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There are no Lions in the Jungle

Memoirs from my time in the Guyana. Part 1 - Welcome to the Jungle

By Laura DaykinPublished 4 years ago 22 min read
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A three toed sloth - picture taken by Kyle Moon, the mammalogist on our exhibition.

The jungle. Although there are many accounts available telling you what it is like and you have done all the research possible so you think you are prepared for it, you are not. Nowhere does it say that you should take two pairs of wellies because your first pair will be destroyed within the first week, or that you should remember to take nail clippers, or that there is no non-deet insect repellent that actually works despite what the packaging might say. You may be well versed in the flora and fauna you are likely to encounter, but that feeling of excitment that threatens to brim over and scare away the Tyra that's just been spotted is never described. It is one thing to know that the jungle exists, quite another to have lived in it.

A lot of people (mostly my traditional British, middle class family) were apprehensive upon learning I would be embarking on a month long conservation project in the remote jungles of a little know South American country. Guyana at the time of my going, had only gained it's independance from the British empire 50 years previously. Prince Harry made the trip over there to celebrate the occasion and my Grandmother, in the way Grandmother's do when they percieve your interest in a subject, made it her duty to cut articles relating to this out of every single newspaper she could lay her hands on. Meanwhile my mother insisted that Guyana was a hostile war zone and it was clearly too dangerous for me to go. I believe she was mixing Guyana up with Ghana at the time which is still a source of confusion to me several years later as neither country has been at war in either of our life times. In all my brutal honesty, she was probably subscribing to that inaccurate and yet somehow still popular belief that all South American (and African for that matter) countries are unstable and dangerous to all outsiders. I, on the other hand, percieved that this would be an excellent adventure and indeed, embracing my role as the free-spirited rebel of the family, made sure I booked a couple of extra days in order to explore Guyana's capital, Georgetown. Besides, I was going with Operation Wallacea so I wasn't on my own. My younger sister, the one of the pair of us to have followed what I believe most would call the more 'sensible' path in life, at least knew it was futile to try and dissuade me. She understands what the rest of my family have failed to grasp even now that I'm fast approaching 30, which is that the more you tell me to not do something, the more likely it is that I will throw myself headlong into it, even if that means having to move to the other end of the country which I'm in the process of doing at the time of writing this (though that's another story entirely!). My sister did however stress that she would be very worried about me which promptly lead me to leave my phone behind when I left. An impulsive move that I would later regret but at the time I reasoned that nobody was going to ruin my fun with emails enquiring as to whether I was still alive. It turns out I needn't have worried about this. Most of the time we were in places where even the satellite phone was having problems picking up signal, let alone ours having an internet connection.

The night before I left I got next to no sleep due to feeling nauseaus and came to the only reasonable conclusion: that due to the family's attitude toward my going, they had tried to poison me at the barbeque the day before. Their attempt did not work as I felt better when the time to get up came and so, with a markedly sadder goodbye to my dog than my family (I was still suspicious), I lugged a backpack that was not far off the same size and weight as me, to Heathrow airport.

The flight from Heathrow to JFK was a overnight affair. I was too excited to sleep and besides, the in-flight entertainment was far too interesting to miss! Lego Batman Movie, Moana AND Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them? Errr... yes please! The previous night of nausea and the second night of movie watching had started to take it's toll on me when I sat at the waiting area in JFK for the flight to Georgetown however. By the end of the 5 hour wait at the airport I was starting to feel delerious and I really hoped I could sleep on the second flight but that is when I definitively found out to my dismay, that I cannot sleep on planes. As sleek and modern as the first Delta airlines plane had been, this second one looked like something out of a 70's sitcom. At least they gave their passengers bigger seats back then I suppose...

The beginnings of a tropical storm were setting in when we arrived, the plane had to make a couple of attempts at landing which scared the girl next to me silly. The first thing that hit me once I got off the plane was the first thing that hits everyone upon leaving the U.K's miserable climate: the heat and humidity. Now, I should mention that the only places I have been previous to this trip were all in Europe and not even remotely as close to the equator as Guyana. So, even though I was expecting this wall once I got off the air conditioned plane, I did not expect to feel like I was sucking in several cubic litres of water with every breath for the first couple of hours. I'd done the research, I knew it was 100% humidity, it still shocked me. The airport itself was more like a metal warehouse. We walked straight off the plane and into this queue that took about one and a half hours to get to the front of. There was no air conditioning in the aiport and I'd gone around 2 days of not sleeping which made standing in this noisy, crowded line almost unbearable. I drew a blank when the man behind the desk asked why I was there. I wasn't a tourist, nor was I technically working, being a volunteer in all. I just said for conservation work which he brusquely started grilling me about. How long was I going to be in the country for? Which parts of the country was I going to? Who were my contacts while I was out there? Where was I staying while I was in Georgetown? I panicked! What if he didn't believe me? What other reason did he think I might have for visiting? I couldn't pronnounce half the places or names and forgot the the other half. I pulled out the details for the hotel I'd been booked into and this seemed to satisfy him. Our luggage had been unceremoniously dumped in a pile on the other side of this security desk. Having extracted my backpack I hurried over to the man with a sign that said 'Operation Wallacea'. I took this to mean that there would be others joining me on the way to the hotel. A girl I had seen at JFK aiport and later on our plane joined me. She had slightly green hair and I had no idea how she managed to keep wearing her green micro-fleece. I thought she must have been mad. This was Brittany and she would fast become a very good friend of mine that I am still in contact with 3 years later.

