Lethem

The first thing Lethem does is slow you down. After the long road from the coast — or the forty-minute charter flight that most visitors take because the road is often only nominally a road — you arrive into a heat that is different from Georgetown’s coastal humidity. This is interior heat, dry and direct, bouncing off red laterite dust that coats everything within a day of your arrival, shoes, bag, the inside of your water bottle. The town is small enough to walk entirely in forty-five minutes, and its grid of unpaved streets holds a hardware store, a fuel depot, a handful of restaurants where the ceiling fans move the air in slow resignation, and a border crossing to Brazil — the small town of Bonfim on the other side of the Takutu River, close enough to wade to in the dry season when the water drops.

I arrived on a Tuesday and the town was quiet in the way that frontier towns are quiet between events. But the Annual Lethem Rodeo, held over Easter weekend, transforms this place entirely. Cowboys from Wapishana and Macushi communities across the Rupununi bring their horses in — real working animals, not the decorative kind — and the rodeo grounds behind the town fill with events that blend South American vaquero tradition with something distinctly Amerindian: the riders are often young men who learned horsemanship from fathers and grandfathers on the savannah, for whom horses are practical transport more than spectacle. The music runs through the night. People drive from Georgetown, fly in from Barbados, cross from Brazil, and Lethem becomes briefly a town with more people than it knows what to do with in the best possible way.

Outside rodeo season, Lethem’s appeal is quieter and more personal. The town is a staging post for the southern Rupununi — the launch point for lodges deeper into the savannah, the place where you stock up on water and fuel and whatever you forgot in Georgetown. The market, such as it is, sells produce that has come up from Brazil as often as from the Guyanese coast. Brazilian reais are accepted everywhere with the casual pragmatism of a border economy. At the one restaurant that stays open past eight, the menu is hand-written on a board and changes based on what came in that day, and I ate grilled piranha with rice and black beans one evening — the piranha was excellent, firm and white, with very specific bones that required full attention — and river fish curry the next.

Sitting outside in the evening, the Kanuku Mountains blue in the last light to the south, a family of donkeys moving slowly down the road without evident purpose, I felt the particular satisfaction of having reached somewhere that is a destination for its own inhabitants first and visitors incidentally. There is no performance here. The town just gets on with itself.

The road back north — a ten-hour commitment in dry conditions, longer after rain — passes through the Iwokrama reserve and is one of Guyana’s great drives if your vehicle is adequate and your expectations are about the landscape rather than the road surface. Or you fly back, and the pilot banks over the Kanuku Mountains and you see the whole of the southern Rupununi laid out beneath you, ochre and gold, and you understand why people who come to Lethem once tend to come back.

When to go: Easter weekend for the Rodeo — book accommodation in Lethem (limited) months in advance. The dry season (August to September and February to April) is the best window for road travel and wildlife around the savannah. Lethem has a small guesthouse sector; the nicest options are a short drive out of town toward the savannah lodges.