Before we start the birding tour we really wanted to see more of Georgetown. However with no car we are quite limited on what we can do so in the end we choose to take a city tour via Viator. It starts at 9 AM in front of our hotel and the guide is quite punctual and has lots of booklets ready for us. The car is also in good shape so we are looking forward to the tour. Which starts at the Seawall at the far end of Georgetown, it is 280 miles in length protecting the settlements which would be under water at high tide otherwise. We walk a bit on the Seawall and the guide explains why it was built and the benefits that the city and the country are deriving from it being built.
However the major reason why our guide stopped here is the 1823 Monument. It celebrates a revolt in Demerara that came close to being successful. In the end though it was brutally crushed and the main instigators killed or deported.
The next stop is at the new Kingston Seawall Esplanade. It was built only in 2023 so it is quite new and looks like a great place to stroll in the evening. However now during the day it is quite hot and we do not see anyone on the stretch we are exploring.
Here we also find for the first time the new slogan, One Guyana, pushed by the President of Guyana. This is a reminder that there are actually three major groups in Guyana, Africans, Indians, and indigenous tribes, each of them with their own desires and ambitions. In fact the two major political parties are closely aligned with the Indian and African communities with the one in power now representing mostly the Indo-Guyanese people.
We also walk on a pier into the water enjoying the views of the nearby modern hotel and the dark waters while doing our best not to fall in as it becomes more and more slippery.
Next stop is another pier, more solid and built to overlook where the Demerara River flows into the Atlantic River. You can easily see where the waters of the Demerara River, brown from all the sediments it is carrying, is reaching the blue ocean and then they start mixing.
This pier was built near the Marriott hotel, the other major hotel in Georgetown. In fact as our guide tells the story when the hotel was built they wanted to make the water look picture perfect and they threw blue paint into the water to make it look like more like in the Caribbean. As can be expected this didn’t work in the long term.
Continuing slightly inland our next stop is the Umana Yana and the Liberation Monument. Umana Yana is a conical palm thatched hut (benab) erected for the Non-Aligned Foreign Ministers Conference in Georgetown, Guyana in 1972 by a team of 60 Wai-Wai people, an indigenous tribe. It then burned in 2014 and was rebuilt in 2016 and since then it is regularly maintained by the Wai-Wai tribe.
Our guide is able to sneak us inside while they are preparing it for Christmas celebrations and we enjoy seeing how the gathering places of the local tribes look like, even if only in a more touristy fashion.
From Umana Yana we decide to cross the street passing by the Guyana Marine Turtle Monument, a cute monument celebrating the successful protection of nesting turtles in Guyana.
We cross the street for a reason and it is not really for the turtle monument. The guide takes us to the famous “I Love Guyana” sign that is on most promotional materials related to Guyana. The sign is always painted differently and now it is pink for breast cancer awareness month. And then we return to the car and pass the Cheddi Jagan Research Center, the famous Red House, on the way to the Walter Roth Museum of Anthropology, a major stop on our tour and described separately.
