November 26, 2006
Day 424
There weren't any buses out of town today, which seemed to be a common theme in Guyana. Craig and I decided to be patient and try to wait for a Bedford truck to take us away. While we were waiting, we met two Peace Corps workers named Rick and Brian. They biked down to The Oasis every now and then to get a drink, and were happy to tell us a lot about Guyana, so we now had a better idea of what to do here.
We walked around the excellent facilities for several hours today. There was a trail leading up to a lookout point, a swimming pool that provided some relief from the heat, and hundreds of cashew trees. I found out that the nuts are expensive because only one grows on each fruit, and there aren't many fruits hanging from any individual tree. But like I said, there were hundreds of trees, and it looked like the nuts were just falling to the ground and rotting, so Craig and I decided to make some use of them. We picked and cleaned about one hundred of them, and will attempt to roast them once they've dried out.
Brian invited us over to his house in a boarding school about an hour's walk away, and considering the lack of traffic on the road, it seemed like a no-brainer to go there. We also met Heather, a volunteer teacher from Chicago, and Monika, from Germany, who was looking after animals in Surama. She originally came to Guyana to take photographs and to film a rather dubious documentary movie using animals in captivity that were being held in a zoo/sanctuary. However, one and a half years later, the movie still hadn't been shot, and she found herself taking care of the animals rather than filming them. We learned about the puma and the giant anaconda that were there and decided to try and check it out tomorrow. It's only twenty miles up the road, so hopefully we'll be able to hitch there.
