Wild Coast Travels on South America's untamed edge

HAVE you ever considered visiting the Guianas, that fabled South American realm of gold and sugar, home to, as the British travel writer John Gimlette reports, "head-crushing jaguars, strangling snakes, rivers of stingrays and electric eels," not to mention giant otters, "half-puppy, half-torpedo," that snack on piranhas? The region's tangled green knot of jungle, rock and savannah - now home to the countries of Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana - crouches between Venezuela and Brazil, veined by thousands of turbulent rivers, mulchily recoiling from 900 miles of Atlantic coastline. Sir Walter Ralegh set off a wave of European exploration of the territory in 1595 when he wrote in his prospectus "The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana" that "there is no country which yieldeth more pleasure to the inhabitants." Boasting, Gimlette tells us, of "diamond mountains, dog-headed mermen, weeklong drinking festivals and men with their eyes in their chests," Ralegh also claimed the place sheltered a city of gold, El Dorado, a fiction that persists to this day. But in the intervening centuries, the region's reputation has suffered somewhat. In 1882, a visiting English yachtsman deemed it "a hopeless land of slime and fever, quite unfitted for man." Evelyn Waugh, who passed through in 1933, denounced its society as "destructive and predatory" and leveled abuse at its "slatternly and ill-favored" women. He even deplored its taxidermy ("the worst stuffed animals I have seen anywhere"). A few decades later, both V.S. and Shiva Naipaul provided their own withering accounts. Yet to the admirably (or alarmingly) fearless Gimlette, the Guianas remain a terrain of matchless allure, rippling with "mad, gaudy, toxic and exotic" life. In 2008, he spent several months burrowing into its rugged, bedeviled wilderness, digging for myth. Though he encountered neither a golden city nor dog-headed mermen, he saw sights so wondrous that, as he later told a BBC radio host, "if it was to be a novel it would be rejected as being improbable." Luckily, Gimlette decided not to cast this account of his wanderings as fiction. Instead, he has written a spirited historical, political and personal travelogue guaranteed to arouse the adventurous reader's wanderlust. "Wild Coast" provides two Valuable services. First, it offers a gorgeously vivid depiction of one of the last untamed places on the planet - "a beautiful world, luminously lush and drenchingly fecund" - and, second, it allows tourists seeking an easy-peasy exotic holiday to strike this destination from their itinerary. More hardened souls may, however, find themselves slavering to repeat Gimlette's ordeals: to live among the Makushi forest people and sip their cassiri homebrew (made of fermented cassava, purple potatoes and human spit), which tastes of "whisky blended with cabbages and socks"; to visit the ruins of a plantation where slaves revolted against brutal owners in the 18th century and find shards of Delft china and "tufts" of smashed wine bottles still littering the grounds; to push through the "vicious vanguard of the forest," with its "trees sprouting daggers and poison," just to test their mettle. Evidently, Gimlette wasn't daunted by the challenges of his expedition. He marvels at the gauzy beauty of the colonial capital Georgetown, "built on canals and breezes, a city of stilts and clapboard, brilliant whites, fretwork, spindles and louvers." He revels in the eccentricity of the local people, whether it's the Scots-Cariband Arawak-descended hunter Dango Allicock, who makes him a bow and arrows to take back to London ("Whenever you use them . . . you'll think of us") or the unnamed landlord in a lawless town who rents him a room with the assurance, "If I hear anyone, I'll shoot them." When Gimlette leaves what passes for