Trip Report: Guyana
Visited in November 2023
The Guianas is a generic term for a region in northern South America. The term refers to the Guiana Shield, which is made up of the countries of Guyana and Suriname, the French overseas territory of French Guiana and parts of Venezuela and Brazil. When travelers talk about a trip to the Guianas, they mostly mean Guyana (British Guiana), Suriname (Dutch Guiana) and French Guiana. The parts of Venezuela (Spanish Guiana) and Brazil (Portuguese Guiana) are usually skipped.
That’s what I did too. During my trip I visited Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana. These three Guianas are also the least visited countries in South America. French Guiana is not even a real, independent country. Among the country counters, Guyana and Suriname are practically always two of the last three countries (Venezuela is the third) that they visit on the continent.
A five-hour flight, which only cost 180 USD, took me from New York to Georgetown, the capital of Guyana. New York is home to a large Guyanese community, which is why two airlines offer direct flights between the two cities.
It was already after midnight when I went through immigration and left the airport. The one-hour cab ride from the airport to the city center cost 45 USD and there is no public transport. I fell asleep sometime around half past two in the morning.
My hotel was the Herdmanston Lodge, in a reasonably safe part of Georgetown. The hotel was relatively expensive at $317 for two nights. Too expensive for what you get. However, it was one of the few hotels on Booking.com that had a rating of >8.0, which is the minimum requirement for me.
The next day was supposed to be a great one, as the country’s biggest attraction, Kaieteur Falls, was on the agenda. Perhaps a brief introduction to what else you can do in Guyana.
Guyana, which means “Land of the Many Waters”, is not an easy country when it comes to planning tourist activities. Especially if you are traveling alone. Many activities require a minimum number of people and most of them only run on weekends. For example, I wanted to visit the Pandama Retreat (google it, it looks cool), but they answered that they only accept guests from Friday to Sunday.
I also thought about a trip to Sloth Island. An island with… well, sloths. But in the end I thought seeing one or two sloths was not worth the long journey (eight hours or even more in a car and on a boat). I also didn’t find any other tours to the interior of the country worthwhile due to the time and cost involved. In general, however, it seemed that most tours take place on weekends if there are enough participants.
For me, the Kaieteur Falls were clearly a priority but these tours usually start on weekends too. I was there on a Monday, so my chances were not good. It was therefore all the more surprising when my tour got confirmed three days beforehand.
The Kaieteur tour is usually a half-day tour and costs a whopping $300. There is the option to see it in combination with another waterfall, in which case you pay almost $400. But most people choose the half-day tour, which includes a one-hour flight there and back and two hours of ground time.
I was really looking forward to this tour, because on the one hand the pictures and videos I have seen of Kaieteur Falls were epic. On the other hand, I was glad that I was able to do an activity in Guyana at all after one company after another told me that they didn’t run any tours that day.
Unfortunately, the trip I did with Evergreen Adventures was a total disaster and one of the worst I’ve ever had. And believe me, I’ve had some incredibly bad ones. It started with us taking off an hour late and being told at the gate that our ground time would be reduced from two hours to one.
The reason for this was supposedly that the sun sets at 5.30 and the plane had to land while it was still daylight for whatever reason. However, we paid for two hours ground time and not one, and the price was not cheap. Trans Guyana Airways, who operated the flight, explained that the weather in the interior was bad, which is why the flight could not take off at 1pm as planned.
The second shock came when our 14-seat plane approached the waterfall. The largest single-drop waterfall in the world was just a thin, pathetic stream trickling down the cliff. At first, when I flew over it, I thought it was another waterfall. It had nothing to do with the Kaieteur I had seen in pictures.
Mid-November is usually rainy season in Guyana. For this reason, I was rather afraid that the tour would not take place due to bad weather. That happens quite often. But the rainy season had not yet started when I was there. The locals were talking about the longest dry season they had ever experienced.
The tour on the ground was an absolute joke then. After the plane arrived, there was a short briefing in a lodge. After that, we walked to a viewpoint, where we spent about 5-10 minutes before we had to return to the plane to fly back. Normally you visit three viewpoints. So, seeing one view point of the Kaieteur Falls for 5-10 minutes cost me $300.
The waterfall was still a large and impressive one. But having seen pictures or videos of Kaieteur in all its glory, the view was unfortunately as disappointing as the tour itself. The National Park tour guide also apologized to us and said it was the shortest tour she had ever had. However, it wasn’t her fault. The pilot urged her to get all the guests back to the plane as quickly as possible.
