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’.
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’.
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