatures
lend to the farming of crops that can’t grow on Guyana’s coastland. For
example, a great potato and onion experiment was undertaken a few decades
back, but most of it went to waste because of inadequate infrastructure to
transport it to market in Georgetown. So, using manual labour, the Patamona
created roads to connect villages stretching across two of Guyana’s interior
regions, Eight and Nine, and for the most part made it easier for vehicles other
than tractors and All Terrain Vehicles (ATVs) to traverse the territory.
The first Pakaraima safari was undertaken in 2003, with just about
four vehicles of government officials eyeing the opening of the otherwise
landlocked Pakaraimas. Soon, the safari grew in scale, and it’s now an annual
feature of Guyana’s tourism calendar. These days, the convoy is made up of
about twenty vehicles, including participation by overseas enthusiasts craving
an adventure off the beaten track and an immersion into the customs of the
indigenous Amerindians.
Exploring the
Pakaraimas
offers the allure
of unknown
terrain
70 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM