Reserve a guided Rupununi trip in Guyana, thirteen nights of savannah and river

Reserve a guided Rupununi trip in Guyana and what you are paying for is thirteen days of arranging that is genuinely awkward to do from a laptop in New Orleans. Region 9 has one road running through it, almost no traffic that is not hauling freight to Brazil, and communities that decide among themselves who may stay overnight. On this rung a driver is holding your name on the coast when you land, a guide moves with the party for all thirteen days, and every handover from vehicle to boat to village has a person attached to it long before anybody leaves LA.

The route is quick to say and slow to do. One night on the coast, two inside the forest reserve the road cuts through, two at Surama, three at Rewa, two at Yupukari, two at a cattle ranch under the Kanuku Mountains, then one long push north for a final night back where you started. Six places to sleep, all six held in the party name, and nobody in the group ever needing to work out where the next bed is coming from.

None of it belongs to Pine Gazette Bookings LLC. Not a truck, not a boat, not a hammock hook screwed into a thatch roof. What this office does is assemble the reservation and hold it in your name; the company that actually runs the thirteen days invoices you itself, on its own contract, once the dates are fixed. Reaching the country is yours to sort out, no airfare is sold here, and the figure below does not contain any.

There are five rungs and the site does not pretend that one of them is the correct one. This is the first: met at every point, guided every day, nothing left for you to organize once your boots are on the ground. Further along the chain fewer pieces are reserved, a trip of the same length costs less, and more of the phoning falls to the traveller. Naming exact dates and putting a figure against them takes two to four working days here, because each village council answers separately about beds and permission, and the ranch answers by radio in the evening or not until tomorrow.

The road south and the crossing at Kurupukari

The coast to the border town of Lethem is roughly 335 miles. Sixty five of those are asphalt and the remainder is laterite: red and hard in February, greasy in June, and corrugated in a way that will loosen the fillings of anyone who tries to take it in one sitting. Trucks carrying fuel and flour to Brazil use it all night. This itinerary breaks the drive with two nights inside the forest reserve, close to a million acres of standing forest between the Essequibo and the Siparuni, and the party crosses the Essequibo on a vehicle pontoon at Kurupukari. That pontoon works in daylight only, about six in the morning until six at night, and the river at the landing is a quarter of a mile of brown water moving faster than it appears to. Arriving at ten past six means sleeping on the bank, which is why the whole day is built around reaching it by four.

Near the second night there is a walkway strung through the canopy: 154 meters of bridge on four platforms, the top one about thirty meters off the forest floor. Anyone who wants it is standing on it at a quarter to six in the morning, because mist sits in the crowns for the first hour and the birds work those same trees while it does. The other thing here is Turtle Mountain, a thousand feet of climb in about a mile and a half with two short scrambles, and from the top the forest runs to the horizon in every direction with the river bending through it.

Three nights at Rewa, and what a river day is

Rewa is a Makushi village of about three hundred people where the Rewa River comes into the Rupununi. You get there by boat, four hours from the landing, and the lodging is eight cabins the village owns and runs, with the generator off at nine. The water is dark and near 82 degrees at the surface. The fish everybody comes for is the arapaima, which reaches eight to ten feet, breathes air, and surfaces every ten to twenty minutes with a cough you hear well before you see anything; villagers count them from boats through the dry months. Every river leg on this trip is operated by the company running it, under its own river licence, and appears on that company's bill. This office moves nobody on water, on land or anywhere else.

A day at Rewa is two outings and a long middle. Out at half past five while the air is still cool, back by ten, then nothing scheduled until half past three, because the hours in between are not worth walking into. Awarmie Mountain is forty five minutes of steady climbing behind the village and gives a view straight down onto the confluence, which is worth doing once. Kaboura flies work the water in the middle of the day and are gone by dusk.

The south savannah, the ranch and the Kanuku foothills

South of the mountains the country opens out into unfenced grass, sand roads and thin creek forest, with termite mounds standing three feet high. The Kanuku range comes off the plain by about three thousand feet and holds nesting harpy eagles, whose whereabouts the ranch hands know and will not always tell you. The ranch runs cattle without fences, riders leave at half past five, and the herd is counted rather than penned. Dinner is at seven or it is not at all. The generator runs from half past six to half past nine, after which the sky takes over, and this far from any town that is a real event rather than a phrase.

Giant anteaters are why a lot of people ask for the south. They stand up to seven feet from nose to tail tip, they feed in the cool hours, and the burnt patches of February and March are where you find them, usually two hundred yards off and moving in a dead straight line. Two dawn outings are built into the ranch nights. At Yupukari the pattern flips to the dark: black caiman are measured and tagged on the river at night, the larger animals run past thirteen feet, and giant otters work the same stretch after breakfast. The lilies there put up leaves six feet across; a flower opens white at dusk, is pink by the second evening, and is finished.

The dry months, the wet months, and how the dates get fixed

The season decides more than anything else does. From the middle of September to the end of April the road holds and the savannah is passable end to end. In July and August the operating company does not run this at all, because the ground south of Yupukari is water and the queue at the Kurupukari landing runs into hours. The council permissions for staying on titled Makushi land are applied for well ahead by that same company, since applying for them is part of running the trip. This office gives no advice on documents for entering any country and none on health.

No money changes hands at Pine Gazette Bookings LLC at any stage. You give us a window and a party size, we come back in writing with dates, beds and a figure, and the company running the thirteen days bills you direct under its own paperwork. Requests reach us from all over Louisiana and the answer takes those same two to four working days wherever they start from. The phone is +1 (504) 832-6194, the address for a first message is bookings@thepinegazette.com, and if anything on a confirmed booking has to change later, corrections@thepinegazette.com goes to the same two people. The office itself is at 2450 Severn Avenue, Suite 312, Metairie, LA 70001.