Coverage / Guyana
Guyana
South America
Guyana is South America's only English-speaking country, a stretch of Amazon rainforest, savannah and Atlantic coast on the continent's northern shoulder that is culturally part of the Caribbean. More than eighty per cent of it is forest, threaded by the wide Essequibo river and broken by Kaieteur Falls, a single 226-metre curtain deep in the interior. The Iwokrama reserve and the Rupununi savannah hold jaguar, giant river otter, giant anteater, black caiman and harpy eagle, much of it protected and guided by Amerindian communities. The capital, Georgetown, is a lattice of Dutch drainage canals and wooden colonial architecture facing the sea.
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What you can do in Guyana
Wildlife Safaris
- Iwokrama ForestFeb Mar Apr Sep Oct NovIwokrama is one of the last great intact rainforests, and it is set up to let you see the animals almost nowhere else offers on the ground. This is jaguar country in the fullest sense: the laterite forest road between Kurupukari and Annai has one of the highest rates of wild jaguar sightings anywhere in the Americas, and night drives here regularly turn up the big cat, plus ocelot, tapir and red brocket deer. The Essequibo and its creeks carry giant river otters, black caiman and Arapaima, while the 154-metre canopy walkway lifts you thirty metres into the mid-canopy for scarlet macaws, toucans, red howler monkeys and, with patience, the Guianan cock-of-the-rock at its nearby lek. More than 500 bird species and 200 mammals have been recorded across the reserve. It is remote, low-volume and community-linked, the kind of place where a handful of guests share a forest the size of a small country.
- North RupununiFeb Mar Apr Oct Nov DecThe North Rupununi is Guyana's land of giants. This is the surest place in South America to watch wild giant river otters, boisterous family groups that fish the Rupununi's ponds and channels, and to see giant anteaters ambling across open savannah in the early morning. After dark the river belongs to black caiman, the Amazon's largest predator, which reach five metres here and are studied and tagged at Yupukari. The wetlands hold the world's best wild collection of Victoria amazonica, the giant water lily whose pads span nearly two metres and whose flowers open white one night and turn pink the next. Add giant river turtles, capybara, four caiman species, and around 400 bird species, from jabiru storks to the endemic Rio Branco antbird, and you have one of the continent's richest freshwater ecosystems, worked by Makushi and Wapishana communities who guide almost every trip.
Witness / Attend
- MashramaniGeorgetownFebMashramani is Guyana turning its independence into a street party. Held every 23 February to mark the day the country became a republic in 1970, Mash, as everyone calls it, is a Caribbean carnival with a Guyanese accent: a day-long parade of costume bands, towering floats and music trucks winding through central Georgetown, powered by soca, calypso, chutney and the national obsession with the steel pan. The word is Amerindian, taken to mean a celebration after cooperative hard work, and the season around it fills February with calypso and soca monarch contests, a children's parade, a masquerade tradition of flouncers and mother sallies, and cook-ups across the city. It is participatory rather than a show for tourists: you pick a spot along the route, or join a band, and move with the crowd. For a country that spends most of the year pointing visitors at the rainforest, Mash is the one time the capital itself is the reason to come.
- Rupununi RodeoLethemMar AprThe Rupununi Rodeo is the wildest weekend in Guyana's interior, and nothing else on the calendar shows this side of the country. Every Easter the savannah town of Lethem, hard on the Brazilian border, fills with vaqueros, the Amerindian and Brazilian-influenced cowboys who work the great cattle ranches of the south, for two days of bull riding, bronco riding, wild-cow milking, barrel racing and bareback events. It began in the 1980s as a working ranchers' meet and has grown into one of the country's biggest cultural tourism events, drawing thousands who camp, dance to Brazilian forro and Guyanese soca through the night, and eat savannah beef off open fires. Beyond the arena it is a window on the ranching heritage the McTurks, the Melvilles and the Wapishana and Makushi communities built out here, a frontier culture of horses and open grassland that feels closer to the Brazilian Pantanal than to coastal Georgetown. Come for the riding, stay for the savannah under a sky with no light for a hundred miles.
Best months at a glance
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