Guyana: Into a Lost World
- Lawrence D'Silva
- Oct 30
- 22 min read
Updated: Oct 31
A journey through one of the world’s last untouched rainforests, and a country on the brink of change.
Changing times
In 2023, I found myself a little lost. My plan was to move away from my office-based career in ethical investment and into media full-time. I had already worked on a BBC David Attenborough documentary, as well as on-camera, as a specialist reporter-presenter on prime-time TV. Things were good. I had a well-known agent, and frankly, I was surprised at my own progress. I was loving the work, but like anything, there were downsides. At times, it was frustrating, but it came with the territory.
At the same time, the ground beneath journalism and television was giving way. Audiences’ attention was being hijacked by social media, advertising revenues were vanishing, and the business models that had supported newsrooms and documentaries for decades were in freefall. Journalism, long regarded as the “fourth estate” - society’s check on power - was being hollowed out; documentaries, once the crown jewels of television, looked increasingly like relics. Just as I looked forward to building on some early successes, the whole landscape started to look fragile, fleeting. By 2025, with AI flooding the media space, even that feels like an understatement.
What I knew for certain was that I loved the very things that were being lost: depth, substance, story, and nuance. The chance to dig, to linger, to watch a story unfold rather than slice it into soundbites.
Following the thread
Complaints aside, for a few months I had been watching the remarkable happenings in Guyana, an ex-British sugar-growing colony bordering Venezuela and Suriname. It’s the second poorest nation in the ‘western hemisphere’, and yet with Exxon-Mobil having just struck oil, Guyana’s GDP growth was the highest in the world.
As a boy, we had a Guyanese family friend, Julio, from Georgetown, the capital, where most of the country’s mere 800,000 people live. He would tell me stories of a hazy, happy childhood in his lilting Caribbean accent. He told me how it was the only English-speaking country in South America, but had more in common with Trinidad or Jamaica than it did with any of the places that surrounded it.
There were other connections too: a visiting Guyanese law student I had once met had recently become a government minister there. Intrigued, I discovered that the ruling party had an unusual environmental message. They were arguing that they did not have the funds to develop sustainably, and that paradoxically, it was only due to the money generated from oil which would allow them to realistically finance and build a low-carbon economy for the day when the oil was gone.
I could see the logic, though it sits uneasily. But the decision has already been made, and the rigs are pumping. For a small nation hoping to lift itself, the lure of oil is hard to resist.
Digging deeper, I also discovered our current British Deputy Prime Minister, David Lammy, was building a rainforest research station there, in his parents’ homeland, Guyana.
I sent his office an email to find out more, and to my great surprise, we were soon sitting together having a beer in a small bar tucked deep inside London’s Houses of Parliament. A shared interest in a tiny nation with a population smaller than Birmingham were grounds for an engaging conversation. He also seemed particularly curious as to why I was so interested in his project.
Guyana is a country that’s over 80% impenetrable rainforest, and it connects directly to the biggest one of them all: the Amazon. Currently, it has one of the lowest deforestation rates in the world. There are barely any roads into ‘the interior’. They are too expensive to build, and as such, logging trucks (illegal or otherwise) can’t easily get access. What’s more, felling of trees is also prevented in a different way. Several years ago, I worked on a finance project with a woman from the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund. She told me how Norway essentially paid Guyana not to cut down its forest, to the tune of $250 million. Of course, the wealth that ‘progressive Norway’ enjoys is all funded by oil originally, but that’s how the world is: weird and full of contradictions.
Norway essentially paid Guyana not to cut down its forest, to the tune of $250 million.
There are several big questions here: what will happen when Guyana receives its huge new oil wealth? Will the ‘resource curse’ ring true? Will the forests be protected, or will new roads be financed that allow the forest to be felled? Will the country deliver on its promises of a low-carbon development plan for the future? These are the questions that David and I chew over. He tells me his rainforest research centre aims to be a place where local and foreign scientists can go to study the forest. He explains that most of Guyana's people are surprisingly cut off from the rainforest, even though, in size terms, it totally dominates the country. Travel is difficult in Guyana, and at present, there's no place for researchers to go that's properly accessible from the capital. He tells me that his project, 'Sophia Point', will also serve as an education hub, connecting the next generation to a wilderness so few of its citizens ever get to visit. For him, the forest is far more than just its intrinsic value. It’s a storehouse of carbon, of undiscovered medicines, of important indigenous knowledge. As we finish our drink, he encourages me to make a visit.
