Adventure of the month

Whenever I visit a new place, there are a couple of things that I normally look for, in order to best get my bearings. At the top of that list is the free walking tour. I love following a local around as they explain what it is that makes this particular place special. Add to that, being able to ask for recommendations after the tour, you've got yourself a full day right there.  In this case, I was not exactly in a new place. I had been to Brasilia once-18 years ago- but now there were 7 of us looking to explore and my foggy memories were not going to cut it. We needed a professional. I looked high and low but there were no walking tours, free or otherwise. There are always free walking tours. What gives? Ok, maybe the city is just really spread out. I looked into the possibility of a hop-on/ hop-off bus. Nope. There is one bus tour but not in the open-ended create your own adventure kind of way, plus it was sold out. It was quickly dawning on me that Brazil's capital city has

Sometimes all you can get is a quickie. Such was the case with country #123. The excitement on visiting my sole remaining South American country was tempered (and then tempered again) by an ever changing schedule that kept reducing the length of my stay. By the time I touched down in Timehri, Guyana, it was 1am. I was only going to have 11 hours, most of them in the middle of the night.   Add to this an hour’s drive to our hotel in Georgetown and I was down to 10 measly hours. Damn you, slow front desk clerk!! Why am I only seeing my room at 2:15 am? Resigned to missing out on the city’s sights, I figured I could at least try the city’s beer. I headed down to the 24 hour casino, where in a perverse turn of all things casino, they did not sell drinks. Sure, you could gamble and get free drinks but if you didn’t happen to have a fistful of Guyanese dollars to feed into the slot machines, you were shit out of Banks. Since at this point, down was up and up was down, the pool bar- the one w