Liming near Linden

I have just finished reading the best modern account of life in Guyana, “The sly company of people who care” by Rahul Bhattacharya. This guy is an Indian who came for a year-long visit to Guyana and managed to capture Guyana in such an authentic way that it shocked me. He wrote most of the book in Creolese and the longer he wrote, the more Creole he became. He was so damning in most of the book but his descriptions were so perfect that it kept me reading. Finally he made the mistake of finding a “fat fowl” (gold digger) of a Guyanese girl who he never really liked and who ended up breaking his mind and turning his experience sour. Books get to me and after this happened, I wondered around feeling somber.

I got a lot of reading done this weekend as I went to a friend’s farm up the Linden highway (the same one I went to last month). We started the journey on Friday after school. This time we loaded the car with two key ingredients; mosquito spray and a mosquito net. Driving down the highway is a hand-sweating experience. The tarmac, single-lane road so obviously cuts through the jungle and you can see how the long-straight road stretches up and down over the valleys between small creeks. Parts of the road make it feel like an earthquake had just hit. At one of these undulations, I caught my friend sleeping and as the car rocketed up and down the dips, it must have felt like we were taking off in a plane. She shook herself awake as if the plane was crashing, but found me laughing as she realised what had just happened.

At the farm we met Dreads. He looks after the place when nobody is there and he helped us set up the generator and pump water for showers. On Saturday we woke up to find out why we bought a mosquito net. The outside of the net was covered in mosquitoes, all flicking their back legs waiting for a careless bit of flesh to be leaning on the net. Sadly this bit of flesh was the end of my second toe which swelled up and felt like the mosquito had drilled to my bone.

The area we were in was separated into lots of farms but each was done so inefficiently that the bush had reclaimed most of the farms and it looked like a cross between jungle and wild savannah. We walked through the farm to the edge and sat watching an eagle soar over a huge field in front of us. A guy came walking across the field towards us and after standing at a distance to suss us out, he introduced himself as Albert and quickly asked which part of New York I was from. Strangely he told me about his life in London over 10 years ago so I’m guessing he has a bad grasp of accents. He showed us round his farm, told us about constructing the Excel Centre in London and introduced us to his wife. We ate his cherries, laughed at his Creole chickens then made our excuses.

My friend made baiganee so we munched on these when we got home. Baiganee is boulangee (aubergine) deep fried in a coating of chick pea flour-paste. So basically pholourie with a slice of aubergine in the middle. After running out of these we jumped in the car and drove another 20 minutes down the Linden highway to Linden. Linden is the bauxite capital of Guyana and a bit of a smear on the pristine nature that surrounds it. The town itself is so spread out and when you manage to find the centre, it is such an annoying maze of one-way streets with no one-way signs that I just wanted to drive straight back out. But we were here for one thing and we couldn’t leave until we found it; a dutty chinee. When Guyanese leave Guyana, it is said that they don’t miss the jungle, the rum or the roti. They miss a big fat dutty chinee. I parked up and we got out to be welcomed by a guy who walked past us saying, “You two look wonderful.” 20 metres further and we stumbled upon a chinee. Linden is an awesome place.

Dutty Chinee: