South America's quirkiest hotel. This is The Toucan Inn in Guyana. You can find it out at Meten-Meer-Zorg, which is a small town built on a grid of canals, with a temple, a mosque, and a market. Like the town, the hotel sprouts upwards and outwards.
For the owner, Gary Serao, this great, concrete creation would never be complete. In the last few years, he’s added staircases, annexes, outer defences, a crow’s nest, a whole new storey, and a series of gantries to link it together. Everything's white and gleaming, as though it's been iced. Inside, it's more like a contraption than a building, a tottering fantasy from Dr Seuss. There's even a swimming pool, right through the middle.
But, as well as his fantasy guesthouse, this is also his museum. Gary has spent his life gathering up the pieces from Guyanese history. There's everything from kitsch to stone axes. I’ve often wondered what it would be like to judge countries by their ephemera. Well, here, the British period would be remembered as a time of ginger beer and postage.
The Dutch era looked far more impressive (there are cannonballs, and manacles and giant jars of fish), and far more enduring. Gary said that both the currency (guilders) and the Court of Policy had survived well into the 20th century, and so had the law. Two centuries on, land deals could still get tangled up in tracts of Roman Dutch.
A wonderful hotel.