Glutton for punishment

With its vast areas of barely explored wilderness, and its heady mix of the sublime, the bizarre and the lushly seductive, South America would appear to have all the ingredients to attract the travel writer. Yet the recent travel literature on the continent has been surprisingly scant and taken up by lightweight, gung-ho tales of not especially remarkable adventures.

Fortunately there is John Gimlette, whose first South American travel book, At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig, captured with great wit and learning the quirkiness of Paraguay. He has now produced a no less remarkable portrait of the highly idiosyncratic countries known collectively as Guiana, the ‘Land of Many Waters’.

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Harry Mount

The Odyssey is more real than we thought

Once divided up between the British, the Dutch and the French (and with extensive communities of African and Asian origin), Guiana is cut off from the rest of South America not just by language but also by what Gimlette calls ‘one of the oldest, thickest, darkest and least inhabited forests of the world’. Both V. S. and Shiva Naipaul have written compellingly about it, though the most famous account of a journey through its midst was by Evelyn Waugh, the most unlikely and unsuitable of intrepid travellers. Waugh’s hilarious 92 Days is not exactly a eulogy of the land but rather a protracted moan directed at almost everyone he meets, including the indigenous inhabitants, whom he criticises for ‘their stupidity and lack of imagination’.

Many other travellers have been similarly unappreciative of Guiana, which was characterised by an English yachtsman of 1882 as ‘a hopeless land of slime and fever’. And the image of the place has barely been helped by its atrocious history of slavery and civil wars, by its having been the scene of the appalling Jonestown massacre, and through harbouring the notorious French penal colony known tellingly as Devil’s Island.