When I got on the bus that goes to the Border with Guyana a Guyanese guy who I will call Dean sat down next to me and acted very excited and was telling me that he was a jungle guide in Manaus and had lived there for the last ten or so years and was returning to Guyana because his dad died and he had to settle the land he inherited with his brother who lived in the capital city of Georgetown.

The bus dropped us off at a Brazilian border town a couple of kilometers before the river-border. When we got there Dean wanted to be my buddy in Guyana so he took me to a Taxi whose driver was apparently a friend of his who he knew for his whole life. The taxi took me to the office to fix my passport problems because I forgot to pay to renew my visa after 30 days; but they never told me that when I got my visa in Montevideo or when I entered Brazil. So the guy put a note in my passport that I would have to pay the fee in Boa Vista when I came back.

Then we drove to the river and changed money and paid a little money for a canoe ride across the river into Guyana. The river was only about 10 meters wide and I could probably have waded across it. There were some construction workers hanging out who were working on the support towers of a bridge that was being built. When we got to the other side of the river there were a couple of cars with some dread-locked black guys hanging out waiting for passengers to take a couple of kilometers into Lethem. Dean was born and grew up in Lethem. Lethem is a small dirt road town in the high desert-like plains where it is really windy. To the south you can see mountains. The taxi dropped me off at a house where there were a few black people hanging out in the front porch. One of them stamped my passport and Dean took me to his father's wife's hotel and I got a room.

Then we went into the town to a store where we bought food for "Itol," which is a kind of vegetarian food that Rastafarian's eat. Dean borrowed like ten bucks from me to buy the Itol because he said he forgot to change money at the river. But the Itol only costed like two dollars. We went to his friends house which was a couple hundred meters into the trees. It was one of the most primitive houses I have ever been in. It was just maybe four meters on each side with two rooms, a kitchen and another dirt floored room with three hammocks strewn up. The house belonged to an old one-eyed man with dreadlocks. We had dinner there and smoked weed with the three dread locked men.

The only way to get to the capital city of Georgetown was on a four wheel drive road through the high desert plains of the south which turns into jungle for the northern half. The only cars that can make the journey are four wheel drive jeeps and SUV'S The only kind of truck that they have is an old truck from England called the Bedford which is from World War II. It is a huge truck with tires that reach your shoulders and has no suspension. Dean wanted to take one of these because they only cost 30 dollars as apposed to the 50 dollars that the smaller trucks charge. We couldn't go the first day because the trucks don't come by every day. The second day we waited all day long in the windy shade for another truck to pick us up. We reserved a place for one truck and Dean put his stuff in it but they changed their mind and said they didn't have room so they gave Dean his stuff back and we went and sat in the windy shade for the other truck to come. Dean said he had the money he owed me i his bag so I reminded his and he looked and said the guys from the other truck stole his money. His cousin was standing there and said ''oh, those duppies''. I knew that word meant evil spirit in Jamaica so I asked him what it meant and he said bad person. Geographically Guyana is in South America, but when your there its just like being Jamaica or Belize. While we where waiting we knocked the nut off a tree and roasted it over a fire on a piece of grated steal. This nut was very interesting because next to it was a sweet fruit that was very delicious. After a couple of hours the nuts were ready to eat and were quite tasty. We waited there with a woman and her little boy and an old man pretty much all day until about nine when one of those Bedford's came by.

It was almost completely full to the top of the metal bars that are made to hold the canopy over it, but we were using it as hand holds to keep us in place as we bounced down the desert. Every once in a while we hit a big hole and the whole truck jerked up so we had to be careful to not keep our faces too close to the metal. On one occasion we hit one and the little boy started to cry and his mother told him with a stern tone in her voice to be strong and stop crying. We bounced down the road for a couple hours until we got to a building and the old man got out and they took some stuff out and made enough room for me to climb in the back and sit between a crate and the back of the truck. We were up all night long until the sun came up slowly and illuminated the glistening jungle trees all around me. We got to the river at about nine in the morning and had to weight about an hour for the ferry to take us across. The river was about 70 meters wide and very calm. The river ferry was a big platform with an outboard motor attached. We put the truck and another four wheel drive SUV on it and went across and had to weight another hour before we got started again. I don't remember what we were waiting for. There was a way station there where I filled up my water bottle and went back to the road and was drinking and Dean was standing in the middle of the road and suddenly put his hand in his pants and started masturbating. After a couple of seconds he looked over his shoulders and remembered I was there so he walked to the other side of a dumpster he was standing next to to finish off. When they were ready to go we drove about a kilometer down the road and dropped the woman and small child off. She had a dirt floored house on the side of the road and her business was to sell food to the passersby. We helped unload all her food stuffs she bought in Lethem, but while we were doing it Dean and his cousin where eating her crackers and peanut butter and she was screaming at them to stop it and calling them thieves but they just laughed at her. We drove for another half hour or so and I saw a gaunt guy with a huge afro walking down the road. I was sitting on the top of the truck instead of down lower in the back because it was more comfortable but I had to keep an eye out for the huge branches that came across the road. When they came every couple of minutes I had to quickly scamper back and climb down until the branch passed by, then I went back to the top. it was cool sitting on the top of the truck breathing fresh air and able to stretch out after that night of being cramped and crushed by shifting boxes and bouncing around. At one point I saw a jaguar lazily crossing the road about 10 meters in front of me. Once I saw a branch coming across the road but it didn't look like it would reach us on the side we were, but I looked away for a split second and the truck shifted tracks to the right and when I looked up it was too late and all I could do was duck and brace myself and let the branch roll over me. It was very painful because it was covered in poisonous briars and when it was over I was covered in bloody scratches. We didn't see any other cars pass by us the whole day until we got to the pavement. A little before dusk we stopped to buy some crackers. It felt like Nirvana to finally not be bouncing around or worry about getting attacked by branches and we were going like three times faster. At dusk we drove past the first town. It had a lot of smoke stacks. Blake, Deans brother, told me they were smelting plants for all the ore that they mine there.

