Westmaas Touring

13/09/2026

https://www.guardian.co.tt/article/three-destinations-a-lifetime-of-stories-journey-into-the-heart-of-south-america-6.2.2666313.c11b8fed17

The term or con­cept of three in one may have vary­ing in­ter­pre­ta­tions de­pend­ing on whether you are a philoso­pher, a Ro­man Catholic (the Holy Trin­i­ty) or a math­e­mati­cian. For the more ground­ed and down-to-earth, it may al­so re­fer to the drinker who will con­sume .....

10/09/2026

Panama PART 4 by Jan Westmaas page 1
With our brief stay in Guyana now behind us, on August 12th we flew back to Manaus from Boa Vista on Azul Airline. No 12-hour bus ride this time. 12 days had gone since we left Trinidad, and we were due to leave Manaus for Panama at 3.30 a.m on August 13th. By 5.00 p.m. August 12th , we were back at our base , Casa Dos Frades where we had just about enough time to organize our packing and to step out opposite the hotel into the bright and lively San Sebastian Park.
There we enjoyed our last moments in the city. We walked around the park in admiration of the many families walking together, old and young with toddlers in abundance. We then went looking look for a restaurant to dine. For all practical purposes, we separated into small groups, bumping into each other every now and then as we searched for food which was plentiful around the square.
Our 2-night stay in Panama (August 13th and 14th) allowed us a full day and a half to play with as the morning of August 15th was our date of departure for home. We had a number of options: rest, go shopping at Allsbrook Mall, a visit to the Embera Indigenous community, a visit to the canal zone and museum and finally, a tour of the city’s downtown historic sites. “It’s a stretch to attempt all in the limited time”, I advise.
A head count revealed that most people had done the Panama Canal tour and the historic city tour on previous visits while just about everyone wanted to do some last-minute shopping at the popular Allsbrook Mall. I always encourage travellers to do a tour of the Canal Zone and museum to understand the logistics of vessels crossing from the Atlantic to the Pacific and vice versa, using fresh water from the Chagres river.
Since dictator Manuel Noriega was ousted from power by the George W. Bush administration in in December 1989, Panama never looked back. “Most of us supported the invasion. We were happy to see the back of the hijo de p**a (son of a pr******te) dictator, ” said Luis, my man of contact in Panama City. “But Trump insults us when he talks about reclaiming the canal because in his view, China is running it.” “Tonteria” (Nonsense) , he concludes.
Panamanians are a proud people who will not give up their canal without a fight. The only Panamanian to “give up” was the former world boxing champion in four weight divisions, Roberto Durán. He is reputed to have said no más (no more) in the 8th round to the referee in his famous world-title battle against the American Sugar Ray Leonard in 1980. “Manos de Piedra”, (Stone Fists), as Durán is popularly known, has not faded into irrelevance. “He’s still around town, greeting and being greeted by just about everybody, ” said Luis, with a sense of pride.
For the shopping-obsessed, Panama is heaven, but Panama is equally a nature lover’s paradise. 18 travellers signed up for the visit to the Embera indigenous community not knowing what to expect, except that eco-tourism in their native habitat was their primary source of income. I had been there many years ago but had forgotten that it took some doing. They are basically a river

Page 2
people who reside in the Chagres National Park and move around the Chagres River in dugout canoes (piraguas).
Getting there, the way our native guides planned it, was not for the weak of heart. The first part of the journey by bus was a breeze. We were then taken to a point on the river where we boarded three canoes which took us you to a beach in the vicinity of the Embera village. So far so good. I suspect most of us would have preferred to go straight to the village. But the native guides had other ideas. They wanted to take us on a hike to a waterfall first. Part of the package, presumably.
They led us on an ordeal, hiking over slippery rocks and through shallow water for what seemed like eternity. Had we each not been given solid sticks (staffs) for support, and generous assistance from the guides themselves and from each other, heaven knows what disaster would have befallen us. In all this, our sense of balance and our basic conditioning were tested to the limit. When we eventually did get to the waterfall, we spent a short while and then retraced our steps as another group of travellers had virtually taken it over!
We finally arrived at the village to be warmly received with pulsating drumming and dancing by natives, male and female, in their traditional dress. We were then invited into a huge thatch-roofed hall where we had a meal of river fish, local fruit and vegetables and Embera-style fried plaintains served on banana leaves.
While we ate, we were invited to form a circle to be addressed in Spanish by the chief’s daughter. Christine volunteered to translate into English. “105 of us from this Embera village live as a community in this part of the national park. We are not allowed to keep domestic animals nor to plant crops other than for our own use. We are one of 8 distinct ethnic groups or tribes in the entire country,” the chief’s daughter said.
There was a lot more that was revealed as she addressed us. And at question time even more information was shared. We learnt that, depending on the region, election for the position of Noko (Chief) , may be held every three to five years. And women can stand for leadership in democratic elections . Voters must position themselves physically behind their choice of leader to be counted on election day.

