It’s no coincidence that an upstart biologist named David Attenborough chose Guyana—at the time, British Guiana—as the second place to film his Zoo Quest series, in 1955. As he described it in Adventures of a Young Naturalist, “South America is the home of some of the strangest, some of the loveliest, and some of the most horrifying animals in the world.” Guyana, in particular, is renowned as a land of giants, where you’ll find record-breaking jaguars, anteaters, river otters, harpy eagles, and anacondas.
While an offshore oil boom promises to lurch Guyana into the 21st century (it’s had the world’s fastest-growing GDP two years running), the interior remains remarkably unchanged—not only since Attenborough’s trip here, but even as far back as the 1590s, when Sir Walter Raleigh searched these lands for the fabled city of gold, El Dorado.
Guyana’s interior houses about 10 percent of the country’s roughly 830,000 people, meaning you could fit its non-coastal dwellers comfortably in some college football stadiums. That tiny population translates to a relatively low environmental impact, and especially pristine is the vast, river-crossed Rupununi Savannah, which hugs the Venezuelan and Brazilian borders, just across from the Amazon; it’s only accessible by air or a single unpaved red-dirt road that runs north to south.
I’m avoiding the notoriously bumpy road and opting instead for a small-group tour with Wilderness Explorers. We board a practically bus-sized plane in Georgetown, and within minutes the traffic-clogged capital gives way to nothing but green. In an hour, we touch down in Lethem, a dusty outpost on the Brazilian border, and begin driving by van into the savannah.
Caiman House is bringing ecotourism opportunities to the Indigenous village of Yupukari.
Photos by Nicholas DeRenzo
Our first stop is Caiman House, an eco-lodge and research field station owned and operated by the Indigenous Yupukari community. Rooms are comfortable but no-frills—featuring open-air showers, mosquito nets—centered around a courtyard with cement pools where the staff raises vulnerable yellow-spotted Amazon River turtles to give them a head start so they’re not preyed upon by animals and humans alike.
In the morning, we birdwatch from dugout canoes on a mirror-still lake; in the afternoon, we stroll through the village, which is at once traditional and beginning to embrace the burgeoning tourism possibilities. There’s a compact house, painted with spiders, where the weavers work, and another where a seamstress sews school uniforms. But there are also solar panels and even a venue where villagers can access the internet via Starlink—government initiatives, thanks to that influx of oil money.
Caimans are a constant presence as you float down the rivers in Guyana.
Photo by David DiGregorio
Herpetologists trained village residents to collect data on the lodge’s namesake, the black caiman, a woefully under-studied crocodilian species that can grow to 20 feet long. “We’re going to use a wire snare to catch a caiman,” our guide tells us as we walk down to the Rupununi River to board small boats. “If we capture a big one, you will see a lot of banging and biting. We do not try to hurt the caiman, but we will have to fight it a lot, from a distance, to get it exhausted.”
As the sun sets, nighthawks dive-bomb past our heads, catching insects. From their adjacent boat, the researchers are hard at work, shining a spotlight on the shore, hoping to catch a glint of eye glare. When they do, the scene erupts into a Spielbergian adventure.
They lasso a snare around the caiman’s neck and begin the arduous task of tiring it out. The caiman swims to keep up, occasionally thrashing its impressively meaty tail against the metal boat, making a thunderous noise. Finally, once they’re confident it doesn’t have enough energy to attack, they wrap electrical tape around its snout and haul it onto the sandy bank.
We gather around, mere feet from a giant who could kill us in 10 different ways. The researchers quickly realize that this is a specimen they’ve met before, number 316. They have a unique numbering system, which involves snipping off a piece of a scute, a bony plate on the tail.
They take measurements—10 feet, 5 inches long, 120 kilograms (or about 265 pounds)—and invite us to rub the soft underbelly, which has historically been used for expensive leather. There’s something thrilling about getting this close to such a creature. The researchers remove a piece of barbed wire that’s irritating his jaw and send him on his way.
Many of the guides, naturalists, and boat pilots you’ll meet in Guyana are members of the local Indigenous communities.
Photo by David DiGregorio
The next morning, we bid farewell to our hosts and travel by boat to Karanambu Lodge, which was settled in 1927 by a man named Tiny McTurk, who raised cattle and harvested balata (a rubberlike material that comes from trees). His daughter became the leading protector of giant river otters in this region, where she’d collect and raise orphaned pups on-site. Today, her nephew Ed and his wife, Melanie, continue the conservation legacy at the lodge.