civilization, he charges ecstatically into the rough, through the "gateway of a primordial world," journeying with relish through "slicks of brilliant ooze, grass like green fire, liverish pools and succulent bogs rimmed with pink," spotting "lilies so purple they looked like the work of an imperial hatter." "Even the jabiru storks," he notes, "seemed to belong to a long-lost age. They'd all stand around in their tatty coachman's livery, stabbing at the frogs and then tossing them back like shots of gin." With the help of air travel, flatbed trucks and motorized canoes, today's explorers have a decent chance of repeating Gimlette's journey. So which of the region's three countries would they like to visit first? How about Guyana, (formerly British Guiana), where the cult leader Jim Jones compelled more than 900 followers to drink a cyanide-laced fruit drink? Gimlette went to Jonestown, spoke with some survivors and found a sandal that belonged to one of the victims. What about French Guiana, "the largest chunk of the European Union detached from the whole," long home to an archipelago of penal colonies: Devil's Island, Isle Royale and St. Joseph Island. Until 1946, the French sent thousands of criminals and undesirables there (most notably Alfred Dreyfus) to languish in the smothering heat. When Gimlette paid a visit, he packed a bottle of wine and a hammock and took a boat to Isle Royale, where he watched monkeys, agoutis and giant iguanas frisk amid the coconut palms before slinging his hammock in one of the defunct prison barracks. But he concedes that plenty of Frenchmen still call the place "l'enfer vert," the "green hell." Then there's Suriname, the former Dutch slave colony, now a popular Netherlandish tourist destination, which welcomes, by Gimlette's estimation, 60,000 Dutch visitors a year. But my Texan cousin and his wife say, "No, no, no," to Suriname. They lived there in 1999 and 2000, while serving in the Peace Corps. After leaving the capital, Paramaribo - "the perfect city," Gimlette sighs, praising its plantations, its canals, its purple fortress "like a hat full of mansions" and even the alligator in the city pond - they jolted along a mud road for six hours, then hopped in a log canoe that bore them to a village of maroons (descendants of slaves who fled their Dutch overseers during bloody rebellions). The Texan cousin and his wife moved into a thatched hut infested with rats and giant spiders. They lasted six months, long after their project director had been medevacked back home with an "obscure jungle disease." Yet even armed with this foreknowledge, after reading "Wild Coast," I longed to fly to Paramaribo, charge into the interior (escorted, ideally, by a couple of bodyguards) and try to see what Gimlette saw. "Other places may feel more magnificent than the Guianas," he writes, "but nowhere feels quite so unconquered." If would-be travelers take a cue from this observation and decide they'd like to follow Gimlette's lead, he can hardly blame them. One of his own forebears, a "lawyer, poet, dilettante and layabout" named Robert Hayman, succumbed to the romance of the region in 1629. Hayman traveled by dugout canoe up the Oyapock River with, as Gimlette puts it, "no map, no medicine and no prospect of rescue." Hayman died there, one of his friends reported, "in the said canoo of a burning fever and of the fluxe." Such a fate might deter others from attempting a similar undertaking, but for Gimlette it was an enticement. Roughly four centuries on, he has proved that although this place can "exact a terrible price for its beauty," sometimes a lucky visitor can depart from it both enriched and unscathed. "Mad, gaudy, toxic and exotic": An 18th-century Dutch view of Suriname. 'Other places may feel more magnificent than the Guianas, but nowhere feels quite so unconquered.' Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.

