More than 240,000 people are visiting the beach at Miranda state, said governor Henrique Capriles (Photo: Venancio Alcázares)

The majority came from Europe or North America, but less than half were on holiday. Venezuela’s Institute for National Statistics shows many were visiting family, on business or studying.

‘Reality tours’
But while tourism overall is still underdeveloped in Venezuela, one niche has done well in recent years.  Some foreign tourists have been attracted by Venezuela’s political scene since President Hugo Chavez took office in 1999.

“I’ve been to Cuba five times since 2006 and I really wanted to better understand the connection between the two countries,” said Nancy Kohn, from Boston, Massachusetts, who was on a bus tour of the capital, Caracas.

Sitting next to Ms Kohn was Sue Bergman who works in a clinic in Berkeley, California.

“The reason I chose to come here was because I’ve been a political activist pretty much my entire life,” said Ms Bergman.

The two women were among a dozen Canadian and American tourists on a “reality tour” of Venezuela run by Global Exchange, a US-based organisation.

The tour dispensed with the usual holiday fare of museum visits and beaches and instead offered visitors the chance to meet Venezuelan activists and community leaders.

“See for yourself the unprecedented social change that is occurring at this historic time in Venezuela and the region,” the tour literature said.

‘Revolutionaries eat people’
While Mr Chavez and his policies are an attraction for some, other aspects of his “Bolivarian revolution” make life difficult for tourists.

Currency controls to stop Venezuelans investing abroad mean the official rate of exchange is poor for foreigners arriving with US dollars.

A sandwich and a bottle of water in a cafe in Caracas cost around $25 at the official rate.

There has also been criticism of the government’s tourism strategy.

“The ministry has changed slogans, image, concepts, markets constantly. There’ve been a series of changes that basically have just generated distortion and confusion in the international market,” said Julio Arnaldes, president of the country’s tourism council, Conseturismo.

The government blames the international media for its inability to attract more visitors.

“There’s an international network that says Venezuela is an insecure country, unstable, dangerous and that the revolution and President Chavez keep coming and that revolutionaries eat people,” Tourism Minister Alejandro Fleming said earlier this year.
Marketing message

Venezuela, which has one of the highest murder rates in Latin America, has certainly struggled with its reputation for violence.

But other countries have proved that a bad reputation can be overcome and even turned into an advantage.

Colombia, which suffered international headlines about guerrilla conflict and cocaine trafficking, did just that when it came up with its latest tourism campaign.

“The only risk is wanting to stay,” said the tagline on the advertisements, making an oblique reference to the worries that tourists might have about visiting a country where foreigners had been kidnapped in the past.

This daring way to sell Colombia became a story in itself, garnering plenty of extra publicity overseas for its tourism attractions.

For Venezuela, heavily dependent on revenues from oil, the main problem could be the lack of incentives to invest in the tourism sector, according to Brazilian advertising executive Bobby Coimbra.

“Since I arrived 20 years ago, I’ve never seen any government bothered about tourism and no government has ever had a plan to effectively develop the sector and sell Venezuela as a tourist destination,” said Mr Coimbra, who heads the Caracas office of advertising agency Ogilvy Mather.

“The big problem for Venezuela is that it has a lot of oil, and that means the country doesn’t worry about making other plans.”

So while the push is on to attract more visitors, Venezuela’s beaches, mountains and Amazon jungle seem set to remain a well-kept secret for some time to come.

On the shore of Gran Roque, where most Roquenos reside and earn their living fishing for lobster, Spanish mackerel and bonefish, which are plentiful in these waters.

Is an archipelago off the coast of Venezuela, 45 minutes, “Fantasy Island”-style, by propeller plane from Caracas. From above, the more than 300 islands scatter over the Caribbean’s blue water in various sizes and shapes: one just a long stripe of green mangrove trees, others with paisley-shaped coves, and countless impossibly small sand mounds with a lone palm tree, like one of those New Yorker cartoons. The biggest island, Gran Roque, stands out from these specks like three lumps of coffee ice cream. Most Roquenos live there; it has an airstrip and a town that is about twice the size of the airstrip.

Los Roques was once remote and entirely isolated — Gran Roque had a modest fishing village with only one or two weekend houses for rich government officials. In the past 20 years, however, it has grown into a beach getaway for middle-class Venezuelans and an oddly high number of Italians as well as South American couples rekindling their romances.