By the way, I also asked her how the weather was at the Kaieteur National Park without telling her what Trans Guyana Airways said to us an hour before. She said it was absolutely fine the whole day. So, Trans Guyana Airways’ excuse for the delay turned out to be a lie.
I subsequently wrote a complaint to Evergreen Adventures and asked for a refund, which is something I have never done before. But I just could not accept how unbelievably bad this tour was. Evergreen did promise me a 25% refund, but since I informed them that I was no longer in Guyana, I haven’t heard back from them anymore. In any case, I would recommend avoiding Evergreen Adventures at all costs. According to Google Reviews, it wasn’t the first time something like this has happened.
If there is anything good to say about this day, it is the view from the plane over Georgetown and also over the interior of the country. The Kaieteur Falls are located pretty much in the center of Guyana, not far from the Brazilian border. The scenery is therefore quite spectacular throughout the hour-long flight.
On my second day, I visited Georgetown, a city with a questionable reputation. I asked several people, including the staff at my hotel, if the city was safe enough to explore on my own. They all said it was safe, but that I shouldn’t take any valuables with me. According to them, the cell phone was not a problem – as if it wasn’t a valuable item.
I did a little self-guided walking tour to check out the few sights in the city. In total, I walked for about two to three hours in the blistering heat. I found the climate in the Guianas extremely uncomfortable at this time of the year. Although it was only around 30°C, the humidity was over 80%. Due to the proximity to the equator, it felt hotter than on the Arabian Peninsula in summer. A short walk outside and you were completely drenched in sweat.
What can I say about Georgetown? Not too much good, the city is not really nice. Various rivers and streams flow through the city, all of which have a pretty bad smell. The city is not really beautiful either.
Exciting sights? Not many. I went to the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, the parliament, the Stabroek Market, St. GeorgeË‹s Cathedral, the “I love Guyana” sign and the National Park. All places were… okay. But nothing that you absolutely have to see and, above all, nothing that I hadn’t already seen somewhere else.
In the national park, which is basically just a pond and a meadow in the city, I wanted to see the manatees that live there. But unfortunately I didn’t. Due to the unpleasant heat, after a few hours outside I had no motivation anymore to spend too much time in the national park, so I gave up relatively quickly.
While I was walking through Georgetown and occasionally snapping a photo, a man approached me and warned me that I shouldn’t take photos so obviously. Otherwise I shouldn’t be surprised if someone snatches my phone out of my hand or robs me. I posted this on Instagram and someone replied that she had been beaten unconscious and robbed in broad daylight in Georgetown. So these things really do happen in Guyana’s capital.
Is Georgetown worth a visit? Not really. The only interesting thing was that the city somehow didn’t feel like South America at all. For me, the city had more of a “Caribbean meets West Africa” character, perhaps comparable to Haiti. The fact that English is Guyana’s language certainly also contributed to the fact that it didn’t feel like South America here. After all, we usually hear Spanish and Portuguese on the continent.
Don’t get me wrong. Georgetown has a few things to offer to keep you entertained for half a day. But all in all, it is not a nice city and I would say it’s my least favorite on the South American continent.
Later, I took a cab back to the airport. Again it cost 45 USD, but this time the traffic made the drive longer than at night. My flight was to Suriname. The alternative would have been a 12-hour overland trip for which I would have had to get up at 3am. No thanks. I’d rather invest 250 USD for a 40-minute flight.
My stay in Guyana was over after just under two days. Only that short? Yes. But even if I’d had two more days, what would I have done with them? After all, I hardly found any activities or tours for my first two days. I would probably have just spent two more days in Georgetown and there was nothing there anymore that I needed to see.
So I wasn’t unhappy that I could leave Guyana again. The country didn’t leave a good impression on me because of the lousy tour and the shabby capital. I would even go so far as to call Guyana my least favorite country in South America. This is partly because the country does not seem to be ready for tourism yet and partly because of the awful and dangerous capital. Besides, Guyana is also not really cheap.
You can probably imagine the answer to the question of whether I would recommend Guyana. If you don’t want to travel to every country, it’s better to skip Guyana and choose another, better country on the South American continent.
Nevertheless, this was the start in the Guianas and it could only get better. Or could it? Continue here with the Suriname trip report.
Click here to find the trip reports of the 170+ other countries I have visited so far!