Keen-eyed travel writer Gimlette garnered acclaim for depicting sojourns in Newfoundland (Theatre of Fish, 2005) and Paraguay (At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig, 2008). A similar reception well may greet this observant chronicle of his latest adventure, a tour through Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana. Blending depictions of their present-day appearances and recursions into the history of these former English, Dutch, and French colonies, Gimlette seasons the account with his signature element of pithy portraiture of his hosts, guides, and inhabitants. Most people in these lands between the deltas of the Orinoco and Amazon Rivers live in the coastal strip, but there ends the generality among the three places. Gimlette sorts through a succession of recent events, languages, and ethnicities in discussions that tend to spring from the region's seventeenth-century origins as sugar plantations worked by enslaved Africans, and various slave revolts echo in Gimlette's considerations of, for example, violent strife in 1980s Suriname. Displaying open-minded curiosity, Gimlette's marvelous depiction of the tropics ranges far from the tourist track.--Taylor, Gilber. Copyright 2010 Booklist

Travel writer Gimlette offers a rare glimpse of a forgotten region: the formerly European colonies of Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana, commonly known as the Guianas. As he describes his travels from coast to forest, through what he depicts as a muddy, rotting, stinking, stagnant landscape, he quickly realizes that Sir Walter Raleigh's 1596 account of bountiful riches might have bent the truth. The first quarter of the book reads like a Devil in the White City-style true crime account as he searches for the ghosts of the Reverend Jim Jones' Jamestown massacre of 1977. Gimlette then follows the footsteps of such notables as novelist Evelyn Waugh and V.S. Naipul, encountering natives as well as a sociologically-intriguing population "descended from people who'd rather have been somewhere else." Turning his attention to linguistics, Gimlette discuses certain humorous facts about the Surinamese language, "Talkie-talkie," in which "I love you" translates as "Mi lobi yu." Though Gimlette provides occasional humor, he lacks Bill Bryson's ability to provoke a belly laugh. The balance between history and travelogue would be an asset to curious travelers, but doesn't make a good case as to the appeal of doing so. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Wild Coast: Travels on South America's Untamed Edge By John Gimlette Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group ISBN: 9780307272539 From the Introduction As far as Amerindians are concerned, the land between the Orinoco and the Amazon has always been Guiana , the 'Land of Many Waters'. European explorers, however, took a while to appreciate this name. On early French and English maps the region was marked as 'Equinoctiale' or 'Caribana, Land of Twenty-one Tribes'. To the Dutch, on the other hand, this was -- for a while -- the original 'New Zealand'. Then they thought of a name which expressed what they felt. It had about it the promise of danger, risk, wealth and perhaps even desire. It was de Wilde Kust, 'The Wild Coast'. Certainly nowhere else in South America is quite like it; 900 miles of muddy coastline give way to swamps, thick forest and then -- deep inland -- ancient flat-topped peaks. It's never been truly possessed. Along this entire shore, there's no natural harbour, and beyond the mud the forest begins. It covers over 80 per cent of Guiana, and even now there's no way through it. Such roads as there are stick mainly to the coast. Without an aeroplane, it takes up to four weeks to get into the interior, and there the problems begin. With such an abundant canopy, most of Guiana never sees sunlight. Perhaps it's therefore no surprise that -- both in science and history -- the story of this land reads like a long, green night. Huge tracts of the interior are only vaguely described, and new species are always tumbling out of the dark. Even some of the more common ones make unnerving companions. Guiana has the biggest ants in the world, and the biggest freshwater fish. There are head-crushing jaguars, strangling snakes, rivers of stingrays and electric eels, and whole clouds of insects all eager to burrow in under the skin. To some this is hell. To others it's an ecological paradise, a sort of X-rated Garden of Eden. But it is water, as the Amerindians recognised, that defines Guiana. Through this land run literally thousands of rivers (in Guyana alone there are over 1,500). These aren't like the little waterways that meander through the Old World, but vast sprawling torrents that thunder out of the forest and then plough their way to the sea. Some have mouths big enough to swallow Barbados. But, even the biggest of them -- the Essequibo, Corentyne and Marowijne -- are intolerant of shipping; beyond ninety miles inland, nothing larger than a canoe gets through without being battered to bits. Once it was thought that these furious rivers all linked up, and that Guiana was really an agglomeration of islands, bobbing around in the