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.

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.

Foods of T&T, Venezuela, and Brazil!

Hello from Manaus, Brazil again--the internet here is relatively fast and cheap, and I needed an extra day to recover from our Amazon jungle outing, so we are back in the internet cafe uploading pictures and catching up on things. Here is another entry in our food porn series!

T&T:
These first two pictures are from Tobago (the second T in "T&T," as the islands are often called).

Here is Andy in our Tobago hotel room assembling one our staple cheap meals: peanut butter and jelly! Shops in T&T had plenty of peanut butter...sadly, no countries we have been to since have sold it, though we have heard Guyana, our next stop, may.



Here's array of street snacks from Tobago. From right to left you see yellow mangoes, purple mangoes, spiced mangoes, and an array of coconut- and sugar-based snacks. 5TT (less than $1) apiece. You'd see the same snacks in Trinidad, and similar ones in northern Venezuela, sometimes set up on unmanned tables in the middle of the road so you could drive by and grab a snack (and, I presume, leave money?)



At Maracas Bay in Trinidad, I finally tried Trinidad's famous "shark and bake," a fried white fish fillet (I don't think they really use shark anymore) on tasty fried bread (the "bake"--but trust me, it's fried) with a huge choice of toppings. I went for pineapple and white garlic sauce. And in the foreground you see Andy's aloo (potato) pie, potato wrapped in dough and fried. Also comes with condiments bar, Andy got something REALLY spicy on his.



Me enjoying my shark and bake from Richard's, the best vendor on the beach. It was SO good.


Later, Andy had to get another aloo pie from a different vendor, and a mauby drink (kind of like root beer), another T&T specialty.


Of course, in Trinidad there was ice cream. We don´t have a pic of the best stuff we had, from a street vendor in the St. James area of Port of Spain, but this stuff wasn't bad either...we got coconut raisin and peanut swirl.


Venezuela:

Of course, there was ice cream in Venezuela as well. Here is the tiny, gasoline-powered soft-serve machine from which we bought cones for 2 bolivares (30 cents) each at the Carupano bus station.


When this lady saw Andy taking pictures of the ice cream machine, she insisted on posing for one with her cone, too.


Here I am enjoying bread and cheese I had bought at a panaderia (bakery) in Santa Fe on our first double-decker bus trip in Venezuela.


In Venezuela, people drink strong, sweet coffee out of tiny cups. It's called tinto. I don't usually drink coffee, but you know, when you are in Venezuela...


There was so much fun street food in VZ. Tons of empanadas filled with chicken, beef, and cheese that we have no pictures of. But here is some colorful sweet popcorn we got in Santa Elena.


Santa Elena is a border town with Brazil, which means that that is where we realized that, unless we changed more money, we only had $8 US left in Venezuelan currency to spend on food for three days. But never fear, $8 can go far in Venezuela! We started by buying the biggest loaf of sliced whole wheat bread we'd ever seen at a panaderia. 38 slices for 15 bolivares ($2.50)!


We also bought a jar of peach jam. But, no peanut butter to be found, so I got a hunk of cheese and ate jam-and-cheese sandwiches for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for a couple of days, with some of this nutella-like stuff on bread for dessert. Andy, meanwhile, indulged in some lovely canned ham, which he spread on the bread with a spork...


We ended up with enough cash left over that we were able to roam the town and feast all over on our last night in Venezuela--broccoli, chicken, and beef empanadas, banana-cinnamon cookies, ice cream, and peach nectar. (See, mom, I'm not starving!)

Brazil:
Our first meal in Manaus, Brazil, was churrascaria, or all-you-can-eat Brazillian barbecue, at a restaurant called Bufalo.


Our lunches were $13 apiece--astronomical compared to what we were living on in Venezuela, but way cheap compared to churrascaria in the U.S.

These pictures don't begin to do justice to the amount of food we ate, but you can get a taste.




Then we went off into the rainforest for three days. It may have been buggy, hot, and uncomfortable, but we ate well.

Back in NYC, I loved to drink that expensive Sambazon acai juice, and one of my goals in heading to the Amazon was to see the acai tree, from whence the antioxidant-filled and tasty little purple berries come. Not only did I get to see the tree, but I got to see our boatman, Josenaldo, climb one, machete in his teeth, and then hack off a berry-laden branch!


We then took the branch back to our lodge in our canoe. I got to hold a berry. It was as hard as a rock.


Then Andy and I got to sit on the floor and shuck the branch, putting all the berries into a big pot!


Later, at our overnight campout in the rainforest, Josenaldo (who was also our cook) boiled them for us to extract the juice, which we mixed with a bit of sugar and drank. Sooo good!

He also built a fire, made a makeshift grill out of branches, and cooked us a chicken for dinner. The next day, while we were out on an interminable hike, he battered and fried us chicken pieces. And on our final day, he balanced chicken halves over the fire in branches he'd hacked and shaped himself with the machete. This man was incredible. And so was his chicken.