I decide to pitch an idea to the BBC, and they like my outline for a Panorama-style documentary. As is the norm when pitching to media companies, meetings are had, momentum is built, everything looks rosy, until it’s not. This really is totally normal, and what you sign up for when pitching ideas. You develop a thick skin. They eventually come back, and in their email subject, they typo ‘Ghana’ instead of ‘Guyana’. In doing so, they accidentally illustrate their main fear: that the country is not well known enough for a British audience, so they can’t justify commissioning a film.
Can I blame them? Not really. In terms of viewing figures for their home market, they probably have a point. But I’m so intrigued by this story, I’m keen to go anyway.
A flicker of an Idea
Before making a trip, I'm keen to pick up some insider tips. Later that month I decide to go to a Guyanese diaspora community event near Elephant and Castle in London. I speak to an Indo-Guyanese man in his seventies with a booming voice. He really does speak much louder than the other fifty or so people in the stuffy, brightly lit room. Over rum punches served from paper cups, he begins talking about his life and how he moved to the UK. How almost twice the number of Guyanese live overseas than actually live in the country. How politics still operates along racial lines. I’m enjoying this chat, and learning lots. He then proclaims, even louder than normal, and with a broad grin, that his ‘wife is a red-skinned n*****’. The words hang in the air, loud enough for everyone to hear. I immediately curl my toes and sink into my chair, scanning the room to see who else is listening. I want the ground to swallow me up.
Someone else at the gathering later tells me that this type of language is just how older Guyanese talk. It’s a bit of a shock, given this is 2025, we are in London, but it’s their culture and that’s how they speak. The translation is that his wife is of part African and part Ameri-Indian heritage. That moment - a single phrase collapsing race, history and identity into one, makes me remember a very different kind of documentary: the Up series. It’s far from the factual, geopolitical, news-driven idea I had pitched to the BBC. It’s much more human than that. The idea behind it is that a group of seven-year-olds from different walks of life are filmed, and then revisited every seven years. The programme started in the UK in the 1960s. Every seven years, a new series comes out. The British participants are now nearly seventy, and it’s absolutely amazing the way you can sit at a TV and spend a few hours watching a group of young kids grow up, become adults, change, evolve, and eventually enter old age. Could this documentary format work in Guyana?
My favourite version of this programme is shot in South Africa. A group of seven-year-olds from different races and backgrounds were filmed back in 1994, just as apartheid was coming to an end. These films work best when a country is undergoing monumental change. It strikes me that Guyana might have all of these elements, and new ones too. And so I book a ticket - not to film or make anything happen, but simply to witness, to see, to ponder, to make the journey.
Georgetown, Guyana
It's early December, and I stay at a B&B on Foreshaw Street, Georgetown, run by Syeda, an Indo-Guyanese lady in her sixties. Like many, she left the country in her youth. Married to a Canadian for many years, she is one of the very few who have chosen to return. She has many dogs that bark at the multi-coloured Toucans flying about in the trees of her garden. Rescuing dogs is her passion, and she spends part of the first morning popping out on calls to attend to abandoned animals. She arrives back looking pleased but rather sweaty. The windows on her old Daihatsu don’t wind down because thieves broke into it, which upset the electrics, and there’s no spare parts dealer here.
At lunchtime, she offers to take me down to the market and introduces me to all her pals there. I make some small talk with the stallholders over mounds of vegetables. She proudly exclaims to them that “if I had ever had a child, he would have looked like him - half-caste!” After lunch, Syeda heads back, and I amble off to explore some more of the city.
The cathedral is one of the tallest wooden structures in the world, but sadly, it’s closed for renovation. Next to it are the burnt-out stumps of another ex-colonial building. For a rest, I loiter for a few minutes beneath the ‘no loitering’ signs (which are commonplace) and to my luck, it is opened up by a cleaner and I manage to sneak in behind them. From both the inside and the out, it has the appearance of an oversized clapboard church you’d expect on a Midwestern prairie.
