Let sleeping lions lie.

There are many things that can make you sick in the jungle: malaria and dengue carrying mosquitoes; drinking tea-coloured river water the guide assures you is safe; getting too close to 4-day unshowered Irishman; having to eat catfish; listening to a self-absorbed French woman wittering on and on and on about her favourite subject, herself, and loudly proclaiming that the thing she likes the most about the jungle is how peaceful it all is. It will be considerably more peaceful - you think uncharitably - when you tie her hammock closed around her tonight and chuck her in the Amazon. French women flesh out conversation with padding words and phrases like "so", "then", "well", "i don't know", "frankly", "seriously", "enormously", "really", "truly", "it was…", "mad", "crazy", "serious", "funny". Two French women together can hold a conversation lasting several minutes using only padding words, never actually saying anything of any meaning. Padding gives the impression of someone who is uncomfortable with silences of longer than 4 seconds. It is exceptionally rare to meet one that pads in a language other than french, but Magalie can. And Magalie does. And Magalie just won't shut up. And Magalie's incessant chatter drowns out the ambient jungle noise.

She is travelling for 6 months you see, and she has a boyfriend in Barcelona and he wasn't ready to travel so she just left without him and she only has 2 more months left and even though she has had lot of opportunities and offers of sex she hasn't taken advantage of any of them because she has a boyfriend you know and she doesn't do that, but she could have, oh yes, but she didn't, and she's been to some of the places you've been but she had a much better time than you, and any places you've been she hasn't been are not important and she deliberately decided to avoid and she doesn't regret it, but you probably do regret ever mentioning it, and the places she's been that you are not going are frankly the best places in the world, and how old are you, but i'm not really interested in the answer, how old do you think she is. This is always a trick question, but having lived in France, i have the answer. If you want to sleep with any French woman over the age of 18, tell her she looks 24. If you want one to stop talking, tell her she looks 37.

There are also many things that can kill you in the jungle. Poison-arrow frogs, beloved of the indigenous tribes when they tried to fight off the invading Conquistadors. Hungry jaguars too. It helps though, as you lie awake half the night, gently swinging in your hammock, if your tour guide snores like the sound of two particularly vigorous mating jaguars. That, apparently, keeps all the other jaguars away. Hungry anacondas can also kill. As can hungry tarantulas. Luckily, Magalie leaves a day early, so she is no longer a threat.

No Coke, Pepsi?

Angel falls takes your breath away. From the base you can look vertically up to the top of the tepui, where the waters gleefully succumb to the challenge laid down by gravity. On the journey down the flow thins, before turning to mist, and - susceptible to gusts and breezes - moves as cigar smoke, before collecting again in hundreds of small pools and re-merging into a single river. It is in one of these pools at the base that we swim. Looking straight up at the almost one kilometre of water coming towards you is truly frightening. The only real way to get here is by 3-day tour, flying into a nearby village in a 6-seater plane and river-kayaking five hours upstream to a one hour jungle trek. I know who found the falls (Jimmy Angel), and when (1937). I know that the indigenous groups that lived here (and live here still) are in awe of the power of this waterfall. But what little i know, I know from the Lonely Planet. Our guide (for three days) has decent English, but tells us nothing. Nothing of the falls, nothing of the plans for the day(s) ahead, nothing of why we stop and start randomly, nothing of why he throws himself into the river to float downstream in the current, round a bend and out of sight. It looks like fun, but do we follow? Do we wait? Is he coming back? When?

Thinking about it, all Venezuelans have been like this. Unsmiling and uncommunicative. Crossing the border into Brazil you are struck by how happy people seem. Probably because they are on the right side of the border. It's easy to think that maybe they don't have a lot to smile about these days. Inflation is unmeasurable and the currency is poison. The state has fixed prices on staples like flour, sugar and milk. The short-term consequence is that limits need to be imposed on the amount of these things that customers can buy in supermarkets. Longer-term it becomes uneconomical for supermarket owners to stock these things so the shelves run empty. The cars are all '60s and '70s Detroit big, but they are battered, often windowless, sometimes doorless and seldom roadworthy, like something from a 1970s futuristic apocalypse movie. Foreign investment is non-existent. Buildings crumble and the only paint is on police and government edifices, typically emblazoned with quotes from Castro or Guevara extolling Bolivarian ideals. Despite big promises and thundering Chavezian rhetoric, the population is no better off under him. Except when it comes to fuelling their dilapidated monster cars. The cost of petrol is one euro cent per litre at official exchange rates, something like half that at black-market rates. 

The benefit of distance - temporal and geographic - has not softened my view of the natives, and my memories are almost universally unpleasant. This may sound like a generalisation but ALL Venezuelans are bastards. You can get sucked into thinking they have few enough reasons to be happy if you like, but i feel that never was the adage about a people getting the government they deserve more apt than in Venezuela. In one Carnival street-corner fire, someone has thoughtfully burned a dog. A woman selling bus tickets, in the bus station. is openly disgusted when I ask her for bus tickets. A girl selling popcorn conducts all transactions without words or eye contact. Our Angel Falls guide tells us that a walk will be 45 minutes, then 35 minutes, then 25, 20 and finally 15. The guy we book the tour through tells us wrong National Park entrance fees. The man flying the plane away from Angel Falls engages someone in a phone and text row for much of the hour and twenty minutes of the flight, including taxi, takeoff and landing. Small children don't play or smile. They don't wave at anyone and they are not very inquisitive about foreigners. Venezuelans just don't care. About you, about each other, and about themselves.

This is no more evident than in how they eat. They don't farm. Farming involves work, and they don't work because they don't need to because they have oil. This is something of a mantra for Venezuelans. They eat big deep-fried meals of whatever is available, usually fish or pork. The latin american word for juice - "jugo" - here means fizzy sugary drink (always Pepsi products, never Coca-Cola). Street-corner fruit vendors common in every latin American country are absent. Instead there are hotdog stands and popcorn vendors. The bread is laced with sugar and gives you a headache if you eat too much. This is no production line of Miss Universes, this is a country speeding towards collective national diabetes self-genocide. And they don't seem to care, so why should I?i. They are lazy, dour and mean, and you are more likely to hit a breaching humpback whale on the way to your small-plane crash death than you are to meet a helpful one. The US State Department warns that Venezuela is not a safe place to visit and recommends avoiding it. I didn't find it unsafe, just thoroughly unpleasant. The best thing that can be said about making the effort is that most Americans heed their government's warning and stay away.