On the way down the road as the sun was setting Blake went to the back of the truck where I was and we started talking. He said the Jungle hills in the South of Guyana were the unexplored part of the country and there are wild Indians who live there, but you don't want to go there because they'll kill you if you do. He said there are all kinds of deadly animals back there too. He said there were huge Pythons that catch deer by staring in their eyes and hypnotizing them until they are close enough to strike. He said the snakes are very intelligent and live for a hundred years. He said the Indians don't have to worry about the snakes though because they have snake tooth necklaces and when the snakes see them they have respect for the Indian because it means the man is a predator of the snake. He said he was in those mountains once with a friend fishing in a pond in a small canoe with a friend and he saw something stick it's head up out of the water and look at them. He said it was unlike anything he had ever seen before and it was huge. He said they were really scared and he will never go back there again. Blake lived in a suburb of Georgetown but had gone to Brazil to buy some birds to sell back home. He had three or four cages of small birds. He said they were rare birds and was going to export them and each one costs about three thousand dollars. Every time we stopped he had to re-tie the cages to the top of the truck and was always getting annoyed about it and saying "Jah"!

It was night time when we got to Georgetown 26 hours after we left. We had some Chinese food and a beer at a restaurant and took a minibus to the center of town. The bus system in Guyana is interesting. Instead of having actual buses, they have normal vans. Most of which have been converted into painted-up low-riders that are constantly playing gangster rap of reggae. Each van had a name of the top of the windshield in the front and back. I remember seeing names like: Jah-love, Roots, etc.. We got off in the center and took another bus to his house because he said he was tired and dangers to walk around at night anyway. Deans brother looked kind of like him except paler. he was married to a big black girl. Their house was really basic and run down, but they had a TV just like most of the people in the 3rd world. His brother didn't seem very excited to see him and didn't have much to say to him even though they didn't seen each other for a couple of years. Dean never talked to the wife and they didn't have anything to say to me. I didn't bother to try to have a conversation with them because it was clear they had no interest in me and it would have been a hassle for them to tell me anything about their lives, so I talked to them about what I knew about the TV actors and programs we were watching, which seemed to be sufficiently entertaining to them. They let me stay in the second room in their house. Dean borrowed all of my money so the next day I didn't have any more and it was a Saturday. He had a mice meal at a restaurant of a guy he knew, but he couldn't get a meal for me. I was starting to get really hungry and Dean acted a little miffed and asked me why I didn't have US dollars like all the other tourists. I said I had Brazilian money so we traded a little with some Brazilians who were there and I ate. The next day I went to the Suriname embassy and paid 45 bucks for the visa and went to the left that afternoon. Even though it was only (?) kilometers to the border, I didn't get their until dark because we had to cross a river. But this river, even though it was only a couple hundred meters across it didn't have a bridge, so we had to wait in line for about an hour to get the ferry across. When I got to the river that is their border with Suriname I found out it was too late to get the boat to Suriname. So I had to stay in a hotel there. This town Corriverton was dominated by East Indians who had a little black blood mixed in. I could detect the Indian accent when they talked their English Creole. and there were Indian newspapers and Bollywood magazines all over the place and Indian restaurants. The next morning I took a van ten kilometers to the river and change money and waited about an hour for the boat to leave.

