Lloyd, a Georgetown taxi driver who had been refused a US visa three times since 2014 and had never once left Guyana, stood at the edge of Kaieteur Falls with no words — only the look of someone seeing their own country for the very first time. Yes Theory documented the five-day overland journey through Guyana and Suriname, two of South America’s least-visited and most culturally distinct nations, and the moment Lloyd finally reached the waterfall he could never afford to visit became its emotional centerpiece.
Lloyd’s First Flight and the Journey to Kaieteur Falls
Yes Theory had spent their first day in Georgetown navigating the city with Lloyd as their hired taxi driver. Lloyd introduced the crew to his local market, shared fresh honey straight from the vendor’s jar, and guided them through neighborhoods where residents described their most treasured national value in a single word: freedom. When the team discovered that all chartered flights to Kaieteur Falls had been fully booked for weeks, persistence and a measure of luck opened four seats on a small aircraft. It was only then that they realized Lloyd had never been to the falls — not because of disinterest, but because the cost was prohibitive, and because the flights are taken almost exclusively by foreign tourists rather than Guyanese locals.
Lloyd also revealed he had never boarded an aircraft in his life. The morning of the flight, he described the experience as ‘excitingf’ — and when the small plane lifted off, he watched Georgetown’s thin coastal strip give way to unbroken Amazonian canopy below. At the falls, the group of nine was entirely alone. No barriers, no crowds, no infrastructure. Lloyd described the moment as something that ‘happens once in a lifetime,’ standing at the base of one of the most powerful single-drop waterfalls on Earth — Kaieteur Falls drops approximately 226 metres, nearly four times the height of Niagara Falls, and receives fewer than 1,000 visitors per year.
Regil, Fort Zeelandia, and the Four Faiths of Paramaribo
Crossing from Guyana into Suriname required a pre-dawn departure at 4:08 a.m., a road journey, a river ferry crossing, and several more hours of driving. On the Suriname side, Yes Theory connected with Regil, a local taxi driver whose name was created by his parents combining two names into one. Regil spent eight months in prison following a drug conviction, then worked a year at a petrol station, saved his earnings, obtained his driver’s licence, and built a career as a taxi operator. When asked about his greatest dream, Regil answered without hesitation: freedom.
In Paramaribo, Regil guided the crew through the UNESCO World Heritage-listed historic inner city, where Dutch colonial wooden architecture lines streets still marked with Dutch-language signage — a living artifact of the fact that Suriname only gained independence in 1975. At the city’s centre, a Christian church, a Muslim mosque, a Jewish synagogue, and a Hindu temple stand within close proximity of one another, a configuration Regil described as unique to Suriname. Slavery persisted in Suriname until 1863, nearly three decades after abolition in Guyana, and the country subsequently absorbed contract labourers from India and from the Javanese communities of Indonesia — a heritage still visible in the city’s cuisine, its languages, and its neighbourhoods.
In Georgetown, the 1763 Monument commemorates the rebellion led by Cuffy, an Akan man who organised enslaved Africans in the Dutch colony of Berbice into a resistance that temporarily controlled a large portion of the colony before Dutch reinforcements suppressed the uprising. Cuffy is recognised today as a national hero of Guyana, and locals explained to Yes Theory that his statue represents the freedom the country holds today.
Lloyd’s first flight, first view of Kaieteur Falls, and first journey beyond the coastal strip of a country where nine in ten residents live within a narrow Atlantic shoreline serves as a reminder that the world’s most extraordinary natural wonders are sometimes most inaccessible to the people who live closest to them. Yes Theory’s next destination is the Brazilian Amazon, where the team is travelling in search of a man living alone in the world’s largest rainforest.