Whilst the cathedral is well kept, many other colonial-era downtown buildings are crumbling or structurally condemned. Not all of them, but enough to be defining. Locals warn me that the surrounding area does not have the best reputation. Within ten meters of stepping back outside, I am accosted by an old woman with three teeth, stooped over and dressed in purple. I can only assume she is a prostitute, as she soon starts spitting garbled profanities and making a series of unappetising gestures. She’s quite horrifying, like a cartoon drawing of the world's most awful witch. I cross the road quickly and seek refuge in what I’m told is one of only two bookshops for hundreds of miles. It’s excellent and feels like stepping back in time. All the books have a sober 'classic' look to them, with none of the fancy covers I’m usually swayed by. The book I walk out with is ‘Wild Coast’ by John Gimlette. It’s both a hilarious and informative portrait of modern Guyana, and also sets it in the context of its immediate neighbours: Suriname, Venezuela, Brazil, and French Guiana.
Georgetown streets: where South America meets the Caribbean
I have several more days in Georgetown before my big trip into ‘the interior’. One morning, I get chatting to a friendly gardener in the city's botanical gardens who tells me he’s very proud that Rishi Sunak is Prime Minister of the UK. I tell him that even though I’m non-partisan, I agree with him. Sunak may not have won an election, but being the first PM descended from colonial subjects is a milestone in British history. I remember when the news was announced: to me, and so many others, it felt like a big deal.
The gardener is Indo-Guyanese, representing the largest ethnicity in the country at around 40%. He has never been to either Britain or India. His pride in Sunak is a reminder of how deeply colonial history still runs through this place, and how it first brought people like him here.
Guyana is a country largely made up of the descendants of immigrants, transported here by British sugar plantation owners. Originally, all the fields were worked by African slaves, whose descendants now make up the second biggest ethnic group at 30%.
The Indians came later. When slavery was outlawed, the British establishment faced a problem: who would cut the cane? Their solution was the so-called ‘indentured labourer’. Shiploads of Indians were sent across the oceans to toil for years in the cane fields. On paper, it was voluntary; in reality, most were among the poorest in Indian society, tricked into pressing an inky thumbprint onto contracts they could neither read nor comprehend. Recruiters spun tales of Caribbean places with names borrowed from Hindu scripture, as if they were sending pilgrims rather than labourers. In the early years, it was slavery in all but name - the whip still cracked, and conditions were brutal.
Once indentureship was over, Indians often received small parcels of land, and this explains why the Indo-Guyanese tend to be more rural than the Afro-Guyanese. The country itself feels syncretic, a place where histories, tongues, and faiths have fused into something uniquely its own.
But sugar was the reason for it all. Plantations were hungry for labour, and sugarcane defined Guyana’s economy for centuries. From the air, Georgetown is still ringed by a grid of long, narrow fields carved out for sugarcane.
After my walk around the botanical gardens, I head to the National Art Gallery and then the National Museum. Both are very well curated, but strangely, I’m the only visitor in either; in both, the staff have to switch on the lights just for me. It shouldn’t really come as a surprise - I’ve been here three days and haven’t seen any other tourists, not even in my B&B.
On my last evening before my trip inland, I head down to the sea wall for some beers and snacks at sunset. It’s a Georgetown tradition, and hundreds gather every night. Here I also meet my local travel agent. I don’t usually use one, but interior travel is not possible without one. Most tourists fly to a remote airstrip in the interior, but I’m taking a bus - the only bus. Along with my ticket, he hands me a heavy black bin bag and asks me to give it to a guy called Eudel at my destination in two days time. I check the contents - some vehicle parts and a collection of nuts and bolts of assorted sizes - and bid him goodnight.
One road to the interior
The following evening, I wait in the shelter amongst the dozing policemen. On the walls hang photos of minibuses marooned in mud, tipped at precarious angles, their passengers huddled around outside, wondering what to do. No civilisation for miles around and no phone signal either. Will they be there for hours? Days? Is this what I also have in store? I sit down and wait for the bus, feeling fidgety and slightly worried.
We finally set off, a few minutes before sunset. The traffic is stop-start getting out of Georgetown. At one point, we pull over to the side of the road, and a man appears outside, sliding a large metal suspension arm through the window of the bus for another vehicle stranded further down the road. It doesn’t bode well.
We are packed in like sardines, and to my surprise, no one really speaks English - not one of the fifteen other passengers is Guyanese, nor, I’m told, a tourist. I hear a bit of Spanish and Portuguese being mumbled, but even then, no one speaks to each other. I wonder where they are all going, but I don’t have the words to ask them. I assumed I’d have a little bit of space, but that is quickly filled with various cans of engine oil and other paraphernalia that couldn’t fit on the roof rack, which is largely occupied by reserve cans of fuel. Guyana may be sitting on one of the world’s great oil finds, but where we’re heading, there isn’t a petrol station in sight.
