Today we head to Guyana, a South American country bordering Venezuela, Suriname and Brazil.
Guyana is a largely undeveloped country. An example of this is the fact that there are no roads leading to neighbouring Venezuela. If you want to drive to Venezuela you have to travel through Brazil. This is partially down to a dispute between the two countries, but also because infrastructure is undeveloped everywhere in Guyana. There are no paved roads link its major towns to the capital Georgetown.
Guyana is the only South American Nation where English is the official language, although the majority of people speak Guyanese Creole.
Guyana is home to the world's largest single-drop waterfall by volume. At 226 metres in height, the Kaieteur Falls are spectacular.
Almost 80 percent of Guyana is covered in pristine, untouched rainforest. In fact, the Iwokrama Forest is so untouched that an estimated 30% of the flora and fauna here is still unidentified.
Back in 2009, Norway signed a landmark deal with Guyana with the aim of protecting Guyana’s rich rainforests. Guyana would receive millions of dollars in exchange for the maintenance of vast tracts of virgin rainforest. While this deal didn’t go as smoothly as planned (Guyana had no real experience in large infrastructure projects, so struggled to write proposals for how the funds would be spent, and unfortunately deforestation rates increased).
One other particularly weird chapter of Guyana’s history occurred in the 1970s when a US-based apocalyptic cult named The Peoples Temple built a town dubbed Jonestown in the Guyanese jungle and coerced his followers to murder journalists and a US congressman, before committing mass suicide by drinking cyanide-laced fruit punch. Over 900 people died in this harrowing incident.
Anyway, on to a more upbeat subject, I recently discovered that the UN provides high quality, free-to-use maps of almost every country in the world. You know the kind of maps you used to find in those beautiful hardback atlases that only seemed to exist in school libraries. Anyway, they have almost every country in the world, apparently, except for Guyana.
This led to a bit of a scenic tour of the internet where I ended up discovering some particularly beautiful old maps of Guyana. So, if you also appreciate a retro map, enjoy!
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