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.

Gran Sabana, Venezuela highlights

Here we are getting ready for our two-day adventure in the Gran Sabana, a large savannah-like region in Southern Venezuela. We started off at this lovely lookout point.

Our day 1 guide was "crazy" Ricardo, who actually went to high school in Jackson Heights, Queens! Here he is pulling me behind a waterfall. I am wearing his had to keep the water out of my eyes.
Me swimming in a pool at the base of one of the beautiful falls he led us to.
A secret falls Ricardo took us to. Such a beautiful spot.
More falls, over a huge slab of semiprecious red jasper stone.

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!

In Brazil! And yes, we have had churrascaria.

A quick "oi!" from Manaus, Brazil! Population 1.6 million, definitely the biggest city we have been to so far on our trip. The Portuguese is kind of kicking our collective butts, but we are getting by.

Luckily, they spoke a lot of English at Búfalo, the churrascaria (Brazilian BBQ) place where we stuffed ourselves silly with meat for lunch! US$13 per person, which made this one of our most expensive meals out yet (that´s more than we spent for the two of us for a whole day of food, lodging, and transport sometimes in Venezuela), but only half the price of the cheapest churrascaria we ever had in the states, and probably the best we´ve ever had. We kind of had to go back to our hotel and take a little two-hour siesta after lunch.

We only have a few minutes of internet tonight, so no more pictures, but I can report that our final excursion in Venezuela, a two-day tour of the Gran Sabana area in the south, was really awesome, one of the highlights of the country. Hopefully we can write more and post some pics of the beautiful waterfalls, jasper (semi-precious red stone) earth, and other great stuff we saw there soon.

Tomorrow we are off for three nights in the Amazon rainforest, then probably jumping on an overnight bus toward Guyana, so it may be a while til we are back online. Love to all. Please post some comments with questions for us and-or e-mail us with updates on what is new in your life!!

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!

Thoughts on Venezuela

Venezuela started out a bit rough, with it taking hours to clear customs and then being stopped at multiple police checkpoints. Everyone was always very nice about it, but it was draining. It has improved dramatically since. It is cheap (we are probably averaging $60 per day not counting the Angel Falls trip, which cost $250 per person), it is beautiful, and the people are super nice (even though we often have no idea what they are saying). The food is mediocre, though they have a lot of fried foods of which I am a fan. I just have to be careful to avoid the cheese.

We have met a few other Americans, but only at Angel Falls. Venezuela seems to attract more Europeans, who don't read bad things about Venezuela all the time. Chavez is everywhere, but there is a large percent of the population that is vocally opposed to him and does not seem to be suppressed too much. Gas here costs about 40 cents a gallon, which makes transport cheap, but we've seen long lines at gas stations in rural areas.

We are thinking about coming back into the Western part of Venezuela later in our trip if we have time. A lot of people say that part of the country is really terrific. We'll see. My internet time is almost up, but Tara is about to post some pictures in a separate post.

Hola!

Wow, it took us a lot longer to get back online than I anticipated--we´re in the south of Venezuela, near the border with Brazil, and almost done with this country!

Over all, it´s been great here--food, lodging, and bus travel are cheap, we´ve made friends from around the world, and we most recently shlepped deep into the jungle to see Angel Falls, highest falls in the world, and definitely a pretty awe-inspiring experience. Andy´s at the next computer trying to get some pictures uploaded, so we´ll see if we can get some pictures up today. The computer speed and internet here are sloooow, though.

Mas pronto!

Alive in Venezuela!

A very quick hola from our second day in Venezuela. Haven't seen too much yet, but we've made some friends and I am using our hotel neighbor's computer that he graciously offered. We'll hopefully post some more updates in the next few days!