There wasn’t much rekindling happening on my trip, though, because I was traveling with my friend Cary, a bottle-blond knockout with a boyfriend. But I knew if I came here alone, I would do what I did on my last vacation to Tulum, Mexico: watch straight couples make out, write in my journal about being a strong single gay guy and listen to Ray LaMontagne over and over on my iPod. No, we were here to spend the week drinking caiproscos, cruising around on boats to the islands and, most important, lying in the sand until our bodies softened like jellyfish.

One of the first places you see when you arrive is La Sirena, an empanada stand near the airport “gate” that has a painting of a mermaid on one wall. Her breasts seem to have been retouched often — perhaps a nod to the high number of augmentation procedures performed in Venezuela. As you approach town, posadas line the sandy streets; they range from chic to charmingly chintzy. The posada Acuarela, where we stayed, is situated behind a playground, on one of the unpaved roads where children howl after their dogs and mothers wash their children in plastic bins. As we checked in, a neighbor was blasting “Total Eclipse of the Heart” and sang along as if she were auditioning for Simon Cowell. But Acuarela is actually quite serene, shielded by aloe plants and palms. There was a coconut tree growing in our bathroom; the breeze swept blossoms from the bougainvillea on our terrace onto the floor of our room, and I kept mistaking them for lizards.

Just about every time we returned to Acuarela, its laid-back owner, Angelo Belvedere, would offer us a freshly blended juice or refrigerated red wine: “It’s so hot here. I like the wine cold.” Belvedere is originally from Sicily, where his family has owned a restaurant for generations, so in the evenings he would throw on a chef’s jacket and prepare dinner for us, whipping up tuna carpaccio, penne in a spicy ragu sauce, panna cotta.

Belvedere is also a painter, and his work of curvy female figures and colorful smears brushed on unframed canvases hangs on the posada’s walls. He came to Los Roques 17 years ago and fell in love with Maylin, a Venezuelan who is now his wife and the mother of his three daughters. When he built his guesthouse, there were just a couple of other posadas. Back then, the Roquenos captured rainwater to wash their clothes, dishes and themselves. Belvedere paid for the island’s first desalination machine.

Though this idyllic life embodies every city dweller’s fantasy, he seemed a little restless. He couldn’t wait to go to Vienna for a gallery opening of his paintings this winter, and he was planning a sailing trip around the world with his cousin. “We’ll stop at each port and cook,” he said. “You will have to meet us!” (Mental note: even if you live in so-called paradise, you will still feel discontent.)

In the town square, there is the requisite bust of Bolívar on a stack of bricks as well as a large statue of the Virgin Mary standing on a clamshell-shaped satin bed that looks as pillowy as a giant Huggies diaper. We had arrived during the annual Festival of the Virgin, when Mary spiritually arrives on the island to bless the local fishermen. It’s more like an end-of-the-summer holiday, an excuse for Roquenos to hang out with their families for the week and drink cans and cans of the local Polar beer. The upside: a dance party took over the square every night, with a D.J. playing salsa and reggaetón. The downside: starting at 8 a.m., firecrackers popped off, sounding like a car backfiring above your head.

Cary and I danced there most nights. I spent my time trying in vain to copy the subtle gyrations of the expert salseros, while Cary, who moves like a Pussycat Doll, was surrounded by little girls with pompoms in their hair trying to copy her steps. On our second night, there was a Butt Shaking Contest: young women in tight, bottom-hugging jeans crunked their posteriors to 30 seconds of music, and then were judged by applause. Cary entered the contest. Cary wore a miniskirt with no underwear. Cary won two cases of Polar beer. A generous champion, she handed her winnings out to the crowd.

Many of the posadas have their own boats and will pack you a cooler of sandwiches and beer — there’s lots of beer here. They pull up to an island, plant an umbrella in the sand, plop down your cooler and leave you alone for several hours. On the beaches, the sand is soft, white and sometimes full of chunks of coral, shells and red flecks, like some healthy cereal you get at Whole Foods. There are also huge piles of conch shells on every island we visited, from years of carefree consumption. They look like tiny skulls from a massacre long ago and creeped me out.

At Crasqui, we all tried to keep polite distances from one another, but this didn’t stop Cary and me from trying to watch the Italian and Gucci Girl through Cary’s camera when they got naked. Later, on the island of Dos Mosquises, we went to a marine biology center that runs a sea turtle repopulation project. The reptiles are kept in vats for about seven months and then set free. But our visit was cut short because they also seem to be raising mosquitoes. Cary was bitten, and her lips swelled up to Angelina Jolie-like proportions for the rest of the afternoon.