As we leave the city, the driver receives multiple calls, just as I start nodding off. His ringtone is a recording of a squealing pig. It sounds like something being dragged to slaughter. At first, everyone chuckles, bemused, but by the eighth time, the sound is more disturbing than funny.
Luckily, before long, the driver’s phone signal drops away, and the road turns to the thick red mud of the interior. The entire night is ahead of us. I have no idea how we aren’t stuck already, but sheer speed and momentum seems to be the trick. When he isn’t maxing out the van, the driver squirms about all over the road to choose the best path and keep the bus going through the thick mud. It is incredibly, mind-achingly bumpy, and we regularly leave our seats as we are thrown up in the air. Outside, it’s now pitch black, and all I can see is illuminated crimson soil stretching out in a single, never-ending line before us. Above us. The Milky Way shines at its very brightest, and before long, the road starts its way through the rainforest. Either side of the road, the dark silhouettes of the trees grow ever taller, and I begin to feel smaller and smaller, as we push on through into the green heart of the interior.
I begin to stop resisting being thrown about. Everyone bashes into their neighbouring passenger so relentlessly that apologies would be tedious - it’s quite refreshing. Soon, the bus music starts up. First on the tape machine is Take That, which, after several whole-album repeats, is replaced by The Backstreet Boys. About 8 hours in, in the middle of the night, on comes “I believe I can fly, I believe I can touch the sky”. I’m so delirious by this stage that I start laughing out loud at how fitting this is. I sit there thinking how glad I am that on the return leg, I will indeed be flying. Just like 99.9% of the tourists who come to Guyana choose to do.
Eventually, the early hours of the morning roll around, and I do manage a few uncomfortable periods of sleep. It’s actually when the bumping stops that I wake up, normally for the multiple police checkpoints along the road. Out we get and into the hut we all file. Several people are Venezuelans, some are Cubans. Others are Brazilians, heading home to Brazil, where the bus ends up. Most people are dealt with pretty quickly. I, on the other hand, take much longer. I state I’m a tourist, but they tell me “no tourists take the bus.” I claim to be British, but they say, “you don't look British.” I show them my British passport, and they see my surname is one of the most common names in Brazil. At this point, I’m feeling flustered but trying to look calm. I’m tempted to explain why some Indians have those kinds of names, but I fear it will just add to the confusion. To them, I must have seemed absurdly suspicious: an ethnically ambiguous man, with a Brazilian surname, on a British passport, bouncing through the rainforest at midnight.
To aid their enquiry, they set me a language test. I spend the next little while having a fake conversation where I have to say vapid sentences about my life back in the UK and what the weather is like. This checkpoint, in the middle of the forest, feels a very long way away from home. After I vocalise a wide range of pleasantries, they soon realise that I really am a tourist, and I’m sent on my way. Relief.
The bus barrels on for many more hours. The music becomes a particularly frantic soca beat that lasts for 45 minutes non-stop. It puts everyone in a sort of over-alert trance. Nonetheless, it is a lot less spooky than the musical weirdness that preceded it: a tune that lent towards the rap end of the hip-hop spectrum and had a very loud, shouty chorus of “The monkeys come out at night!…. Let those monkeys out!…. OOO AAAA AAAA AAAA!!!” When you’re in the rainforest, in the dark, that song does strange things to the mind.
As the dawn breaks, we still hurtle along the endless mud road, racing ever faster to make the 6 am crossing over the Essequibo river. We make it, with moments to spare. The boat is not a boat, but a floating wooden platform lashed with motors, carrying us and a few ancient, roaring lorries. Once British army trucks, now conscripted for the interior’s gold, diamond, and bauxite mines. This mining is not obvious on the drive; the trucks are the only giveaway. When viewed from above, though, the forest near the main road bears the scars. Will oil mean more money for roads, resulting in more mining and deforestation? It seems more than likely.
The interior: Iwokrama Rainforest
The stillness was almost disorienting after so many hours of motion. It was a bloody relief to get to the lodge. A circular clearing in the forest with a collection of very comfortable wooden huts. Isolation here comes at a price: nowhere in the interior is cheap to stay. Even for the lodge to get any food on site is a challenge; to the extent that I had to place all of my meal orders several days ago in Georgetown.
