Guyanas trip 2010 (continued)

I've at last finalised the route of the journey through Venezuela, Brazil, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana - inasmuch as an itinerary like this ever gets set in stone. Click here to read more.


In keeping with the tradition which started in 1980, when we devised our first trips, we've named the journey after an iconic South American bird: Coq o' the Roq. It's a brilliant orange bird which is native to the Guiana shield. The Latin name is Rupicola rupicola, but even non-ornithologists will have noticed that coq is not the usual spelling in English of that word. In the first flush of publicising the trip, we discovered that whatever algorithms web-browsers use to block pornography were pouncing on the hapless English version of our chosen name. So we changed it.

In future I'll also try in this blog to avoid using pictures which have a pre-dominance of flesh tones in their colour balance. Plenty of greens and blues. That should fool 'em.

Another unseen complication. This week, good old president Chavez has decreed that the Angel Falls are no longer to be known as the Angel Falls. Henceforth they shall be known as Salto Kerepakupai-Meru.

Why should this greatest of Venezuelan tourist attractions commemorate a lickspittle Yankee adventurer who chanced upon the falls in the 1930s? They were there long before he got there. The Pemón indians, argues Chavez, knew about them first, even if the rest of us didn't.

I can give the illustrious president a bit of advice here. Don't mess with marketing for the sake of political correctness. 20 years ago, when Journey Latin America first started running an adventure trip to climb Roraima tepuy, in a moment of inspired folly, I hit upon "Archaeopteryx" as a suitable name for the journey.

This was where Conan Doyle had set his Lost World of T.rex and pterodactyls. Archaeopteryx was the name given by palaeontologists to the "bird" which showed the first fossil evidence of birds having evolved from dinosaurs. All the boxes, as they say, were ticked. We'd be able to stick to our tradition of naming trips after birds.

"But no-one will able to pronounce it" protested practically everyone. "No matter" decreed I.

Our few competitors named their trips "The Lost World". So, Señor Presidente, you can probably guess who sold more.

CP