When I got to the other side of the river in Guyana I had no money for the van ride to Georgetown, but I remembered I forgot to get my key deposit at the hotel I strayed there. So the bus driver waited in front of my hotel for about 15 minutes while the hotel people where trying to figure out if they owed me the money or not. While I was waiting I ran out to the van and apologized for taking so long but no one there seemed to be in any rush to get moving. After I forgot my money and we started driving I started talking to a couple of young English guys who were living in the outskirts of Georgetown and teaching English and they envied me to stay with them. So when we got there at dusk (because we had to wait an hour again to get across the river) I met a couple more English kids they were living with. We were drinking and hanging out with them and a couple of young English girls who were in their program came over and hung out for a bit. there were a couple of small neighbor children hanging out there too. We bought some weed and got stoned and listened to music and sang along with Red Hot Chili Peppers songs until people passed out one by one. The next morning I went into town with one of them and was going to get something to eat with him so he went to use the email and I went to the bank for some money. he never meet me at the back so I went to the subway for some food and saw the only other white people other than the English kids that I have seen in Guyana. They were missionaries. I went to Deans' house to get the 30 bucks he owed me but his brother said he wasn't there and hadn't seen him for a while. I didn't feel like waiting around for him and had a bad feeling he was just going to tell me another hard luck story and ask to borrow more money to get to Manaus and pay me back there so I decided to get a truck back to Lethem that night. While I was waiting at the hotel where the trucks pick people up for Lethem I started talking to the only white Guyuanese guy I saw there. He was dressed really raggedly but said he was from the third richest family in the country and he made his money from gold mining. he said 15 years ago when he had a lot of money he went to Las Vegas and blew a hundred thousand dollars in two weeks screwing prostitutes and staying in the nicest hotels and gambling, but he doesn't have that kind of money anymore because the gold mines haven't been doing very well. he was with a woman who was friendly and talking to me for a bit. Then when she turned her back he told me she was a prostitute but she wasn't like a normal bitchy prostitute, she was cool and acted like his friend. He said he was going to Lethem where he lived the next day but was taking the plane and would never do the journey in a truck. he asked me if I smoked weed and I said yes so he told me he would get me some at his house and jumped on his motorcycle and took off. I was excited to smoke some weed for the hell journey but he never came back. The truck I got on was better than before, this time I was on a full-sized Dodge Ram with built in seats in the back. I shared the back with about five Brazilian guys. We took a couple hours just to get out of Georgetown because the truck was late and then they had to keep stopping to pick things up. When we got to the police checkpoint where the dirt road starts we had to show our passports to the cop who was on duty at the time. The guy was alone and drunk and being very belligerent. He wouldn't let us go for about an hour because he said my driver didn't have a permit to take passengers. But the driver kept telling him that he makes the journey two times per week and always uses the same permit and the cop got mad and kept interrupting and insulting him by saying things like "don't raise your voice at me"! But he wasn't raising his voice. then he just sat there with every one watching him for about ten minutes as he loaded his shot gun and then unloaded it and loaded it. When he checked my passport he said there was no entry stamp in it and asked me where it was but I told him I didn't know because I hadn't looked in it. then he sat there looking confused for a couple of minutes in complete silence as we all watched him and then out of the blue he told us we could go. When we got back in the pick up the woman who was sitting next to me in the cab was complaining about him and the driver said he was a drunken idiot. We arrived at the river crossing at about seven the next morning I was hungry and remembered when we dropped the woman off at her place so I walked there and ordered something to eat. While I was eating I saw that Afro-man walk up again and the woman got pissed off and started yelling at him telling him she wasn't going to give him any more food and if he wanted to be fed he would have to do something for her like go get firewood or something and he just stood there with a blissfully ignorant look on his face repeating nonsense non of which I can remember, maybe because I couldn't understand it in the first place. I noticed he was missing a finger on the other side of the river was where the nasty part of the road was and we kept getting stuck in the mud because the tires on the truck were too small. The first couple of times we were pulled out by Burfords but one time we got stuck for about an hour and we all had to get out of the truck and dig and pile the hole with logs and grass. We kept making baby-step progress until we were out of the bog. Not long after the sun se t adn we got stuck a few more times, but there were more Burfords coming along and pulling us out every time. We spent about a half hour at the way station owned by the white American guy where the high plains started and the truck driver bought me a beer why I don't know because he didn't want to talk to me. I just figured maybe because he felt bad we got stuck so many times but he didn't buy any beers for the Brazilians. We arrived in Lethem at about midnight and took a shower and went immediately to sleep. The next day I went over to the Rasta hut in the trees to buy weed and he hadn't seen Dean so he must have still been in George]town. I went back to the house where I got my entry stamp and was a little nervous because the cop the night before told me there was no entry stamp from when I came back from Suriname but I looked through it and it was there the guy at the border just put it in the wrong place. I knocked on the door and a grumpy guy came up to me and asked me what I wanted and I said to get stamped out and with out saying anything he just turned around and started washing his dishes. I stood there watching him washing his dishes for about a half hour until I asked him when he was going to be able to stamp me out and he asked me if I was in a hurry and I said "sort of" and he said I should have gone to the office to get stamped out and this was his personal residence and I told him I didn't know there was an office. I thought this was the office so he took my passport and stamped it.