After a basic meal, I spent much of the day recovering before being met by my guide, an Amerindian man in his 30s named Tichi. His people are Guyana’s first inhabitants, rooted here for many thousands of years, yet today they make up only one in ten of the population. Our conversation is halting, his shyness noticeable. It’s a common stereotype, but easy to see why: there are so few people here that I imagine I’d be the same if I’d grown up in this world.
We have some Brazilian coffee before heading into the forest on foot. As we set off, he searches for common ground and brings up football. I like the sport, but my knowledge is terrible. Luckily, the tenor of our talk soon changes. He tells me that he loves the Mexican football team, saying their whole team is full of people like himself and how he feels closer to them than to either the Afro- or Indo-Guyanese - a reminder that his people’s ties run deep into the Indigenous Americas and cut across modern-day ideas such as country borders.
We leave the fresh, bright airiness of the lodge’s clearing behind and are immediately thrown into the dark breathing mass of green. This is one of the last four pristine tropical forests left on earth. Tichi crouches down and illuminates a burrow with his torch. At the entrance sits a ‘Goliath bird-eating spider’, with an eight-legged span as wide as a dinner plate. It soon retreats into its lair, and we continue. As we walk, the ground underfoot feels spongy and the air is thick. Our path is cut, but we still carry large curved blades across our shoulders for patches that have already grown back.
We are on our way to a structure called the ‘Iwokrama Canopy Walkway’ that allows scientists and tourists to access the tree tops, where the flora and fauna are very different from those on the forest floor. We rarely stop for too long. Stop in the wrong place, and you’ll be under attack. An army of aggressive ants up your leg, a family of mosquitoes at your ear, a leech attaching to your shoe and shimmying up towards your netheregions. A relaxing place it is not.
When we get there, we climb up to the tree top walkway and wait. There are none of the scientists or tourists it was built for; indeed, I’m the only guest at the lodge. We are alone. It’s lighter up here, but dusk is descending, and the branches of the great ‘greenheart’ trees are silhouetted against the indigo of the sky. Half an hour passes, we sit still, and the susurrus of insects rises into a full nocturnal symphony. Then, suddenly, crashes come from above us, and the branches blur. Two large howler monkeys come to a rest close to us and start delivering their guttural, primal chant. These are the loudest land mammals on earth, and their call rolls out over the landscape like thunder.
Tichi later tells me how lucky we are to have seen this at such close quarters. I think he expected me to look more amazed. It was a lovely sight, but I feel a touch of guilt. For those of us who have travelled a lot of the world, we don't always realise just how lucky we are. I know this is the case for me.
I also feel a touch of guilt because I’ll admit, I don’t necessarily enjoy the rainforest as much as I feel I ought to. I appreciate it greatly in a cerebral kind of way: for its global importance for life on earth. I appreciate watching magnificent things on TV, which camera crews have spent half a year capturing just one new animal behaviour, whilst I sit on a comfy sofa with a beer and watch. The reality of the rainforest is very different from these things. There is a reason that relatively very few people live in the forest itself. It is dark, it’s claustrophobic and oppressive, and many things are trying to bite you. Ironically, I actually find the best places to appreciate it are from the road or a clearing. Doing so allows you to get far enough away from it to actually get some perspective and to be able to look out over it. Being inside the forest is a bit like how it might be hard to appreciate the beauty of a huge whale if you are trapped inside its belly.
I spend the next few days exploring the Iwokrama area with local guides. It’s always dark and damp, but rewarding. As tough as it is magical. So many creatures are colourful, especially the butterflies, and there are more species of them here, in just this forest, than in all of Europe combined. Their colours flicker like confetti where the sunlight slips through the canopy.
Rupununi savannah: tourism gone right
Several days later, I’m picked up in a battered Toyota flatbed pickup in the heat of the midday sun. I like the sunlight. Equatorial latitudes such as this tend to be a lot cloudier and muggier than the neighbouring tropics. The driver deflates the tyres slightly to get better traction in the mud, and we slowly rumble on through the forest, massive trees towering over us on both sides.
To my great surprise, the only other passenger on the back of the truck is an Englishman with blonde hair, hidden beneath a wide-brimmed hat. He tells me he was born and raised in Rushden, a tiny middle-England village in Northamptonshire. Several years ago, he swapped that life for another - a tiny middle-rainforest village on the other side of the world.
He is returning from a year of earning money working at the local Sainsbury's, back in the UK. Later that day, he would be reunited with his Amerindian wife and children, who, he told me, had never even been inside a supermarket, let alone been to Georgetown.
