This is the ranch store at Dadanawa (Guyana), near the fabled table-lands described in Conan Doyle’s novel. It’s the place to buy a stirrup, or a beer, or a single cigarette.
At night, the vaqueiros or cowboys gather here to listen to the distant crackle of the BBC, or for the cook – armed with a needle – to dig the jiggers from their feet. But, as well as a bar and a clinic, the store is also the repository of almost a century of grassland junk. There were jaguar skins, giant fish skulls, several antique guns repaired with tape, a truncheon, a pickled snake, and endless Landrover parts, going all the way back to 1950.
Even things too big for the store are never thrown away. Just behind it is a collection of old army trucks, now green and hairy, and reverting to soil.
