Turning the Tables on Piranhas

This morning I woke up and my arms were sore from all of the wave impacts on the way home, and I had a little limp from getting my knee slammed when we almost tipped over. My ghetto sunblock from who knows where washed off with the lightest river spray and so I had a bit of sunburn as well. Guyana was whipping my butt.

The trip felt different than others. There was a lot of time to reflect. Any time we were cruising on the the river the motor was too loud to hear each other and we were going so fast that I was afraid to have my phone in my hand lest it get flipped into the black waters of the river. So I just sat with my thoughts and watched the scenery whip by. Other times we had hikes or long rides in the car and it was just me and Dillon chatting. He knows a lot about the country and its inhabitants so there was always a lot to talk about. He told me about some of his dreams for his business, and was hoping to hire some people to help him do tours. He's a unique dude so I wonder how well he will do finding employees that can live up to his standards.

We saw some more monkeys hopping around.

Dillon somehow seems to be friends with just about everyone in the whole country. We met Sylvanus Gittens and his wife at their house on the riverbank. Sylvanus had quite the life story. He said he has 11 daughters with 7 women, 3 with his current lady. In Guyana you call your wife a mistress apparently? I don't know it was kind of hard to understand him at times.

More important than having children: I got my cutlass! Dillon told him we were in the market for a worn sword, and at first he said no, maybe not believing we wanted some half used up old tool. Then when he seemed interested it was amusing negotiations time. He didn't want to frame it as an exchange, he wanted to "gift" me the machete and then I would "gift" him some money. I think we settled on $10 but I gave him a crispy $20. It was worth it to hear him rave about how great Christmas was going to be.

I think maybe Sylvanus is in some Christian religion... we offered him a cold beer from our cooler and he accepted it but pounded it quickly and got rid of the bottle. Dillon thought it was because he didn't want any boats passing by seeing him drinking, which his religion forbade. I also joked about eating an alligator that was bothering him, and he acted like that was absolutely taboo. Interesting.

Up the river we hit so much floating grass that passage was impossible.

Our boat's wake was the best way to see how black the water is in the Canje crick. It was like boating in Coca-Cola.

Guyana is another Caribbean former British nation with a lot of Indian influence in its food. This I think was a samosa.

We had been going up the river to find a particular fishing spot, but it turned out there were fish in other places as well. We grabbed a few piranhas, which in the local slang they call pirannis.

Since the river grass screwed us we were back at Sylvanus' house much sooner than anticipated. We also gave him some of the gas that we didn't end up burning. We helped him fix his rainwater collection system before leaving. I'm essentially the river Mother Teresa.

We stopped at this churchy community center looking place to cook our pirannis.

A couple of gentleman were just leaving as we were coming and we had a very entertaining chat with them. One guy was carrying some fun stuff. The first I think was a root for a cassava plant? I think he was planning on planting it at home.

Dillon said that villages will have one spot in the whole town where they get phone reception and it will be like two nails in a tree where you set your phone. I'm not sure how long I could make it out here.

The other I believe he called black seed or something along those lines, but it was food for his fighting bird. Through his cool accent I thought he was calling it a bastard bird but there is a bird called a bustard so maybe that's what he was talking about.

Dillon lit a fire and cleaned our catch to prepare it for grilling.

The ants seemed to be happy with their share.

Piranha doesn't taste that much different than other white fish honestly. It was pretty good.

Guyanese Fort Ruins and Piranhas

I think Dillon has a few different tour packages and since I was going to be here for a few days I just booked them all.

I made myself a classy "stay the eff out of my room" sign at the hotel then headed out.

It was nice to see that Coca-Cola wasn't letting Pepsi dominate the inappropriately branded town welcome sign game.

We were going on a longer trip this down the river this time so the first order of business was to load up on gas.

Dillon's batmobile's grill had pipes welded to it that doubled as good fishing pole holders.

At the gas station there was a fun little outdoor bakery place.

The round cake is a Chiney cake. "We don't say Chinese we say Chiney."

I think it had red bean paste inside which is a classic.

This place's Pepsi sign proudly declared that this was "#2 Village".

His old school Guyanese driver's license had his photo stapled to it.

While driving we saw a man on a bicycle with a bird cage hanging from the handlebar. These were "race song birds". In what sounds like the yawniest cock fight imaginable the birds don't move or contact each other, they sit and see who can get the most tweets in a time period to win. I'm imagining the level of excitement of a live viewing of a children's spelling bee.

On today's journey we had a special guest: Shakira the dog.

Dillon rubbing in the fact that he has a sweet cutlass and I do not.

We spotted a ton of monkeys on this trip, sakiwinki(squirrel), capuchin, and howlers.

It's hard to capture with photographs but the water here was super black. The water moved slow enough and there were enough tanniny plants around that the river turned into one big cup of tea.

We had a random conversation with some guys who were on the lookout for their stolen boat.

This was a new one. This guy was standing in waist high water net fishing.

Once or twice Dillon said he saw a manatee and stopped the boat but I never caught a glimpse. It was still kind of cool to know that they were out here regardless.

I picked up some terrible sunscreen in who knows what country, and it washed off with the slightest bit of rain.

A big feature of our trip today was a visit to Fort Nassau. Guyana was a Dutch colony before it was a British one, and the fort was built to support the colonial effort in 1627, serving as its capital The fort was burned down by the Dutch in 1763 to prevent it from being captured by slaves during the Berbice Slave Uprising.

The ants here were super cool. I'm not sure what type they were but they were special to me because they had different body types depending on their job. The ones with the giant white heads are the soldiers, for example. I also have a pretty big white head but luckily this wasn't used to determine my profession.

There's not a lot left remaining of the fort, but one of the most well preserved elements are these grave stones. It's funny I think the writing was well preserved but it was in cursive and so damn near impossible for me to read.

There were a lot of glass booze bottles around.

1722 was a good year.

Shakira was a fan of the graves.

Steps were all that remained of former buildings.

Later we went fishing and ended up snagging some piranhas.

I tried my hand at snagging some caimans once it got dark. I don't think I did half bad.

The waves on the trip back were brutal. Our little boat kept ramping them, catching a little air, then slamming back down over and over. Hundreds of those impacts were rattling my bones and hurting my teeth. Earlier in the morning our large container of gasoline tipped over and threw the boat off balance, slamming my knee into the side of the boat. Adventurin' ain't easy.