We soon hit it off with the captain of our boat, Fuyu, a handsome guy with long hair and a sarcastic wit. Sometimes a flock of birds would hover over the water, and Fuyu and his assistant, Chino, would suddenly stop smoking, throw out fishing lines into the water and inevitably catch something like bonita and Spanish mackerel. One day Chino plucked out a conch shell, gored a hole in its side and served us sea-shimi. He and Fuyu had a chummy Gilligan-and-the-Skipper rapport. With my gringo-Spanish, I could glean one conversation:

“You’re so crazy!”

“No, you’re so crazy!”

“No, you’re so crazy!”

Chino was a stocky fellow with a bright smile and the ability to balance in the boat without holding on to anything. I developed a manageable, non-“Death in Venice” crush on him because there was no one else there. It was either him or a pelican. I caught him staring at Cary’s prize-winning rear end, so maybe we weren’t really an ideal match.

My best shot at romance was on Carenero, where an old man with five teeth lives in a shack that is painted with a heart-shaped sign, “El Rancho de Amor.” Apparently the five-toothed man loves all women who come to the island. Fuyu announced that he had one for him, a gringa, in fact. The five-toothed man thought that he said “gringo” and pointed at me, and we all laughed, because these are the kinds of jokes that translate well.

Most of the islands we went to were unpopulated — each place your own little sliver of paradise. La Pelona (“The Bald One”) is just a pile of sand the size of my Brooklyn apartment, surrounded by a beautiful coral reef. Cary and I swam around it, taking in the fascinating Little Nemo underworld. But for only an hour or so — even slathered in SPF 50, the sun is brutal.

Every afternoon I found myself lying on the beach, trying to be brainless, but I ended up obsessing about how many more “me’s” would come to this spot before it got junked up, the coral too damaged to regenerate. The chipped mermaid mural, the Butt Shaking Contest, the five-toothed man — Los Roques felt perfectly unpolished. And though the streets of Gran Roque are now crowded with posadas and there are plenty of places to drink at night, it still is free of sunburnt Germans, dolphin art and high-end spa spirituality. Right now Los Roques seems to be enjoying an equilibrium between comfort and rustic realism. But I worried that this will all begin to brown and rot like a plantain.

Nelly Camargo is the owner of El Canto de la Ballena restaurant, a favorite hangout among locals, including Fuyu, Angelo and a couple who own a surf shop on the island of Francesqui Arriba. Cary and I became regulars during our stay. Camargo has lived on Gran Roque for 20 years and is the island den mother. She is a passionate woman with graying hair and glasses she pushes up as she talks about how Hugo Chavez is helping the poor. (She was one of the few people we met who support the Venezuelan president.)

One night I asked her if she was worried that this place would eventually become another Acapulco or Puerto Vallarta, searching for the word for “development” in Spanish. Camargo explained to me that Los Roques was designated as a national park in 1972, in order to protect its rich marine ecosystem. She assured me that it was safe. Both the Sofitel chain and Sandals were turned away when they attempted to develop resorts here, and there is a height limit for building on Gran Roque. But Nelly and Angelo don’t even own the land they built on. It’s owned by the government, and what this administration has planned for the area is anyone’s guess.

If this place does turn, I have a feeling it will not follow the typical Hard Rock Café route.  It may overripen like everything does now, but in some different way that I can’t imagine. I just hope it will still welcome a gay guy and his best girlfriend, the 2007 Butt Shaking champion.

On a truly epic expedition, British adventurer Leo Houlding and his team of climbers spent eight days of boat rides and hacking through virgin jungle to get to its base, and a further six scaling the east face of the 1,400m peak.

As these images from the expedition show, it was a remarkable and challenging journey that makes Indiana Jones’ adventures look like a walk in the park. Photographs by Alastair Lee

Cerro Autana is a spectacular quartzite-sandstone tepuy (table-top mountain) in western Venezuela. The local Piaroa Indians revere it as the stump of the tree of life, from which all life grew. The starting point for the expedition was the frontier town of Puerto Ayacucho, reached from Caracas by car or plane. From there, the team made their way to the Piaroa community of Ceguera via an eight-hour boat ride up the Rio Orinoco and tributary Rio Autana

After seeking a blessing from the local shaman and participating in a memorable yopo ceremony (snorting a hallucinogenic powder), they began a four-day trek through virgin jungle to establish a trail and base camp below the rarely visited east face of Autana

The initial climb involved as much vegetation as rock face, but as the rock quality improved the team climbed above the jungle canopy and into the Cuevo Autana, the highest elevated cave system in the world where they camped

The largest cave was ‘cathedral like’ and provided fresh running water, plenty of flat ground and truly awesome views over uninterrupted jungle