froth. But whatever the layout, water still rules. It dominates development, trims opportunities and seals off the world. It makes islanders of tribes, and supports long-lost communities of prospectors, Utopians and runaway slaves. It feeds malaria and nurtures some of the world's most ambitious strains of dengue fever. Damp gets everywhere, rotting buildings and feet and making steam of the air. From the very earliest times human beings have realised that their best chance of surviving Guiana is by living right next to the sea. Even now, nine out of every ten of its inhabitants live on a long, muddy strip, barely ten miles wide. It's curious, life in the silt. Most of the houses have legs, and every town is built on a grid of velvety, green canals. Meanwhile, the Atlantic Ocean here is the colour of plaster, caused, it's said, by sediments harvested in Peru, washed across the continent and disgorged by the Amazon. It makes for a beautiful world, luminously lush and drenchingly fecund. Not surprisingly, its inhabitants are proud of it and give it affectionate names. In Demerara they call their land 'The Mudflat' (and their neighbours the 'mudheads'). But not every-one's impressed. As one visiting English yachtsman wrote in 1882, 'It appears a hopeless land of slime and fever, quite unfitted for man, unless it be for Tree-Indians, a low race of fish-eating savages …' Naturally, this claggy, overgrown, fish-breathed coast was never immediately inviting. For years the newly emerging Europeans had steered well clear. In theory, Spain was the first to claim it (along with the rest of the western world) under the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494. It was five years, however, before they sent a ship, and even then it didn't stop. Another thirty years passed before anyone tried to land, only to be eaten by the locals. After that, Spanish interest in Guiana shrivelled, and the only part they ever occupied was the north-west end, now part of Venezuela, called 'Guayana'. Meanwhile, the Portuguese colonised the southern flanks (now the Brazilian state of Amapá), and the bit in between was up for grabs. It's this bit of Guiana -- the chunk in the middle -- that interested me, and eventually it became the setting for these travels. It's an area about twice the size of Great Britain, divided into three unequal, roughly rectangular shares: Guyana (formerly British Guiana), Suriname (formerly Dutch Guiana) and Guyane Française (also known as French Guiana). They are sometimes referred to -- usefully, if a little inaccurately -- as 'The Guianas', and form the only part of the South American mainland that was never either Spanish or Portuguese. What's more, they've totally resisted the influences of the continent all around, never knowing salsa or tango, Bolívar, machismo , liberation theology or even the liberation movement. In fact, independence for two of the Guianas arrived only some 150 years after the rest of the continent, and even today Guyane remains a département of France. It's almost as though the giant at their backs has never existed. Even as I write, there isn't a single road that leads from the Guianas into the world beyond. The story of how this oddity came about is surprisingly bloody. After the Spanish lost interest, it looked, for a moment, as though England might quietly acquire this coast. In 1595 Sir Walter Raleigh propagated a rumour that there was a city of gold here, that the women were biddable and cute, and that there was a fat partridge draped on every branch. Although these claims were rather obviously over-puffed, there was plenty of interest. First off, in 1597, was a barrister called John Ley, although he never planned to settle. Plenty of others did. But insolvency killed off most of their ideas, and ridicule the rest. Even the Pilgrim Fathers briefly toyed with the idea of planting New England here in Guiana (before a more sober assessment prevailed). Eventually, however, in 1604, colonisation began, with a settlement of English gentlemen in what is now Guyane. Most were dead within the year. Their colony, however, heralded the beginning of a murderous game of musical chairs. For the next two hundred years, the three great European powers -- France, Britain and Holland -- scrambled around on this coast, snatching colonies and killing the previous incumbents. These wars always began and ended in Europe, and there were nine in all (First Dutch, Second Dutch, Grand Alliance, Spanish Succession, Jenkins' Ear, Austrian Succession, Seven Years, American Independence and Napoleonic). At the end of each round no one was where they'd started, and the coast was in ruins. Modern-day Guyana changed hands nine times, Suriname six and Guyane seven. All three were seized at one point (1676) by the Dutch, and at another (1809) by Britain. Even today, the Guianas -- as I'd soon discover -- still reel from the impact of this antique chaos. Excerpted from Wild Coast: Travels on South America's Untamed Edge by John Gimlette All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher. Excerpted from Wild Coast: Travels on South America's Untamed Edge by John Gimlette All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.