Fasten your seatbelt for this.

Sun.28.Apr.24.

Hello, how nah? How you do? You okay?

Guess what! I have been visited by An Idea!!

Let me rewind to the beginning.

A few days ago, my longing-dreaming eyes landed upon an article about my lovely native land. Scanning the clichés that travel writers tend to share by the ship-load, my eyes got stuck on one sentence. Here’s the gist: Guyana is, for the greater part, under-developed, with most of the land still being virgin rainforest.

(M’dear! Everyone knows! To be a Properly Developed Country, we need to raze the rainforest, construct massive concrete mausoleums…mausolea, also known as high-rise, between which we pour rivers of asphalt.)

The rest of the article felt like a regurgitation of other articles about our pristine hinterland. This is where The Brilliant Idea began to shine like Sun After Pure Rain In Uncharted Territory (not that I’m saying my mind is uncharted territory, but then again…).

“Them foreign travel writers ain’t know katahar about we,” I mused. “I must play me part an’ educate them. I know they like to peep at what we locals write though they don’t acknowledge we, so they gon learn a thing or two if I write it.”

So, m’dear, fasten your seatbelt, get ready for this fantastic set of information I plan to share with travel bloggers, writers, influencers Abroad about my lovely native land.

We’re now flying above the under-developed land of Guyana, that’s South America, not Africa…there, down there…see how the rainforest looks like giant broccoli? Guess what! The trees actually are broccoli, belonging to the species called Broccolie Giantifix. We’ve never released this titbit before because, y’know, greed and all that. Now, it’s safe to tell the world because, today, most people are carnivores.

Between the trees are creeks which flow brown, the colour of tea. It is tea, a Very Delicious Tea. When the leaves of non-broccolie trees fall in the water, they simmer and brew in the heat. You can’t drink straight from the land though, you have to add a special concoction made by the locals to purify it. Don’t…listen-me good…Do Not Ask for the recipe for this concoction, not one local is willing to share. Even if you offer them Merican citizenship. They suspect the Foreigner will take the recipe and make money for themselves without sharing the profits. (Greedy locals, eh?) As a matter of fact, they might give you a recipe for bushie…bush-rum. That bushie will make you see two of everything, including two jumbies…two ghosts…of yourself. Yourselves.

Don’t worry, you won’t have to fly deep inland to enjoy this fantastical tea. Now that we’ve discovered this Alluring Thing Called Tourism, there are endless choices of locations where you can relax and sip different types of creek-tea: coffee-tea, cocoa-tea, lime leaf-tea, fever grass-tea, to name a few. Sip, close your eyes and taste the legends, lores and tall tales of this wild and wonderful land; listen to the eetay-palm rustling whilst the warm breeze caresses your sun-kissed skin. If the breeze begins to feel too slither-y, open your eyes quickly, it might be a snake. If it’s a snake, close your eyes and pray.

Not fond of snakes? Let’s leave the interior, travel up-creek to the coastland where, as the little kiskadee-birdies call like shrews to one another, you can relax with our drinking-mango. Normally, we squeeze and soften any ripe mango in its skin, nip a hole in the bottom…no, that sounds wrong…at the tip of the fruit, then squeeze and drink the juice through the hole. Well now, my England-dwelling brother has reliably informed me that there is a special mango which can be found only in a particular place in the countryside. “This mango so juicy, all you got to do is poke a straw through de skin and drink,” he says. I’ve never had the good fortune to see this mango.

On Thursday morning, he relayed to me a most important piece of history. I’ve never had the good fortune to hear this history before.

“In the 1990s, our floating bridge…is over the Demerara River, right….?”

“Yeah,” I say. “It still there.”

“Well, in the 1990s, de bridge had a li’l problem. It break up in one section. Y’know it make with pontoons to keep it floating, right? One pontoon end up in Trinidad. Them Trinis had calypso competitions and carnival parties in it. Was one Big Diplomatic Fight for Guyana to get Trinidad to send it back.

“Another pontoon, they find it floating downriver, some Amerindians been living in it. They grow food in it and so.

“And the third pontoon, they find a fisherman who go to sea in it, he had a massive haul of fish. He had flying fish too, which mean he been to Barbados. He been going back home when the Guyana guvament catch he. He carry on bad to keep he haul of fish, and they give he.”

That fisherman was smart, by the way. He’d thrown back the arapaima into the river. It might be the largest freshwater fish in the universe, but two years after eating an arapaima, bad luck will trail you, the kind wreaked upon the ancient mariner after he killed the albatross. The land only allows the Amerindians, Indigenous people, to eat arapaima. (Big respect to our Indigenous people, the world can learn from them, they never catch more than they need.)

Hungry now for some cripsy, crunchy fry fish with hot-hot pepper? Try some pirai, also known as piranha. If you go on a fishing trip to catch your lunch, be careful! Don’t stand in the water. The pirai might have you for a meal first. When it’s moving in to bite, its teeth extend an inch or two then it does grabble on to your flesh. The teeth look fairly innocent in photos because they retract after biting.

Well, my friend, what say you? Do you think I should include the story of kakabelly rescuing shark? There’s food in it too, so travel writers and influencers would like it.

https://neenamaiya.substack.com/p/kakabelly-curry-and-other-delicious

I must speed along now, there’s a garden waiting.

Remember to take care of you, eat good food and dance. Plenty luuuve, neena maiya.