After several hours, the trees abruptly stop, and the wide-open vistas of the Rupununi savannah begin. The emptiness compared with the forest is almost eerie. The driver carries a large satellite phone the size of a brick but twice as long, complete with a pull-out aerial. He calls ahead to Caiman House, my next stop. We are running late, so he pins the throttle, and for the rest of the journey the truck spends as much time airborne as on the ground, hammering across the ruts and dips in the track.
Caiman House embodies the kind of sustainable tourism Guyana’s government says it hopes to build with its oil wealth. It wasn’t set up by the state, so whether they’ll deliver is another matter. The black caiman - a giant member of the alligator family - was once hunted to near extinction, its leather coveted by Brazil’s luxury shoe industry in the 1990s. For many locals, selling hides across the border was one of very few ways to earn a living. Today, some of those hunters are employed in research: Caiman House runs a conservation project funded partly by paying guests. Capturing the animals is vital, allowing them to be weighed, measured, and checked for signs of population health. This isn’t simply for visitors - again, I’m the only guest here - but an essential part of the work. And so begins my evening activities:
Back from the Brazilian border
My time in Guyana was drawing to an end. Before my turnaround point, I visit the magnificent Kaitiuer Falls. Twice the height of Victoria Falls, and completely isolated, without a cafe or any civilisation in sight; just forest-covered tepuis (table-top mountains) that inspired parts of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. It feels like a glimpse of what the planet looked like before we arrived.
Walking around the rim of the falls, it feels like a fantasy. Mist drifts upwards in slow ribbons. Even the creatures are strange and unique, such as the Kaieteur golden rocket frog, a tiny species that lives only inside the water-holding leaves of the giant plants in the area.
I also visit Sophia Point, the rainforest research centre being set up by David Lammy. Ironically, the person David has employed to run it is a ginger-haired Scotsman called Sam - the Scottish were the main plantation owners in Guyana during colonial times.
Eventually, I reach the dusty frontier town of Lethem, on the Brazilian border. Portuguese is spoken as much as English; pickup trucks idle in the heat, and the whole place hums with a faint ‘Wild West’ energy.
It is sweltering hot as I board a tiny plane at Lethem's airstrip. Soon, I am amongst soft, fluffy clouds, looking down at the single dirt road stretching back to Georgetown. We fly close to it all the way, presumably for safety; there would be no other place to land if we needed to.
As I stare down at the endless forest, I think again of the Up Series. What a fascinating country this is: raw, diverse, and right on the brink of change. Imagine following a group of seven-year-olds from every background, revisiting them every seven years as their country transforms. The beauty of these films lies in their patience; they let time itself do the storytelling.
So much oil has the potential to make a tiny population of 800,000 people very rich. Will it happen? Will ethnic tensions persist as a problem? Will the forest stay standing? Will oil riches actually allow a low-carbon economy to be planned and developed, for when the oil runs out? Will Venezuela continue to claim that Guyana's oil reserves belong to them? All these themes, and so many others, can be explored via an Up Series. The advantage is that none of these themes have to be approached in a way that is too 'try hard' - the downfall of many a documentary - they simply come out, slowly and clearly over many years.
Exit
Back in Georgetown, I have a final couple of days before leaving. One evening, I have dinner with the country's main news anchor and a gaggle of other journalists. The next, I find myself dining with a British business magnate who is attempting to reintroduce the wolf to Scotland and runs conservation projects all over the world through his foundation. He's the first other tourist I've met. That's the thing about Guyana: you go there and get introduced to all sorts of interesting people, very easily. Everyone knows everyone. On my last night, Syeda, the B&B owner, throws an impromptu party.
The next morning, I am gone. After having my bags emptied twice by two different policemen, I am London-bound. As the plane lifts over the coast, the Atlantic below is split in two - one half a thick, silty brown caused by the muddy Essequibo river, pouring straight from the heart of the rainforest, the other the vivid turquoise of the Caribbean. The border between them looks painted on, the colours struggling to mix. It's a striking sight.
As the colours below begin to blur - brown fading into blue - I think of the country I’ve left behind: small, raw, abundant, and poised for transformation. It deserves to be seen, not just in headlines, but through the slow, generous gaze of time.
I may not be the one to film it, but I hope someone does - perhaps a Guyanese filmmaker who can tell it from within. I’d love to help make that happen; to plant the seed, to be part of the conversation. For now, I leave with a feeling of hope and potential.
Lawrence D'SIlva
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