I felt sorry for the man driving us to the Windjammer hotel. He tried valiently to start up a conversation but it was very clear that we were all exhausted and our brains simply were not up to the task. I was in fact, so tired I cannot even recall what he looked like, only the impression that the car he led us to looked like it had seen better days. A couple of things he said did get through though. The airport wasn't actually anywhere near Georgetown, it did take about 45 minutes to get to the capital, and that it was a pity we were there during the rainy season as Guyana's true beauty comes out during the dry season. It turns out that Guyana doesn't have distinct seasons like we suffer in the U.K. There is no winter, spring summer or fall. It is roughly the same temperature all year round (a balmy 26-30 degrees centigrade) and the only real yearly changes is the amount of rainfall.

I watched the passing landscape as we drove. The houses were densly packed and ranged from shanty towns in one area, to houses on stilts in another, to big, gated, colonial style houses that wouldn't have looked out of place in the southern United States. Street signs indicated that we were passing from town to town but there was no space between them. Guyana's population consists of around 750,000 people that are mostly situated on the coast which is where we were driving. There were several billboards explaining why hitting women was wrong, a stark reminder that the women's rights movement hasn't come as far in some countries as the U.K.

The Windjammer hotel consists of buildings set around three sides of a swimming pool. I was shown into a room with dark wooden furniture and once I had settled in a bit I found what I am pretty certain was a blood stain on the wall next to my bed. A tad disconcerting to say the least. Being accutely aware you cannot drink the tap water and being very hot and thirsty by this point, I went to find some of the other people who were with the exhibition in the hopes that they knew where I could find water. This was when I met Hugh and Scott. Hugh was a young Irish man who was doing this trip for the second time while Scott was the exhibition leader in his early 30's and American. They got me some food and pointed out a place across the road where I could go and buy snacks and drinks. I went over to the little lady behind the counter of what was essentially a large shed with shelves in it and it was clear from the start that she did not like foreigners. She refused to accept American dollars "go and get yourself some real money white girl" she shouted as I scuttled away as fast as I could back to the hotel. The nice lady behind the bar at the hotel sold me some bottles of water and I started to make my way back to my hotel room where I thought I could sleep for a week but was waylayed by a sixty-something white haired, large man who goes by the name of Johnny. He, quite franklly, has the coolest job title I have ever come across. He is a jungle ecologist and he has so many stories I could sit and listen to him (as I did several times) for hours. It was while I was talking to him that I spotted the first bit of wildlife, a jewel green hummingbird. I had never seen one of these in real life and was captivated at the way it darted from flower to flower next to the swimming pool, its tiny wings moving so fast as to be invisible. To me it was the most exotic and beautiful thing I'd ever seen and it felt strange to me to see in the very rural setting of the hotel. Johnny explained that the birds tended to go where the flowers were which quite often meant they lived alongside humans as we of the human race have a fondness for the pretty plants that attract these birds. He invited me (and Brittany when I explained I wasn't the only one here from my team) to join the school party from Texas that were tagging along with us for a week for dinner later that evening. I gladly accepted and went to finally get some sleep.

The pool at the Windjammer hotel - photo courtesy of Camille Venier

When Brittany and I got up later that day we met another volunteer in the hotel. Her name was Camille. She was the same age as me, from Canada and would turn out to also be a very good friend that I am still in contact with to this day. She had arrived the day before and had spent the day exploring the town having been the the zoo and a market. We told her of the invitation we had recieved from Johnny and she joined us for dinner in the hotel. There was no menu, we got given what we got given and I remember eating mash potato but not much else. The conversation was excellent, Johnny was telling us about what we could expect when we got to the field sites and regaling us with stories of previous exhibitions he had undertaken in different exotic locations. As the night wore on I was distracted and more than a little delighted to see house geckos emerge in the dining room. They were tiny, around 3 inches long, a pale brown colour and traversed the vertical walls with the ease of Spiderman. Try as hard as I might, I failed to catch one. We were told that a large party of our fellow volunteers were due to come in later that evening but that the tropical storm that had threatened the safety of our landing that morning, had grown and completely grounded the flights out of the Port of Spain. It was decided that those of us that were there would still go onto the next stop and that arrangements would be made to get the others to us once they managed to get to Guyana. We had to be up at 6am the following morning to get ready to go to the lodge where we would spend a couple of days doing jungle training and learning the conservation objectives of the exhibition so we went to bed.