That's all we've got for now. In Brazil, we have also enjoyed the ddoce de leite (dulce de leche)-filled churros (cinnamon-sugar-coated donut-like sticks) that they sell on the square here near the beautiful opera house (and near our hotel). But at 2 reais ($1) a pop, we've had to limit our consumption. We're not in Venezuela anymore!

Trinidad and Venezuela in (very few) pictures!

Photo uploading is REALLY slow here, so we've only been able to get the absolute highlights up onto Picasa so far. We'll have to flesh things out some other time! But, here is a visual taste of what we've been up to over the last 10 days or so:

On our first day in Trinidad, we visited the Caroni Bird Sanctuary, where we watched many specimens of the beautiful national bird, the scarlet ibis, fly home to their nests at dusk. Here is the sunset off our boat at the sanctuary:

Here you can see eggs dropping out of a leatherback turtle into the hole it dug on the beach on the east coast of Trinidad. Awesome.

And here we are cradling newborn baby leatherback turtles gently in our fingers !
We spent a day at beautiful Maracas Bay beach on Trinidad's north coast, and Andy constructed a masterful sand castle. I dubbed it "D Castle" in the local dialect. (What you can't see in this picture is my nearby failed castle, washed away by the waves, dubbed "D Ruins.")

This is the ferry boat we took from Chaguaramas, Trinidad to Guiria, Venezuela. (Not so big, is it? I took a Dramamine and slept most of the way.) Just 3.5 hours of ocean crossing and 3.5 hours of Venezuelan health, immigration, and customs hassle!

This picture is from La Piscina, a snorkeling area of beautiful coral off of Santa Fe, on Venezuela's Caribbean coast, where we stayed by the beach for two nights with a friend we made on the ferry, Andrew from Manchester. (Hello, Andrew!). Andy, using the waterproof camera, captured this interesting fish:


And here is the huge iguana we made friends with on the beach of Isla Arapo, part of Mochaima National Park, on the same boat trip:



Pabellon is the national dish of Venezuela: black beans, rice, shredded meat, and fried plantains. Yum. (Extra yummy is that the dish you see here only cost 18 bolivares, or $3.)

The spectacular Salto Angel, or Angel Falls, highest in the world. To get here, we had to fly in a five-seater plane for an hour (yipes), ride in a glorified canoe upriver for four hours, and trek an hour into the rainforest up some steep, slippery slopes. Was it worth it? Yeah, we think so.
We slept in hammocks in a camp across the river from the falls. This is a shot Andy took of the falls from near our camp just after sunrise the next morning.

On the same trip we also visited Salto Sapo, a falls you can walk behind. Here's a pic Andy took from behind the falls before it got really wet (we were totally drenched on the other end!)

And here's a shot out the window of our five-seater on the flight back to Ciudad Bolivar. Note the other small plane nearby...

That's all we have for now. We're heading out on a two day tour of the Gran Sabana area in the south of Venezuela tomorrow, to see more falls and rivers and savannah lands, and then it's off to Brazil, where we REALLY don't speak the language. Wish us luck!

I saw a turtle give birth! (Well, lay eggs.) I ate a shark! (I think.) AKA Update from Trinidad.

Hi everyone! Coming to you today from an Internet cafe in the main bus station of Port of Spain, Trinidad. We have had three action-packed days here on the (much) bigger of the two islands of this country and there is a lot I could write. Andy is sitting here making fun of my long title, but it caught your attention, didn't it?

Sadly, the computer here does not like our memory card, so we have no pictures to share today. But we can report on our most recent activities!

1) We are staying with a wonderful woman named Sherry who has quickly become a friend. We met her through couchsurfing.com, and she basically opens her home to visitors to the island. We are sleeping in bunk beds in her son's room while he's in America for the summer.

She has seriously gone above and beyond for us, shuttling us around to all kinds of adventures and experiences. OK, so maybe the shuttle itself is a little dicey (Mom, don't read this part: No seat belts in the backseat, and Andy had to change one of the tires on the side of the highway our first night here!)

2) On our first night, Sherry took us to the Caroni bird sanctuary, where we watched throngs of scarlet ibis (Trinidad's national bird) fly home overhead to roost for the night. Then she drove us down to San Fernando, the 2nd biggest city in Trinidad, to check out a cultural festival, where we had some delicious chicken, rice, some kind of cornmeal dish, a delicious spice mix with sesame-like seeds in it, and tasty molasses-and-ginger sweets. And listened to Calypso music. Fun!

3) The next day, Andy and I mastered the Maxi-Taxi system of getting around here and spent the day in Port of Spain, the capital. Many people tried to warn us about how dangerous it is here, but we have had no problems whatsoever so far. We saw the new waterfront (where Obama recently came for the summit of the Americas) and visited the lovely botanical gardens and the zoo. And ate a pint of ice cream for lunch, because that is how we roll.

