After visiting on foot the downtown area near the National Museum and having lunch it is now time to drive towards the Botanical Garden. Luckily this area is less traffic snarled and there are some beautiful buildings along the way. One of the most impressive ones is the City Hall, as you would expect, and it even has a policeman directing traffic. In fact a reason for all the snarled traffic is that none of the stoplights are working, we ask our guide later and he says they are down just for the day but usually they are working so we are simply unlucky.
There are other impressive buildings in the area including the Supreme Court of Justice which is fronted by a statue of Queen Victoria which has an interesting story. It was placed in 1894 and then in 1954 it was dynamited during protests against the British occupation and its head and left hand were blown off. Then it was repaired in England and returned before being moved to the Botanical Gardens after independence in 1970. And then in 1990 the statue was restored leading to protests including another defacing with paint in 2018.
Next we pass another major church, St Andrew’s Kirk and a major Chinese store, there are quite a few stores here catering to the Chinese who have quite a few investments here including the bridge over the Demerara river that we heard so much about the previous day.
There is also a Catholic church and many old colonial houses that we really like, it is great that so much survived the major fire in 1945 which consumed the central area of Georgetown.
There is a sizable population of Muslims in Guyana especially in Georgetown, which makes sense given the large Guyanese-Indian population. As such there are a few mosques including the one we are passing on the way to the Gardens.
Next stop is the 1763 Monument which is dedicated to another major revolt in Guyana, called Berbice at the time.
That revolt led by a slave named Cuffy was initially successful before the rebels were done in by infighting and European reinforcements. However the rebellion had a large impact on Guyanese culture with the date that the rebellion started, February 23, being Republic Day in Guyana, and Cuffy becoming a national hero as evidenced by the monument.
The next stop, a major one, are the Botanical Gardens. While tomorrow we will visit the Gardens for birding today we are visiting them for history. Specifically we stop at the Burnham Mausoleum, a place we didn’t know existed before our guide led us here. Forbes Burnham was the leader of Guyana from independence, a dictator that led the country from 1964 till his death in 1985 during throat surgery. He was installed with not insignificant help from the CIA that were afraid that the opposite, Guyanese-Indian party was socialist and then were promptly betrayed as Burnham embraced his own brand of socialism which was likely worse than anything his rivals would have implemented.
Nearby is the Place of the Seven Ponds, a beautiful place to reflect and as we learn it also has some historical ties.
Here, near the ponds, there are a few graves of famous Guyanese people, that either helped or promoted Guyana during their lifetime in the well named Place of Heros. Between the many revolutionaries is also Sir David Rose, the former Governor General of Guyana and the person who represented to British state during the first years of independence. This is quite unexpected but nice to see between all the other Guyanese VIPs buried here. And then it is time to continue to the last stop of our tour, a surprise from our guide!
