This week’s dream: Venezuela’s hinterland

Expect "endless challenges" on a voyage through the hinterland of Venezuela, says Hermione Eyre in the Independent. Tourism here is "deeply dysfunctional" - visitors may be confronted with anything from "motorboats breaking down" to "national coffee shortages and political unrest" on a daily basis. Persist, however, and you'll be rewarded with an array of spectacular landscapes - "delta, jungle, savannah, mountain". Only the face of President Chavez, "loved and hated in equal measure", remains constant along the way, beaming down on you from posters "in the poorest of homes or on roadside walls".

From the "little river port of Volcan" in the north east of the country, it is seven hours by motorised canoe down the Orinoco to its delta. You'll arrive "sun-baked, rain-sodden and breeze-whipped" in a "peaceful wooden village" of the indigenous Warao people, where you can stay in a house built on stilts, and swim nearby "off the wide sandy shore of the Atlantic".

To the south is the jungled Canaima National Park, where a tiny Cessna plane will take you over the Angel Falls - the highest waterfall in the world - to Kamarata, inaccessible by road. From here, you can trek to the "glorious" Kavak Canyon, "nature's stateliest jacuzzi", and Canaima itself, "a lagoon fed by six hypnotic waterfalls".

Los Llanos, the vast savannah in the northwest of the country, spilling over into Colombia, is home to an abundance of wildlife - "storks, tiger herons and vermilion flycatchers; capybara, spectacled caiman and turtles basking on rocks". From here, it's not far to the "Alp-like" mountains of Aragua, where you can enjoy the hospitality of another ethnic group - the Germans. A colony of Black Forest emigres lived here undisturbed until 1960. They are there today, "slightly more genetically various" but still "wearing dirndls, cooking strudel and dancing around Bavarian maypoles".

Explore (0844-499 0901) offers a 16-day Angel Falls & Orinoco tour from £2,205pp incl. flights, transport, accommodation, meals and tour leader. ·