River Cruising / Scenic Float in November

The Essequibo is Guyana's liquid highway, and moving on it slowly is a reward in itself. Above the confluence town of Bartica the river spreads into a maze of forested islands, black-water creeks and old Dutch trading channels, and a scenic boat journey here threads between them at the pace of the current. This is not white water; it is a float past walls of rainforest where you scan the banks for kingfishers, herons, toucans and osprey, spot three-toed sloths hanging in riverside trees, and watch for the tucuxi river dolphins that surface in the wider reaches. Island resorts and creek landings break the journey for a swim in tea-colored water, a forest walk or a stop at Bartica's frontier market. The Essequibo has drawn river travelers since Walter Raleigh's day, and its lower island belt, an easy day or overnight from Georgetown, is the most accessible slice of Guyana's interior, big rainforest scenery without a long expedition in.

The journey to the base of Angel Falls is one of the great river trips in South America. You fly in to Canaima, a Pemon village on a red-water lagoon ringed by its own falls, and from there travel by curiara, a long motorised dugout canoe, up the Rio Carrao and into the Canyon of the Churun. For hours the boat threads between the vertical walls of the tepuis, the flat-topped mountains that gave Canaima its Lost World name, until Auyantepui rises ahead and the thread of Angel Falls appears down its face. A short forest walk from the river camp reaches a viewpoint and a pool at the base. The trip runs in the wet season, when the rivers are high enough to pass the rapids and the falls are in full flow, and most itineraries add nights at Pemon-run lodges in the Kamarata Valley. It is remote, weather-dependent expedition travel, and reaching the tallest waterfall on earth this way earns it.

The River Gambia is the country, a broad tidal river that runs the whole length of the land, and cruising it upstream is the way to see a Gambia the beach resorts never show. From the estuary the river narrows into forested banks alive with birds, and the upper reaches around Janjanbureh reward the journey with the country's richest wildlife. At the River Gambia National Park, the Baboon Islands hold a long-running chimpanzee rehabilitation project, and boats drift past to see the chimps on the forested shore along with hippos, crocodiles and red colobus monkeys. Nearby stand the Wassu stone circles, a UNESCO-listed field of ancient burial megaliths thousands of years old, and Janjanbureh itself, a weathered old river town of colonial warehouses and slave-trade memory. A multi-day cruise strings these together with village landings and long, slow days on the water, watching fish eagles and kingfishers work the banks. For a traveler who wants to read a country by its river, the upper Gambia is the reason to head inland.