“We act as a surrogate family for the otters,” Melanie says. “If you’ve done it really well, your cub is brave and independent and staying out all night. It’s like having a teenager.” Unfortunately for me, there are no pups to hang out with at the lodge—but, of course, no orphaned pups is great news for the ecosystem.
When Ed shows me to my thatch-roofed bungalow, he suggests leaving the windows open. When I ask, slightly alarmed, if that would let in wildlife, he says, “They’re going to get in anyway, so you might as well enjoy a cross-breeze.” It’s an exercise in letting go and communing with nature. And indeed, there’s a hefty scorpion in my shower, and bats flit around over my mosquito netting at night.
Melanie later tells me, through stifled laughs, about a bright idea gone wrong: She hand-harvested snakes from the surrounding jungle and deposited them in the villas’ thatched roofs to catch bats. It was all fun and games until a guest ran stark naked out of her bungalow when a snake darted out above her head in the shower.
Giant anteaters are one of the many animals that give this area its nickname “The Land of Giants.”
Photo by David DiGregorio
The following day, we awake before sunrise and head out into the savannah by truck with guides from the local Macushi Indigenous group. Our goal is to spot the elusive giant anteater, which tends to be most active during dusk and dawn and beds down in the morning light. A local vaqueiro (cowboy) is helping us spot on horseback, and within minutes of setting out from the lodge, we’re being hurriedly ushered out of the truck and traipsing through high, sharp grasses. A flash of flowing hair that looks halfway between a watering can and an Afghan hound begins galloping across the horizon, cutting toward us, before breaking sharply in the opposite direction mere feet from us. During his visit, Attenborough filmed himself chasing an anteater, but we’re decidedly more respectful—or at least too frozen in place with awe to be menaces.
With the sun blazing, the best way to beat the midday humidity is to laze about in hammocks, with the property’s charismatic cats, Chairman Meow and Cinnamon, winding around below us. Over a lunch of fish (peacock bass) and chips (yucca and plantain) and green mango salad, Melanie regales us with tales of the legendary property. This is the very table where David Attenborough sat in 1955; these are the rafters where a curious jaguar used to break in at night and watch Auntie Diane sleep.
That evening, we pile back into a boat to search for giant river otters, and while we unfortunately don’t see any, the river banks are a riot of activity, with black spider monkeys, brown capuchin monkeys, and brown-bearded saki monkeys chattering and chasing one another up and around the canopy.
Victoria amazonica lily pads are some of the biggest in the world, and their flowers inspire a unique ritual with pollinating scarab beetles.
Photo by David DiGregorio
We pull over to the muddy riverbank and take a short hike to an inland lagoon, where the surface is practically clogged with enormous Victoria amazonica water lilies. Guyana’s reputation as the land of giants extends to flora: Their pads can stretch up to 10 feet in diameter and hold the weight of a grown adult. We paddle to the center of the water in tiny rowboats and sit in silence as a birds-and-bees display worthy of a biology class plays out all around us: The lilies blossom at sunset, and fat golden scarab beetles nestle into them for the night, attracted by a sweet scent. They stay trapped (blissfully) inside, keeping warm and well-fed, and emerge the next day covered in pollen.
We toast to a pollination job well done with a secret-recipe punch made from Guyanese El Dorado Rum, then ride back to the lodge. Along the way, our guide’s spotlight illuminates greater bulldog bats, which use echolocation to skim the surface of the river and catch fish in the pouch between their legs.
Back at the lodge, the McTurks have set up a barbecue of just-caught river fish under a towering, light-strung mango tree. Melanie’s mother was a renowned Chinese Guyanese cookbook author and caterer for the National Assembly, and she clearly has passed on a love of hospitality. Out here in the rough-and-tumble interior, danger always seems to lurk just out of sight. This is a land of piranhas and jaguars and vampire bats and scorpions, and our group has even taken to repeating a phrase one of our guides let slip offhandedly—“There’s an anaconda in every puddle”—as some little mantra about our bravery. But over a glass of rum, a pot of cook-up rice, and some fresh-baked roti, Guyanese hospitality makes the land of giants feel quite a bit less intimidating.
