Your Eyewitness was soooo touched when he saw that convoy of vehicles threading their way to the Rupununi Rodeo!! What better way to honour our pioneering forbears who opened up our interior savannahs by founding some of the largest cattle ranches in the world!! Bet you’d forgotten THAT little factoid, didn’t you?? That’s right…our Dadanawa Ranch had pipped the King Ranch in Texas to earn us bragging rights as to whose cowboys had to roam furthest to rustle up their cattle!! So the next time you encounter those Texas ranch hands – now reduced to being roustabouts bringing up our oil for Exxon – swaggering around in their black, duty-free SUVs, let them know they’re number two when it comes to the real cowboy life. We still have a CATTLE TRAIL to traverse to get to the rodeo – while they have paved highways!! What wimps!!
That cattle trail is historic, Dear Readers – and your Eyewitness is pretty sure it’s nostalgia for those good, rough and ready days that’s preventing us from ever completing the much-announced Linden-Lethem paved highway!! Do we want to become soft and namby pamby like these modern Texans?? Nah!! It took a lot of guts for old man HPC Melville – the Scottish owner of Dadanawa Ranch – to carve out that 120 mile trail during WWI when supplies to Georgetown from Europe and elsewhere got disrupted. Imagine taking hundreds of head of cattle across swamps, jungles and rivers from assembly point at Annai to the Yawakuri Savannah up the Berbice River. And thence by pontoon to the coast!!
The Yanks also laid railroads to their Chicago stockyards: they just couldn’t take the heat so they scampered from the camp-fire!! And started living on Brokeback Mountain! Anyhow, back to our Rupununi Rodeo. From what your Eyewitness could see…we still have some real dyed-in-the wool cowboys – we call them vaqueros – who put on quite a show for the visiting coastlanders. They lapped up the manly art of wrestling cattle to the ground and spitting out their tobacco chaw!! Better than sticking bulls with swords while prancing around – as the Spaniards do – ain’t it??
But whether we like it or not…the Rupununi has changed – and that change is gonna accelerate. The Administration is pouring in a lot of money to get agriculture finally self-sustaining – and capable of not only feeding the region, but exporting to Brazil and the Coast. Our vaqueros might just have to become rice and soya farmers!! So, unfortunately, the cattle trail to Lethem might finally be paved – it is already funded and launched! – and we’ll just have to do like the Texans and tool down to the Rodeo next year in our SUVs!!
How demeaning!!
…a happy Easter Monday
Your Eyewitness doesn’t know about you, Dear Reader, but for him, the best part of Easter was the annual trek to the sea wall his mother would arrange for her brood. He and his brothers would’ve spent all week making their kites from scratch. That was before those plastic abominations imported from China!! No siree Bob!! They created the “frame” from “pointer sticks” filched from their mother’s broom! Then came the trek to the “gamma” tree where they’d eat as much of the sticky fruits as they would bring home!
The ”kite paper” was purchased with coins secreted at great sacrifice and now splurged to complete the colourful kites. But if the truth be told, even more than the sight of his kite hovering in space against the pale blue skies, it was the snacks that his mother had prepared that he enjoyed.
Somehow the egg-balls and bara and phulowrie – with the obligatory “sour” – tasted so much more delectable on this day. Yeah…Easter was “Happy”!
…office again?
If the Opposition are so convinced they won the last elections – which they insist their secreted SoPs conclusively prove – your Eyewitness wonders why they have evidently given up on elections?? And are now demanding “shared governance”??
