A hot opportunity in extreme off-roading?

Dear Editor,

From recent discussions among knowledgeable residents of the Rupununi Central Savannahs, there is some basic common sense to pass on you and your readers. First, what we have between Linden and Lethem is not a paved road, it is an earth-surfaced trail. Secondly, we have a thing hereabout named Rainy Season.

Nobody can repair a trail in times when it rains heavily most days and nights. Any of that $193 million that gets spent during May, June, July or August will be wasted. Anyone who contracts to fix earth-surface roads in or to the Rupununi in this season deserves all the punishment he will get.

As for the public funds involved, no doubt there will be more where they came from, even next year. What’s so different about this year?

If this was not news to our decision-makers, we wouldn’t have to be writing it now. And to what effect? Only, we can expect to be attacked as bearers of bad tidings.

But there’s good news too. One enterprising tour company, growing fast in the sale of adventure holidays to jaded first-world travellers, sees a hot opportunity to promote just the overland trip from Lethem to Linden as extreme off-roading. A journey of up to 24 hours by bus over the excruciating trail can offer physical challenges in degraded natural environments, with a quick study of social resilience among hardy pioneers. A unique snapshot of survival skills in an endangered physical and human ecology.

Here perhaps is Region 9’s last economic promise. Already we have had an expatriate operator selling survival training in our rainforest. Now our minibus drivers too can exploit the very hardships of the route, for markets beyond the garimpeiro traffic.

Every cloud has a silver lining; this one may be only copper, since most of the tourists we get are low-budget backpackers. But it’s hard to see better prospects in a Region that’s cut off from the national economy more than half the year because the road to the coast cannot be kept passable.

But here’s even more consolation. Since a lot fewer trucks can get through to Annai and Lethem, Region 9 residents will be able to eat a lot less rice, flour, sugar and other processed goods imported from the coast. More food will have to be grown locally. Surely a boost for our farmers, many small-scale farmers at that, because the road and trail network within the region is similarly affected.

Further, since the flow of cheap Chinese goods for the Brazilian day shoppers and smugglers will also be throttled, Lethem entrepreneurs may have to divert from easy commerce to more productive enterprise, using local resources for sheer survival.

If Rupununi people weren’t almost perversely optimistic and inventive, they wouldn’t be here anyway. They can – they have to, on their own – rebuild this forgotten frontier.

Yours faithfully,
Gordon Forte