You land at Cheddi Jagan International, on the east bank of the Demerara south of the capital, and the first decision is how far inland the trip goes. Georgetown is worth a day and a half: the wooden cathedral, Stabroek Market, the Botanical Gardens and the sea wall at dusk. Kaieteur Falls is the thing almost nobody skips, and it is a morning flight from Ogle rather than a hike, landing on a strip inside the national park for a couple of hours at the rim with nobody else there. Past that the country asks for commitment. Iwokrama puts you in primary rainforest with a walkway strung 30 metres up in the canopy, and the Rupununi beyond it is where the wildlife is: Surama, Rewa and Karanambu are village-owned lodges reached by light aircraft or by the unsealed Linden to Lethem road. Coast and Kaieteur is a long weekend. Add the Rupununi and it is ten days.
1 Guyana city guide
Fun fact
Around 85 percent of Guyana is still standing forest, and the Guyana Forestry Commission has reported annual deforestation as low as 0.048 percent, among the lowest rates measured anywhere. That combination puts the country in the small group classified as high forest, low deforestation, which is why Guyana has been able to sell its forest carbon rather than its timber.
Stereotypes, sorted out
The realityIt is on the South American mainland, with land borders on Venezuela, Brazil and Suriname. The confusion is cultural rather than geographic. Guyana belongs to CARICOM, plays its cricket with the West Indies and eats, speaks and sounds Caribbean, but you can drive from Georgetown to Brazil without crossing water.
The realityThree separate places. Guyana is the English-speaking one, independent from Britain since 1966. Suriname next door is Dutch-speaking. French Guiana beyond that is still legally France, uses the euro and launches European rockets. Guinea is in West Africa.
The realityAn American cult leased land in the north west in the 1970s and 909 people died there in November 1978, almost all of them Americans who had been flown in. The site is overgrown forest with nothing to see, it is hard to reach on purpose, and it has no bearing on Guyanese life then or since.
The realityMost of the territory is, and almost nobody lives in it. Roughly nine in ten Guyanese live on the coastal strip, which is flat rice and sugar land drained by Dutch canals and held against the Atlantic by a sea wall. The forest starts where the road stops.
The realityThat arithmetic changed fast. Offshore oil production started in 2019 and the economy has grown at rates among the highest recorded anywhere since. What has not changed at the same speed is the travel infrastructure: Georgetown hotel prices moved first, interior logistics have not.
How to get it right
- The interior lodges are village businesses, not resorts. Take the guide the village provides, ask before photographing anyone, and accept that the schedule belongs to the river and the weather.
- Three religious calendars are national holidays here. Christmas, Diwali, Eid and Phagwah all close things down, and Georgetown genuinely stops for them.
- Carry cash in Guyanese dollars once you leave the capital. There are no cash machines inland and cards are close to useless there.
- Tipping is welcome rather than expected. Nobody tips at a snackette; ten percent at a good restaurant and a proper tip for interior guides and boat crews are the right instincts.
- Do not swim in coastal rivers on impulse. Caiman are real, the currents are strong, and the brown water is river silt rather than anything wrong with it.
- Call it Creolese, not broken English. It has its own grammar, people are proud of it, and trying a phrase lands better than assuming everyone will switch for you.
Famous Guyanese faces
Clive Lloyd
Shivnarine Chanderpaul
Lance Gibbs
Rohan Kanhai
Andrew Lewis
Wilson Harris
Martin Carter
E. R. Braithwaite
Grace Nichols
Frank Bowling
Aubrey Williams
Eddy Grant
Letitia Wright
CCH Pounder
Cheddi Jagan
Walter Rodney
Must-try Guyanese food
Pepperpot
The national dish and a Christmas morning fixture: beef, mutton or pork stewed for hours in cassareep, the black cassava reduction that keeps the pot safe to reheat for days. Eaten with plait bread.
Cook-up rice
One pot, traditionally on a Saturday: rice and peas simmered in coconut milk with salt beef or pig tail until the grains take the colour of everything else in it.
Metemgee
Ground provisions, cassava, eddo and plantain, boiled down with dumplings in seasoned coconut milk. Guyanese comfort food, usually with fried fish alongside.
Garlic pork
Pork cured for days in vinegar, garlic and thyme, then fried hard. The Madeiran contribution to the Guyanese Christmas table, and still made at home rather than bought.
Cassava bread
Amerindian flatbread pressed from grated bitter cassava with the poison squeezed out in a woven matapee, then baked flat on a griddle. Made the same way in the interior today.
Guyanese chow mein
Noodles stir-fried with shredded vegetables and chicken, and a fixture at every birthday and wedding table. A century of Chinese settlement, absorbed into the national menu.
Chicken curry and dhal puri
The Indo-Guyanese Sunday plate: curry with a roti layered with seasoned split peas, soft enough to tear. Duck curry is the version people drive for.
Channa and paratha roti
Chickpeas in a dry curry, folded into roti clapped loose at the griddle so it comes apart in flakes. Breakfast, lunch, or eaten standing up at a stall.
Pholourie
Split-pea fritters fried in batches and eaten hot with tamarind or mango sour. The default snack at every fair, cricket ground and roadside stall.
Egg ball
A boiled egg wrapped in seasoned cassava, rolled and deep-fried, sold with sour on the side. The best-known thing in any Guyanese snackette.
Bake and saltfish
Fried dough split open and filled with salt cod cooked down with onion, tomato and pepper. The standard Guyanese breakfast, on the coast and in the interior alike.
Black pudding and souse
Rice-stuffed blood sausage eaten with a fierce sour, sold beside pickled pork souse. Saturday food, and the length of the queue is the recommendation.
Salara
Soft sweet bread rolled around bright red grated coconut and sliced like a swiss roll. In the window of every bakery on the coast.
Black cake
Dried fruit soaked in rum and cherry brandy for months, then baked dark and dense. The Guyanese Christmas cake, and the reason the soaking starts early in the year.
Mauby
Bark boiled with spice, sweetened and drunk cold. It finishes bitter, and it is the taste Guyanese abroad miss most and visitors take longest to like.
Sorrel
Hibiscus calyces steeped with ginger and clove, served cold at Christmas and often with rum in it.
Demerara rum
Distilled at Diamond on the east bank of the river the sugar is named for, on wooden stills that are the last of their kind still working anywhere.