Georgetown (Guyana)

My first stop in South America was Georgetown in Guyana - pretty much as this was the only place in South America I could fly directly to from British Virgin Islands. Not a main stop on the average South American backpack iteinery but decided I may as well have a few days here - bonus is that it is the only English speaking country in SA (though at times it didn´t sound like English to me!!). This was the hotel that I stayed in.

St George´s Cathedral - which is the world´s tallest free standing wooden building!!

For the centre of a capital city Georgetown was pretty green and spacious - lots of old wooden colonial buildings and wide streets - the population of the whole country is only 750,000 so I suppose they have the space....

There was not a huge amount to do in Georgetown itself but there were a few parks/gardens to wander around and lots of pretty birds.

In the 17th century before losing control of Guyana to the British the Dutch built a sea wall along 450km of coastline around Georgetown to protect the city from flooding.

The kids wait to be picked up by the school bus.

A colurful parrot at the market.

The markets are always an interesting place to wander around to get the feel of a place - people here were quite friendly and laid back - no pushiness and no major efforts to rip you off when you bought something - though the general call to get my attention was -`oh whitey´ - political correctness obviously hadn´t reached here yet though it wasn´t meant offensively.

The Town Hall.

Not sure where the owner of the shoes ended up!!!

An old church.

Hard at work.

The toothless fruit seller who wanted to marry me - I know you will all just say that I am being fussy but no I wasn`t tempted.

Some pretty flowers.

Unfortunately there was also a lot of rubbish dumped at the side of some of the roads.

The Botanic Gardens were pretty - lots of birds and flowers so spent a few hours here just wandering around and chilling out with my book.

A monument to Cuffy - the African slave who led an unsuccessful slave rebellion in 1763.

The horse and cart are still a popular way to move stuff around the city.

The local police do some training.

There was a little zoo next to the Botanic Gardens - the averies has some bright coloured birds - some of which I had seen flying around in the wild at the Botanic Gardens like the bg Maccaws but couldn´t quite get photos of the wild one´s!

This was a cheeky little pheasant - everytime I went up to the cage to take his photo he tried to grab the camera!!

A coati (I think!) - this wee guy seemed quite lonely as anytime anyone went near his cage he was jumping up to get some company - some of the smaller animals were caged alone which didn´t seem right and then there was a big lion in a pretty small cage which was pretty awful to see.

The Spider Monkeys did have some company and a big cage though this one still didn´t look happY!!

Iguana

The reason I went into the zoo was to see the Manatees - aquatic mammal known also called Sea Cows - these are an endangered species and almost extinct - they never came right out of the water so the most I saw was their trunk like thing eating the grass!! Funny looking animal.

It was the end of rainy season when I was in Guyana - I was pretty lucky though as it only rained a couple of times and one of those was when I was at the airport to fly out. I only visited Georgetown in Guyana - the interior of the country where all the natural attractions are - wildlife/waterfalls etc is pretty hard to get to and for safety reasons you really have to do it on a tour which were too expensive for my current budget. But I did enjoy my few days in Georgetown it was pretty laid back and the people were friendly enough.