About the Author

A journalist and traveller, I went to Venezuela for a two-week holiday and was so blown away by the people I met and the places I visited, I ended up staying for 12 years. Along the way I bathed in the spray of Angel Falls, the world's highest waterfall, trekked to the Lost World table mountain of Roraima (four times) , rafted down jungle rivers with wonderful indigenous guides and swallowed my fear of heights to paraglide at impossible heights in the Andes. I also took my first faltering steps of salsa in Venezuela and learnt the lingo by watching slushy soap operas.The results of my adventurings are gathered in the Bradt Guide to Venezuela, an exhaustive and comprehensive guide to where to go and what to do that is my small way of giving something back to a country that has given me so much.I hope others who read the guide are encouraged to follow in my footsteps and explore this incredible country. I am now based in the UK and it tugs at my heart strings some nights that I am too far from Choroni to hear the tambores on the malecon. Fortunately my job as a journalist in England allows me to follow Venezuelan and Latin American developments and keep my Spanish up to scratch. The UK is also a good place to do research and meet other like-minded Latin-America-philes for proper rum and salsa sessions.No matter how many trips I take back to Venezuela, I always find something new and unexpected, a dish I've never tried before, a mountain never climbed, something exciting that the world needs to know about. It's that kind of country.To keep up to date with my articles on Venezuela visit my blog at www.venezuelanodyssey.blogspot.com