Ordinary Essequibo residents are becoming increasingly aware of the potential of the wider region to establish itself as one of the country’s most appealing tourist destinations and some of them are already in the process of seeking to transform that potential into an entrepreneurial opportunity.
When the Stabroek Business visited the region a few weeks ago, we sensed an increasingly audible clamour for more robust state intervention to help position the region to fulfill its potential as one of the standout places to visit across all of Guyana. Both longer-term business persons and would-be entrepreneurs have told the Stabroek Business that the creation of the supporting infrastructure to render what is already a pleasing pre-existing visitor environment could see a dramatic transformation in the developmental fortunes of the region as a whole as visitors head for the lure of the region’s outdoors like moths to a candle flame. The process of bringing Essequibo further into the limelight as a tourism haven, both ordinary resident and long-standing business persons have told the Stabroek Business, has to begin by creating the infrastructure to support the already pre-existing natural environment.
This is where, they believe, state support in the form of investments comes in. Not that they are sitting, arms folded, waiting on manna from heaven. When we visited the Essequibo Coast a few weeks ago for the two-Day Agro Processors Product Display (the second day of which was completely ‘rained out’), we learnt that modest though the event was intended to be, the region’s twelve or more hotels were fully booked for the weekend. Part of the reason, we were told, was that visitors had traveled to Essequibo with the intention of seeing more of the region than the Agro-Processing event had to offer.
Deleep Singh, the owner of WD Hotel and Mall at Charity, is in an upbeat mood. He believes that the natural attractions of the region could help transform the fortunes of a part of Guyana that is still to deliver its fullest potential. These days, he says, it “takes little” to bring people from elsewhere in the country to the Essequibo coast. For the relatively small event like the weekend Agriculture and Agro Processing Product Display his own hotel and others on the coast were enjoying a ‘full house.’ Most events connected in one way or another to the capital or to other parts of the country, but which are held on the Essequibo coast, usually served as a boost for hotels. While the Agro Processors promotion event of a few weekends ago had provided his own hotel with a welcome ‘top up’ Singh said that with the facility usually yielding a 75% occupancy rate anyway (once the Covid-19 restrictions had been lifted) it provided, even in what one might call leaner times, a pretty good living. Much of this, he said, had to do, originally, with the fact that hotel guests in the region include state employees visiting the region, returning Guyanese ‘taking a walk’ on the Essequibo Coast and travelers journeying between Moruca and Georgetown.
The flow, he says, never really completely dries up. Singh is also the owner of a Mall that occupies part of a larger complex, created in response to the continued growth of the region’s consumer culture. The Mall houses around forty businesses and Singh says that with the pandemic now being less of a menace than it had previously been, entrepreneurial activity on the Coast was showing encouraging signs of “picking up.” As is the case with other businessmen on the Essequibo Coast, Singh also has his fingers in other pies that add value to his business pursuits. He currently serves as President of the Essequibo Cricket Board and, not unexpectedly, is an aggressive activist for the creation of a weekend calendar of ‘chill out’ events that could conceivably include some of the various incarnations of cricket that have become globally popular. What Singh is seeking is a planned and sustained regimen of entertainment-based weekend events in Essequibo that can eventually metamorphose into the region becoming, conceivably, the country’s foremost tourism locale.
Unsurprisingly, the businessman cum sports enthusiast, has become one of the community’s foremost advocates of the now emerging Multi-Purpose Sports Facility currently under construction as an extension to the existing Anna Regina Community Ground. Nor is Singh alone in his keenness to set Essequibo on the road to becoming the country’s main visitor attraction. Bernard Young, known for his reputation as a pioneer of the hotel industry on the Essequibo Coast and Proprietor of the 52-room Arabian Atlantic Hotel at Henrietta told the Stabroek Business that his Hotel, too, had been fully booked for the two days of the Agro Processors event. Even as he fretted over the fact that the intervention of the weather had caused some of the visitors to cut short their stay he unmistakably sided with Singh in the view that Essequibo continues to ‘drop’ unmistakable hints of a capacity to become one of the country’s biggest tourism ‘drawing cards.’ At ninety and unquestionably the ‘grand old man’ of entrepreneurship on the Essequibo Coast, Young concurs with his fellow Hotelier regarding the need for the infusion of a more generous measure of planned sporting activities into the entertainment calendar in the region as a means of increasing the volumes of visitor arrivals.
Young told the Stabroek Business that he recalls a time when the Essequibo Coast served as a magnet for persons searching for places to go. In those days, he says, Essequibo was far more popular for its calendar of sports that included Cricket, Dirt Bike Racing, Football and Athletics. These pursuits, he recalled, used to be held mostly at the Hampton Court Ground, attracting visitors from as far away as Linden and Berbice. In those days, Young said, the Hampton Court Ground was owned by the legendary Guyanese rice magnate Kayman Sankar. Young recalls too, that each year, during Agriculture Month, Essequibo became the focus of various custom-made activities that included competitions designed to parade the acumen of local farmers. He remembered that he won a few farming-based regional competitions in which he never failed to entertain what he boasted were his own well turned-out pigs. This, he said had been a stepping stone to taking part in the more prestigious national competition in Georgetown.
Young, meanwhile, told the Stabroek Business that he welcomed the construction of the two all-weather roads leading to Mainstay and Capoey Lakes, initiatives which he said will further popularize more of the Essequibo’s already well-known visitor attractions. As an ‘old hand’ at the Essequibo experience Singh says that he wishes to see the “natural beauty” of the region shared with the rest of Guyana and with much of the rest of the world. The natural beauty of the region, not least the attractions reflected in its historical sites, lakes, and its rainforest, he says, offer opportunity for the creation of both a nature reserve and a potentially lucrative tourism hub. Essequibo, Singh believes, is one of the more important challenges to the vision of the institutions responsible for the building of a robust yet environmentally friendly tourism sector for Guyana.
