Bus Journey Into the Interior

November 21, 2008 9:00pm

I'm on Waterloo St. at the depot for Intraserv Bus Lines. It is also the home of Gerry's "the only all-night karaoke bar in Georgetown." Listening to the singers, I not sure whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. It is hot...not a breath of air anywhere. Brazilians, Guyanese and one white man wander about, drink cold beer, munch on roasts on a stick (a Brazilian dish) and wait for the bus. We have all shown our ticket and been weighed with our baggage (I kid you not, we have to be weighed to be sure we are not over our baggage weight limit...at first I thought I'd made a mistake and was going to fly out on a plane.

But no, around 8 pm an ancient...20+ year old Marco Polo pulls up. Over the next hour, luggage gets stowed, passengers take their assigned seats, the drivers confer and finally the old bus lumbers through the dark streets of Georgetown. For the next hour and a half, the ride is relatively uneventful as we travel the paved highway from Georgetown to Linden. Sometime around 11pm we arrive in Linden. After maneuvering through the streets, the bus stops outside an enclosure...the driver announces, "Have your passports available and check with the police." We go inside a small office building where a police officer checks our passports against his list.

We re-board the bus, wind through more back streets, through the bauxite facility and on towards the Demerara River Bridge. The road south of the river is a moonscape of potholes...the driver steers the bus into the ditch, across both lanes of traffic, down the edge of the road...all in an attempt to dodge the potholes...he is marginally successful.

Into the pitch black night, headlights boring two holes in the darkness, the bus careens down the single lane gravel road. For the next nine hours the bus lumbers southward. At times it approaches 45 mph, but most of the time the driver shifts down from 5th to 4th to 3rd...and on many occasions he stops, revs the engine, shifts into 1st gear gets up some speed, upshifts to 2nd holding his breath that we will get through the sand pit, the mud hole or the mini-lake-sized puddle that covers the road.

Just after daylight the bus stops at the bottom of a hill...the passengers disembark...up ahead a tractor trailer truck is stuck...its drive wheels spinning uselessly in the mud described by one onlooker as "slicker than greased monkey shit"...

Note the fallen tree stump on the left side of the road. Not only was the driver trying to back down the hill, he had to (try to) maneuver around that stump. I thought we were here for the long haul...but here in Guyana, especially this part of Guyana, we do things 'the Rupununi Way".

When you have an obstruction...move it. From out of truck from somewhere, came a chainsaw and that was the end of that little problem. If you look closely, you can see our bus at the bottom of the hill.

Our bus driver was not about to let that truck have another chance at the hill and get stuck again...nope, he PASSED the truck while it was backing down the hill...on a road that is barely one full lane wide...and roared up the hill.

In our next adventure on the Road to Surama we will cross the Essequibo River.