4) Late that night (around 9:30 PM) Sherry drove us literally across country to the east coast and wrangled us a spot on a turtle-watching outing at Matura Bay, where enormous leatherback sea turtles crawl out of the ocean at night to dig holes in the sand and lay their eggs. (We didn't have the permit we were supposed to, but thanks to Sherry the guide took us out anyway.) This was definitely the highlight of my trip so far--we got SO close to the turtle, and literally got to crouch down and watch as the eggs fell out of its butt (Andy says not its butt, but that was the general area) into the deep hole it had dug with its rear flippers.

Can't wait to share those pictures with you. Andy even got video of two eggs being dropped. We also got to pet the turtle (while it's laying, apparently it's in a "trance" and doesn't mind being petted and photographed...hm...but we went with it). And then, back at headquarters, we got to hold two tiny newborn sea turtles who had just hatched that day! You should have heard Andy SQUEAL WITH GLEE when he did this. He has some serious paternal instincts for cute baby turtles.

5) OK, wrapping up. Today we spent the day at Maracas Bay, probably the most famous beach in Trinidad, which was just gorgeous and cost less than $1 to get to on the bus. Also had my first "bake and shark," basically the national dish, which is fillets of deep-fried shark (or is it just white fish? I'm unclear on this) on a fried roll (the "bake"). Friedlicious! The condiments bar is huge, too--I added pineapple and garlicky chutney to mine.

Thanks for reading! We ferry out early tomorrow for Venezuela, so the next post will be in Spanish. Yeah, right. Hopefully it'll have pictures, though, and internet down there will be cheap.

Food of Tobago!

The first thing to understand about the food in Tobago is that it is expensive relative to services because they import just about everything except mangos and chickens. This detracts a bit from the food itself. The food is generally average, and I'm sure the seafood would be good if we ate seafood. The most exciting parts are the roti, which is prevalent thanks to the large Indian minority, and the candy sold on the street, which mostly consists of sugar patties with various fruits and spices. Our favorite was coconut with ginger and cinnamon. Here's Tara eating one:
They also have amazing coconut cream cookies, made by Wibisco instead of Nabisco:

Most of the restaurants don't believe in menus, so we are reduced to asking what each item is and how much it costs, but we still don't know what regularly goes together, which is how we ended up with a "coconut bake" without any filling (below). Apparently this is just the bread all by itself. They also like this bark called Mauby, which is sort of like rootbeer. Fairly tasty. On average, a fast food meal costs about $6 and a nicer sit down meal cost about $15-$20.

We had some good homemade coconut and peanut butter ice cream (two flavors, not one), but it is really expensive here due to the cost of refrigeration. We wll hope for better ice cream luck in the future.

In the way of fruits, we had the best mango ever yesterday and some excellent bananas earlier in the week. For those that don't know, most of the fruit imported to the US are varieties chosen for shelf life rather than taste, making some of the best fruit that grown overseas.

Lastly, we are starting an official street food section for each country. Tobago doesn't have much, though they have some huts along the side of the road with lunch food. The easy winner in Tobago is the candy sold along the side of the road. As mentioned above, we particularly liked the coconut/ginger/cinammon concoction.

Tobago in Pictures!

Greetings from (mostly) sunny Tobago! I am blogging from an internet cafe that is also a laundromat in Crown Point, across the street from where we are staying. I only have 10 minutes time left, so lets see how much I can cover.

We took off! Note our cute twin backpacks and how well they fit in the overhead compartment. Yes, all of our stuff is in those two bags and two small daypacks.


Our room in Tobago. Single beds, mosquito net, no bathroom of our own. But, a TV and AC! Yes, we travel in style.



Andy got a haircut!


The beach near where we are staying.


A beautiful beach we visited on the north shore.


Some excellent wildlife.


Except for crazy amounts of rain yesterday, which thwarted our plans to dive and/or snorkel on the other end of the island, it's been sunny and beautiful and we've been fairly lazy. We rented a car for two days, and I think it was probably the scariest driving we've ever done (I use the term "we" loosely--Andy did all the driving), as most of the roads were very twisty, very high up, and barely wide enough for one car.

Over to Andy now for some reviews of the food.

More pictures can be found at http://picasaweb.google.com/taradairman/Tobago#

Alive!

Well, the trip has begun and we've lived through the first three days. That was questionable at times while driving in Tobago today, where highway means a one lane road on which people often park in the one lane. All is well with lots of sand and sun. We don't have time to do a full recap now, but a few observations: food is really expensive here (a half gallon of Edy's in the supermarket was US$17); they don't believe in menus, which makes it hard when you don't know what things cost or what they are; a sign on a store saying open or with the opening hours means nothing; the candy they sell on the street is very tasty; and the people here are incredibly friendly so far. We'll write more when we can and post pictures. Trinidad on Sunday!