I don't know what they put in the sandwiches we were given in the morning but they tasted like cat puke. None of us could work out what the creamy yellow sour tasting stuff was but it was relief that we found out we were going to be taken to a shop on the way to the lodge. We were being driven in what can only be described as 4x4 mini buses. Brittany, Camille and I got to go in the same one and the driver put on a playlist I suspect he crafted for our benefit. It was full of Katy Perry, Avril Lavigne, and my personal favourite, Karma Chameleon by Culture Club. We drove past more of the same houses we'd seen the day before and an hour later we got to the shop where I stocked up on as many pringles and sweets as I could and revelled in the fact that the individual bottles of coca cola were not only bigger than you get in the U.K but also cheaper. It turns out there was a problem with one of the monster mini buses. This is my first encounter with what was to be called 'Guyana time'. Things happen on a time scale but in Guyana, urgency is a rarely thought of concept. Things happen in Guyana time so it took them about 10 minutes to work out the bus was unusable, a further hour to figure out that due to it needing a new part, the people in that bus would have to decamp to others and we'd have to leave that driver with his predicament. Considering we had a ferry to catch, this was inconveinient.

The houses began to peter out, the road became a dirt track and the trees began to appear. I seriously think people who get insulted at the tinest pot hole on our roads need to experience this one. When the monster mini buses hit these ruts you were flung from your seat. My head hit the roof and window of the bus on more than one occasion. As fun as this was to begin with, its novelty wore off after a few hours. So did Katy Perry. Threetimes we had to get out and help push the buses out of the mud slides they slid into and couldnt get out of. We came across a logging lorry that had gotten well and truely stuck in the middle of nowhere and had to try and navigate a way around it.

The very stuck logging trucks with Scott (exhibition leader) and Hannah (one of the herpetologists) in the foreground - photo courtesy of Camille Venier

I have honestly never seen such thick, unbroken and dense vegetation in my life. Either side of the track was a wall of green. On the many occasions we had to get out of the buses we saw several aptly named blue morpho butterflies. My aforementioned Grandmother has one of these framed on her landing. I have to say that my first thought when I saw the electric blue flash of one of these gigantic butterflies in the wild was that I much prefer them alive. There were also plenty of vultures circling above, I assume that the road equals road kill and that's why we saw them in such great numbers. Despite seeing them frequently during my time there, I never got used to the sight of them, fascinating as they are.

We had set off at 7:30 that morning with the assurance that it would be an 8 hour drive with pit stops. We arrived at Iwokrama River Lodge at 7 that evening making our journey 11 and a half hours. As bonkers as this sounds, the drivers of the mini buses dropped our stuff, turned around and drove straight back to Georgetown in preparation to pick up the rest of our volunteers when they eventually landed. Crazy! I wondered breifly if our driver would continue to listen to Katy Perry now his passengers were absent from his bus. Despite the darkness, I could already tell that Iwokrama River Lodge was one of the most beautiful places I had ever seen. Set on the Essequibo river, it is a series of wooden structures built in a space of the jungle that has been cleared. I could not wait to see it in the light of day. While we had our dinner, there were several bats flying all around us and someone found a giant cockroach the size of my hand! While a lot of people recoiled at the find, I was enraptured. I had bred a few species of cockroach during my reptile breeding days but this one was something else! He seemed a little indignant at being picked up and handled, cockroaches don't like light very much and he had several head torches shining on him so I couldn't say I blamed him really. Another exciting find was a little leaf litter frog but he managed a houdini-esque escape through someone's fingers before anyone could scramble for their cameras.

All the girls shared a dorm style room which housed several bunk beds and we all got talking. Brittany it turns out, has very vivid and funny dreams. One of these included a priest stepping back and stating that "this exorcism sure is good exercise" which had us bent double with laughter. The school party were actually pretty cool. There was one particular girl, Ellie, who was as into herpetofauna (before your mind goes there, its a collective term for reptiles and amphibians. An unfortunate name I will concede) as I am. We saw two more of the little house geckos I had spent a couple of hours watching in the dining room the night before, running around our dorm room. Ellie and I made a pact to catch one before we left Iwokrama.

