Guyana is the only English-speaking country in South America and, with its history in the sugar trade and Caribbean links, is primarily a coastal culture. With a population of only around 750,000 in a country almost as big as the entire UK, it combines dense,species-rich forests with low population pressure.
The former British colony, sandwiched between Venezuela and Brazil, is home to fewer than a million people but it is also home to an intact rainforest larger than England.
Guyana is the unspoiled, undeveloped, unvisited tropical nature lover’s paradise that Costa Rica was 30 years ago. Located in northern South America next to Venezuela and a short hop across the Caribbean from Trinidad, Guyana offers the Amazon wilderness in microcosm. There are only a handful of ecolodges in millions of square hectares of sparsely inhabited Amazonian rainforest, savannah, and wild coastal plain forest. There are no luxury resorts and roads are few
Bordering the Caribbean, Brazil, Venezuela and Suriname, the country enjoys a varied ethnic mix unique to Latin America, and has a dramatic colonial history that includes lengthy periods of Dutch and British rule. With more money and more commitment from the government and outside investors, the place could be a hub for specialist tourism, from holidays exploring the country's sugarcane history, to sports fishing on its various Amazon tributaries.
For food alone the country is a must-visit, with cuisine that mixes Amerindian, West Indian, British, Dutch and even Chinese and Indian culinary traditions - the latter two having arrived with indentured workers during British rule. But Guyana is a long way from neatly packaging its colonial history in tidy museums and organised tours. Since independence from the British in 1966, the economy has been in gradual decline and the locals have been leaving in droves. Today, tourism mainly caters for returning Guyanese diaspora.
