I love the mystery that we tourists get out of travel.
Take this place, the Rupununi (the nearest thing to 'the Wild West', in Guyana). Life here can be thrillingly odd. Most visitors, like me, enjoy all this feeling happily out of their depth. With so much to misunderstand, after a while anything seems possible.
One man – a very congenial Canadian – had even managed to convince himself that the brocket deer were ‘rocket deer’ (how, I wonder, did he think they got their name? Was it the salads they ate? Or some inter-galactic tendency?) But others didn’t get it at all.
‘There’s nothing here but bats, snakes and creepy-crawlies,’ grumbled an elderly American couple. It was only later that I discovered they’d hated everywhere they’d ever been to. Even America was ‘full of nuts,’ and Cuba was a ‘paradise for drunks.’