That first night surrounded by jungle was not so much eye opening as ear opening. It is loud. While insects and birds make the day noises, at night the amphibians and an altogether different bunch of insects call to each other. In an area where there are densly packed trees and other vegetation, your line of sight is interrupted during the day, and eyes are almost useless at ground level during the night. One way animals make up for this is by calling to each other. Rainy season is also when amphibians mate in the jungle and with so many different species in our vicinity, they made up a chorus complete with soprano, tenor, bass and all the other roles inbetween. I eventually managed to drift off and got so used to these noises over the course of my time there that I had to download jungle noises and play them to go to sleep to when I got home, finding the quiet unbearable. Even now, three years later, I have to fall alseep with a noise though I have migrated over to audio books.

The next morning I got woken up at 5am by the sound of a white breasted toucan. I adore toucans so while most of the others slept I rushed to get dressed and try to find the source of the call. I found Brittany awake with the same idea in her head. We wondered around and though we could hear the toucan, we couldn't see it. We ascended the steps to the top floor of one of the wooden structures which makes up the main communal and dining area and I was stunned at what I saw. I had been right the night before, Iwokrama was, and still is, the most beautiful place I have ever seen. I have skipped through all the pictures that have been taken of our time there and not one of them does that place justice. Cattle egrets were scattered all over the lawn that lead up to the river, martins nest in the rafters of the building, parakeets, golden macaws, and red backed cardinals can all be seen flying from their nesting sites to their feeding sites for the day. The only birds of this type I had ever seen were their miserable captive counter parts in too small cages back home, this was incredible. A pair of vulchers were above the trees in the distance, indentifyable only by their characteristic circling behaviour. A pair of silver beaked tanagers had a chick in a nest they had built in a tree you could just about make out if you stood in a certain spot. A huge great green mantis flew onto the rafters. I could have cried. I love mantids and there was a wild one right in front of me. I wasn't the only one to notice the insect's arrival. A couple of the martins that were nesting nearby peeked their heads out and looked at it. The martins weren't very big birds and this was a very big mantis, you could see them sizing the giant bug up, wondering if it was worth risking an eye for this juicy treat. They hopped out onto the rafter, approaching with caution. The mantis seemed unaware of their presence at first but as the birds skipped nearer the mantis stopped preening itself and looked at them. They sat there staring at each other for a minute. I was transfixed and thoroughly on the side of the mantis. There were plenty of other bugs I liked a lot less than this magnificent specimen they could go and eat but at the same time I felt like I couldn't disrupt the delicate balance of predator and prey. The irony being that both these creatures are both these things themselves and the tables in other circumstances, could have been turned. One of the martins took another calculated hop towards the mantis. The mantis flung up its arms, a fantastic example of its defensive behaviour and caused the martin to hop back a couple of paces. The other martin however had taken flight and evidently thought to approach the mantis from behind while it was distracted. As smart as this thinking was, the mantis saw it fly and swivelled to face the bird. The bird now sat on the rafter saw a chance to come closer but the mantis, noticing the movement, swung round again which caused the airborn bird to try again and this went on for a few repetitions, neither bird gaining significantly on the mantis. Eventually the flying bird decided it had had enough of this game and flew at the mantis, not caring when it turned to square up with it. The bird grabbed the mantis but the mantis fought back. The bird dropped the mantis and it flew away with both birds hot on its tail. I do not know what happened after that. I like to think the mantis got away and judging by how soon the two martins returned to their nest, sans mantis, I think this must have been the case but I can't be sure.

The view from the communal area at Iwokrama River Lodge of a very flooded Essequibo river. Picture taken by Kenneth Butler of Green Diamond Nature Tours.

Not much happened for the rest ofthat day as we were still waiting on the other research assistants. We did get demonstrations on how to put up bird and bat netting and how to set up our hammocks for when we enter the jungle proper. I've never been great at knot tying - shoe laces are about the only thing I'd had to do before then and I had visions of me falling on my backside the first time I tried to sleep in a hammock put up by me but I figured we'd cross that bridge when we came to it. We managed to catch a little fruit eating bat in the bat net and Burton (a mammologist and our resident bat specialist) showed us all how to go about using the identification keys to ID the bat species. We also went on a short herp walk just up the road we'd come in from bt we only saw 2 frogs and we couldn't catch them to ID them.

When the rest of the research assistants did show up I was devastated to discover that one of them (that I not so affectionately call 'the whale' and will do so for the duration of this diary) was a girl I knew. She had been in my class on my degree that year and she crashed out of it due to shear laziness, an absolutely astounding ability to cheat and a complete inability to make friends due to being rude, selfish and about as disloyal as you can get. She still is one of the most detestable people I know. How on earth was I going to survive four solid weeks in the middle of the jungle with her? I went to bed that night hoping that there were enough people around that I could avoid interacting with the whale altogether.

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About the Creator

Laura Daykin

Herpetologist in training! Having muddled my way through a degree I'm now counting down the days until I start my MRes in Endagered Species Recovery and Conservation...

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