Financial Update

Time to update our financial picture. Here is the breakdown and summary by country:

Trinindad & Tobago: $109/day average. TnT is fairly expensive, with lodging really tough to find for less than $35-$40/night. We also spent money on the flight to/from Tobago and on renting a car for a couple days. Overall, our spending here was fairly even, though, so I think that's about the right amount. Note that food is overpriced in Tobago because they are an isolated island. We ate several peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to keep the cost down.

Venezuela: $90/day average. $50/day without the trip to Angel Falls. We think the trip was worth it, though. You have to use the blackmarket or these numbers would be 3 times as high. We normally paid $10-15 for a room and about $3-$4 each for a decent dinner. Transportation is nearly free because gas is nearly free (we paid $11 each for an overnight bus for 13 hours and the buses are way nicer than American buses). Angel Falls costs $250/person, though we wish we would have found an operator that would throw in a free hotel the night before and after, as many of them do. In Santa Elena, we suggest Francisco at Touristica Alvarez at the bus station. He did a good job getting us a tour in the Gran Sabana, though you have to be flexible with everything.

Guyana: $70/day average. Skewed by us hitchhiking the length of the country rather than paying the high bus fares. We sort of wish we had visited more of the interior, but we couldn't afford the very high transportation costs. We met people who often spent $300/person just to get to some of the inland places. Mostly, I wanted to see giant anteaters, but maybe somewhere else. Lodging was consistently $30-40/night and you should bring your own food to the rainforest or be prepared to pay higher prices for it. Food in Guyana, especially local food, seemed almost free. One morning, we bought every bit of street food and drink that seemed at all interesting until we could barely move. It amounted to about $4. We did have a bad experience going to a Rodizio suggested by our book. It ended up costing about $30 and was not very good. Don't go to rodizios outside Brazil, I guess. Oh, and lastly we decided to skip Kaiteur Falls. They looked very nice and I would have loved to do the overland hike to them, but it was $800/person, which seemed crazy for 4 days.

Suriname: we're on track to average $190/day. Suriname, mostly because of transport into the interior, is really expensive. Paramaribo is also very expensive. Rooms for less than $35-40/night are really hard to find. Meals aren't as expensive as the US, but average about $7 for a standard restaurant. We're taking a cheap tour that doesn't go that far inland and it is $300/person for 3d/2n. The ones that really go to the more interesting parts start at about $700 for 4 days/3 nights and most are even more.

Feel free to ask if you have any questions. Our guidebook is woefully out of date for the Guyanas, so expect to pay a lot more than many books indicate. We've learned a lot and are happy to share our knowledge if useful to anyone.

Foods of Brazil and Guyana!

Here's another entry in our popular series about the incredibly healthy food we've been eating around the world.

Brazil:

In Brazil, there are a lot of pay-by-weight buffet restaurants, but we weren't quite prepared for the pay-by-weight ice cream parlor!



It was fun because it let us try lots of strange (to us) local fruit flavors we may not have gotten otherwise. But since Andy can put away a lot of ice cream, it didn't end up being such a bargain.

Speaking of dairy, yours truly had to sample some yogurts, of course. You wouldn't believe how many different types of Activia they have there--big tubs, small cups, big and small drinkable versions...here I am with a carrot-orange-honey flavored one. (Note the "experimente" sign I'm pointing to on the container...I'm not sure this experimente in flavors really worked so well).



And here's a locally-made, prune-flavored drinkable yogurt I tried at the Boa Vista bus station, where we changed buses from Manaus heading for Guyana. Yum.



In Brazil, dulce de leche (in Portuguese: doce de leite) comes in jars, tubs, and many other forms. We chose the squeeze tube and had it on bread (lack of peanut butter leads to desperate measures!).



And of course, there were the amazing doce de leite filled churros, which I posted a picture of in my Manaus post.

Guyana:
The offerings of the Stabroek Market, the main market in Georgetown, Guyana's capital, really deserve their own post. Here are some snaps we took there:

Yum, fish.


A triangle-shaped flaky pastry filled with "pine jam" (pineapple jam). (Jews, this was kind of like a hammentaschen!)


On the right, the "cashew fruit," a tasty sweet-and-sour fruit that comes from the "French cashew" tree, different from the cashew nut tree. On the left, a not-so-tasty small fruit with edible seeds and flesh that had little taste and the consistency of cotton.

Both are usually sold in bunches but when we said we just wanted to buy one to try, the vendor would not take any money from us for them.

Boy walking around the market and selling live crabs on a string. Apparently he thought we looked like the types of people who might be interested in this, because he tried to sell one to Andy.

(P.S. It's school holiday time right now in Guyana, so we didn't worry too much about the occasional kid we saw, er, helping out at the marketplace...)

More tasty pastries. On the right, a pastry filled with more pine jam. On the left, cassava bread, which was dense and sweet and also had coconut in it.


Sugar-cane juice. It was surprisingly a little bit bitter with the traces of molasses still there from the raw cane. When you buy stuff with "evaporated cane juice" in it, ostensibly this is what the manufacturer starts with...

Side note--they love their little plastic bags in Guyana and put all sorts of commestibles in them that you wouldn't think should go in baggies. Like any fresh juice we bought, and snacks you'd eat with a spoon, such as...

Channa! (Tasty Indian-spiced chickpeas. This was at a different market, later in the day, but same idea as Stabroek. God, I love chickpeas.)


The one juice I got that didn't come in a baggie was this fresh coconut water, which came still in the coconut.


Also, please note that in this final picture I am wearing a different one of my three shirts! Yes, I do occasionally change my clothes.

In conclusion, the street food in Guyana was really tasty and darn cheap--I think that everything I posted pics of here cost 50 cents US or less. Here in Suriname, where we are now, there's not nearly as much fun street food and it costs more (we've been paying nearly $1 apiece for our sno cones, painful). So in addition to the lovely interior and bouncy flatbed trucks, the food is something we will surely miss about Guyana.

Obsessions of the World

We have decided to introduce a new regular feature about the obsessions of different countries. For each country we visit, we will choose one thing, at our sole discretion, that we consider the country to be obsessed with. We will try to explain where needed. We may, at times, repeat. Here we go:

Trinidad & Tobago: Fried Chicken. We estimate that 65% of all the food consumed in Trinidad is fried chicken. They have KFC, Popeyes, Chester Fried, and Church's from America. They have Royal Castle as a local chain. They have numerous other local places.

Venezuela: Cosmetics. In a city of 300,000, we couldn't find a single place to buy food. Yet, a cosmetics store was on every corner. This explains why they have so many Miss Worlds--lots of make-up and no food.

Brazil: Shoes. Shoes everywhere. Any kind of shoes you want. Want to buy some shoes with your lunch? Not a problem. Shoes while you wait for the bus? Sure. Imelda Marcos had nothing on Brazilians.

Guyana: Taxis. One taxi driver explained how hard it is to become a taxi driver there: you have to have a normal license for 3 years and then you have to pay slightly more to register your car. Apparently, everyone gets this and then can act as a taxi. We averaged about 5 requests per minute to take a taxi.

Suriname: Supermarkets. Here's an imaginary conversation between an American and a Surinamese who don't know anything about the other's country:
A: You are from a poor country. You would be amazed at how many supermarkets we have in America!
S: How many are there?
A: It seems like we must have one on every corner!
S: Haha. That's absurd. How could all the people possible live with just one supermarket per block?
We passed through villages where we are certain the supermarket to person ratio was 1:1. I have no idea how they can all stay in business. We're happy to be able to buy food, though.

We'll post more as we venture to new countries.

Of parrots and peanut butter, hiking and hitching: Guyana!

Today is our last day in Guyana, the Westernmost of those three small countries in the northwest of the contenent that no one really seems to know about. Guyana is English-speaking and feels decidedly more Caribbean than South American, with a lot of goods available that we haven't seen since Trinidad. Culturally, it is a mix of people African and Indian (East Indian, as in from the country of India) descent with some Amerindian (what we would call Native American in the US) villages in the interior.

Though I am blogging from the capital city of Georgetown, on the Atlantic coast in the north, we started our adventure here far south, in the small town of Lethem, on the border with Brazil. It was a dusty town with no paved roads (here is our guesthouse)...



But, peanut butter!!!


Locally made by a women's collective, to boot.

The next day we took a bumpy bus ride north a couple of hours to the Oasis, a "rest area" along the side of the main road where we got a cabin and were able to hike to see a panorama of the surrounding rainforest and savannah.


(Interestingly, when our book said that the "newly completed" road connecting Lethem and Georgetown was "now all-weather," I took that to mean it was paved. Wrong-o!)

The next day, the real adventure began. We really wanted to go to Surama, an Amerindian village 25KM north that was known for its affordable eco-lodge and beautiful rainforest and savannah surroundings. But when the Oasis told us it would cost us $80 US to hire a car to drive this short distance, we balked...and (moms, don't read this!) hitched a ride with a guy we met at the rest area who was heading that way anyway.

OK, that sounds a lot worse than it was--he was a tour operator with a company jeep and also had two other passengers with him, so it really wasn't that sketchy. But, it gave us a taste for how easy hitchhiking was in this country, which was to come in handy a few days later...

But first, we needed to walk to Surama, which was actually 5.8KM (almost 4 miles) from the junction with the main road where we were dropped off. We knew this in advance and had accepted that it would be a long slog into town carrying our 30-lb bags, but we geared up and did it. We even spotted this pair of scarlet macaws en route, which seemed like a good sign for wildlife to come.



The thing is, no one had told us that once we reached Surama proper, it was ANOTHER 3miles walk to the Eco Lodge, which was well on the outskirts of the small cluster of buildings on the savannah known as "town." So we walked and walked and walked in the direction the woman in town had pointed, and finally we got there.

(When we told the people at the lodge that we had walked in from Surama junction, they looked at us like we were completely insane. They were probably right, but we also thought that paying $80 for a taxi was insane!)

Anyway, we stayed two nights in Surama, and it was one of the highlights of our trip so far for me. We saw lots of birds and a few monkeys in the beautiful, untouched rainforest and out on the savannah that surrounded the eco-lodge.

On our boat trip up the Burro Burro river, we saw loads kingfishers, herons, swallows, macaws, and some capuchin monkeys. Here is a great shot Andy got of a kingfisher.



Turkey vulture:


And here are the bees that decided to attack my bag on the boat. Notice how well they match my bag!


The rainforest was also chock-full of these millipedes, and on our hike up Mount Surama, Andy and the guide convinced me to let one crawl on my arm. Yes, I've officially lost my mind.


Aaand, remember how I said I'd come back to hitchiking? Well, when it was time to leave Surama, we were told it would be $25 US to be driven the 6 miles to the junction, where we could wait for a minibus running the 12-hour route to Georgetown. Now that we knew how long the shlep was and could mentally prepare, we turned down the taxi offer and, once again, strapped on our packs for a long, long slog by foot to the main road.

Two hours and over 500 choruses of "999 bottles of beer/guava-pineapple juice/milkshake etc." later (we switched beverages every 10 choruses and got pretty creative), we arrived at the shop at the junction. It was 12 noon. And we were told that there would not be a minibus arriving until 10PM, and that it wouldn't actually leave the junction until 4AM. Crap.

But then, literally 30 seconds later, this truck pulls up...


I mean, it's like the gods of hitchhiking had sent us this ride. It was clearly meant to be!

So we road 12 hours in the back of an open supply truck over an unpaved road to Georgetown. This was my position for approximately the first 5 hours of it.


My view wasn't bad at all. Note the rainbow!


Of course, when we picked up three more people in Mabura, and it started to get dark, and then it started to rain and we all had to get under this dirty tarp, well, it was a bit less pleasant then. And three days later, Andy's and my butts and lower backs are still a little sore from our adventure.

But, hey, we made it, and saved somewhere between $50 and $100 on bus fare. Solid.

We'll have to do another post recapping all of the fantastic and cheap street food we have enjoyed in Georgetown--we took a lot of pictures. Tomorrow we are off to another country, Suriname and will try to check in from there if we can figure out how to surf the Web in Dutch.