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As luck had it, between the mercury scrubber and helping thefirst minister and his daughter, I hit it off very well with a fewofficials in the government there. I had a friend who wanted tomove from Russia to Guyana, and I mentioned this to the ministerof mining. A couple of days later, I got a call from the minister ofimmigration saying that I could call my friend and tell him to visitthe Guyana Consulate in Moscow. He said papers were waiting formy friend there that would allow him to immigrate to Guyana. Soyou can see, I really did have a little bit of pull. I mention thismerely to illustrate my good luck.On our first expedition into the jungle, we would be taking eightmen who would carry the supplies and set up camp as we reachedvarious locations. Our workers were called droggers. These menThe Miracle Mineral Solution of the 21st Century6were hired by Mike and they arrived at the house about a weekahead of time to begin putting supplies and equipment together. Oneof the droggers was the foreman, and the others, of course, wereworkers.Finally, it was time for our expedition to begin and neither Joelnor Beta had arrived. But we couldnt wait. The men only made$6.00 a day (U.S. money), but it still cost to keep them around andwe wanted to get things done. So, the final crew consisted of me,Mike the landholder, and the eight droggers.

The trip into the interior took about 2 days. First, there wasabout an hours ride from Georgetown to the town of Parika on theMazaruni Cuyuni River. We loaded our supplies onto a large truckand four taxis, and arrived at Parika at about 9:00 a.m. We thenloaded our supplies onto several large speedboats. The river at thispoint is more than 5 miles wide. Should you decide to do your ownresearch on this part of the story, you will find that the next leg ofthe journey took us about 4 hours at what can be called high speedon that river.We finally arrived at our next destination, the town of Bartica,which is considered the gateway to the interior of the country ofGuyana. There, we bought food supplies at a number of food storesconstructed like warehouses, which mostly supply excursions into

the interior. Our buyer bought almost nothing except beans and rice.Normally, they buy only rice for such trips, but because I was therethey added several sacks of beans. (On other trips, I had been able toget them to buy a variety of groceries.)We then loaded all of our supplies into several boats andcrossed the river to a port on the other side, about 1 mile away,where we transferred our supplies and equipment into two verylarge trucks. The trucks had wheels that were more than 6 feet indiameter for driving through the jungle on roads that were mainlymud. Even with those big wheels, the trucks could not venture offthe roads. The supplies were tied down securely and most of themen elected to walk on a somewhat shorter route to the nextjumping-off point into the jungle. I soon learned why they preferred

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