In the City at the moment - thinking back on Guyana......

El Dorado Rum with a dash of soda........and my thoughts bring me back to..Guyana....

The Amerindians are descendants of the original inhabitants of Guyana. Most of them live in tribal groups in the coastal regions and further inland. The coastal tribes are the Caribe, Arawak, and Warao.

On my way on the slow flowing Demerara River which, is located in Eastern Guyana. It rises in the forests of Central Guyana and flows northward without important tributaries for 215 miles to the Atlantic Ocean at Georgetown.

Jungle Cabbage - Sabal Palmetto - and suprisingly it taste like...... Cabbage...

Guyana is one of the primary countries for the export of birds - here is a boy who lived in the jungle with his very pleasant family and a vicious little parrot.....

The angry parrot....

Amerindian Village....

Canoe - River - Blackwater.........light to dark stained water from the vegetation of the jungle...

A captured Macaw...

Another headless photo....in the jungle hunting for Labba....

Here is a photo of the highly priced Labba... it is a large rodent, which prefer and live close to water and rivers. A rodent with many names depending on where it is found in the tropics/sub-tropical Americas. The meat is a delicacy.

Amerindians playing at the river in the last minutes of daylight.....

The Americas and Trans Darien Expedition..........

(All photos in this post by Mr. Amado Arauz)

Trans Darien Gap Expedition -1960 - From Panama to Colombia. In 1957 there were discussions about a research expedition for adjoining the Pan-American Highway. A couple of Land Rovers were custom built and of they went.

They had to drive to goopy mud under the triple-canopy jungle, snakes,vampire bats, boa constrictors, bugs, more dense and endless tropical jungle, river crossings, malaria, humidity, log bridges, difficult mechanical, logistical and topographical problems were a present part throughout the expedition. Leadership skills are essential in any successful expedition, think Sir Ernest Shackleton and our days Sir Ranulph Fiennes. The leadership skills were there and 4 moths and 20 days later they finished. AP McGee "Sons of Savages" you would have loved this Expedition.

Matto Grosso, the Brazilian jungles and the disapperance of Colonel Fawcett in 1925

Explorer (for the Royal Geographic Society), Archaeologist, a strange disappearance of him and his expedition in 1925 has always been of an interest to me. After studying historical and legends about The Lost City/World - he truly belived he had mapped the location of the lost ancient city in the jungles of the Central Brazilian Plateau. As his disapperance has been a mystery and explorers still are looking for an El Dorado the Lost World of Fawcwett keep fascinate us. Fawcett had been sending reports to the Viceroy at Bahia from the Paraguassu River. That was when the last was heard from the expedition.Expeditions in this area had been conducted by the Portuguese in 1743 but it is said that the legend began in 1622. The city had been described in detail. Fawcett was a man of action, he had been exploring Brazilian-Bolivian Frontier 1906 - 1909 and had led before the Brazilian expedition seven expeditions.

Occasionally the interest of Colonel Fawcett reappears but is it Fawcett we are interested in or is it the Lost World and perhaps the El Dorado???

Audwin Pierre McGee - Artist and Adventurer

The Artist - Mosambique 2007 detail from one of his blog photos.

Audwin Pierre McGee

Click for A fantastic artist and adventurer with a passion for life

I am sitting here with my morning coffee in my "kikoy" and safari shirt reading through his blog and visiting his sites ....I can truly write a man with a passion for freedom, an artist with an adventurous spirit for life. Born in 1955 in Alabama, USA he traveled since childhood from the jungles in Central America to the African Continent - his hunger for life.. he has absorbed it to give birth to his art. How many times have you been enjoying the calmness and the smells and sounds of the tropical night when our thoughts get together and we create as artists or individuals building on our own sculptures at our hearts and minds. He puts it into life on his canvas, in his furniture and sculptures. Understated elegance, possible one of the most complicated and complex ways to express yourself. Looking at his pictures of life, nature and women, women are living sculptures in their own right - they keep on fascinate us, sensual, sensitive, intriguing,dramatic, or furious like a charging lioness, fire and water and in the end they keep giving us inspiration. That is why in all our arts they are a part of it.

The African continent - when the venom of Africa runs in your blood and veins it is as you had been bitten of a Puff Adder. You will come back to Africa again and again... it maybe take years until you return but you will be back..no one will ever tame this continent.......it has is own soul and life...it has it's own smells and sounds...you have to experience it to understand....and you will tell your friends stories and.....it becomes a part of your persona....

Here are some quotes I have applied on my voyage in life;

"There are milestones in every ones life, crossroads where either decisions are made or impressions gained that alter the whole future of the person concerned."

"If one advances confidently in the direction of ones dreams,and endeavors to live the life which one has imagined, one will meet with success unexpected in common hours"

H.D.Thoreau

So you definitely have to set your path, Jean Paul Sartre wrote in "Le E'tre et le Néant" in 1943

A man can will nothing unless he first understand that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny, than the one he forges for himself on this earth". Hemingway would likely agreed with this.

Bullfights and Hemingway.....the man who created his own myth and lived it to the fullest

I have always had a great passion and fascination for bullfights and it shows in my home where bronze sculptures, books and paintings are telling their stories of an ancient art form. When there is time on a Sunday afternoon...""La Fiesta Brava"". I have watched some beautiful bullfights in Bogota, Colombia...and many other places where appriciation and understanding of this art is part of the culture and the people - especially in Latin America and Spain. Hemingway had his passion for bullfights, deep sea fishing, hunting, conversations and life in it's own way. It is all about creation of your life as an art and nothing is more important than to live it to the fullest.

(All photos taken by Loomis Dean in the 1960s)