They also practise monogamy. One of the more serious crimes is for a married man to have another woman. The punishment for this can be severe. The offender must sit on the floor with his feet clamped to a device for a certain period depending on the severity of the offence. That’s not all. Sugar and honey are spread around the guilty party to attract ants to add more bite to the punishment!

We were coming to the end of our 3-country adventure and by the time we arrived back home in Trinidad, we had sufficient time to reflect. Captivating and enervating as it was, it will be some time before it is expunged from our memories, if at all. THE END.

Travellers are invited to share their photos relevant to Part 4 of the serie

10/09/2026

From the modern city of Manaus in the Brazilian Amazon, the Rupununi Savannah in the Guyanese outback now beckoned. But we must first get to Boa Vista, Roraima’s, purposefully planned capital, with its delightfully wide, bright avenues on the Branco River. But it’s some distance away. “12 hours by bus!”, responded incredulously one traveller when I remarked about the time it was going to take to get from Manaus to Boa Vista.
“Never mind, we take a brief stop for lunch, there’s a toilet on the bus and you can also catch up on sleep”, I reassured him. “And don’t forget on our way back to Manaus, we fly from Boa Vista. - it’s a mere one hour 15 minutes flight”. Indeed, it took 12 hours to get to Boa Vista. We left Manaus at 10.00 a.m. and arrived at our hotel in Boa Vista at 10.00 p.m.
My last visit to that part of the globe with a group of Trinis was way back in 2013. As we journeyed this time along the 760-kilometre Highway BR-174, I distinctly recalled crossing the equatorial line that demarcates the northern from the southern hemisphere. At precisely this point, there was a marker indicating zero degrees latitude. I also recalled the signage on the side of the road indicating to travellers that they were passing through the Waimiri Atroari reserve- territory of indigenous people.
What the signs did not say then (2013) nor now ( August 2026) was the number of lives that were lost (highway workers and officials as well as members of the Waimiri tribe) during the building of the highway in the period of Brazil’s military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985. In 2019 a historic inquest by a federal court took place in a make shift court (a traditional thatched hut) on Waimari- Atroari land. Many indigenous elders testified that state-sponsored massacres, aerial bombings, and chemical warfare were perpetrated against them by the Brazilian army during the military dictatorship.
As we travelled further south, I noticed a distinct change in the vegetation at the side of the highway since my last visit. Tropical rainforest, grazing pastureland and scrubland gave way to tidy, almost manicured plantations of palm oil. Doing some research when I returned home, I discovered that Brazil in its haste to combat climate change invested heavily in a “sustainable” aviation fuel (SAF) project using biofuels like palm oil as raw material. This sat well with President Lula who dubbed it “the fuel of the future,” much to the disgust of environmental experts who bemoaned further deforestation of the Amazon rain forest as a result.
We were due to spend the night in Boa Vista at Hotel Aipana Plaza whose Guyanese-born Front Office Manager, Travis D’Aguiar waited patiently for us to turn up. We did, if not a wee bit later than expected. The following afternoon we reached Hotel Takutu in Lethem in Guyana about 4.00 p.m. From Boa Vista via the border town of Bonfim, we travelled on a recently paved first class highway and crossed a modern 230-metre concrete and steel bridge built by the Brazilians over the Takutu River.
Completed in 2009, the construction of the bridge was a clear signal that Brazil meant business. And Guyana likewise. The bridge was even designed to allow drivers coming from Brazil to Guyana to transition smoothly to the left side of the road and drivers leaving for Brazil to transition easily to the right side.
Barring some delay caused by unduly officious Guyanese border officials, we would have covered the Boa Vista-Lethem leg of the tour in less than 2 hours!
Boa Vista, capital of a state rich in precious metals (gold and silver) and bountiful minerals, shone in comparison to dusty Lethem, only just beginning to come out of its shell. Significant investments by the Chinese in road building, real estate, ware housing , retail and whole stores with just about everything on sale, stared you in the face.
In these borderlands, Brazilians flock to Lethem where prices are attractive while Guyanese tourists with more disposable income from the country’s oil boom, make a beeline for Boa Vista and Manaus for something radically different. In both cities, they get hints of what life can be like in an upper-middle nation, as defined by the experts.
“Easter time is the tourist high season here. The place is packed with local and foreign tourists who’ve come to experience the annual rodeo, celebrating the life of the local cowboy- the vaquero- on the cattle ranches of the Rupununi ,” said Marva Johnson, Manageress of Hotel Takutu. probably the oldest and best hotel in Lethem, partly founded by her grandfather, Ivan Johnson in the 60s.
“I’m here for other purposes and my group is fine with that,” I thought to myself, thinking that one day I’ll bring a group to experience the traditions of the vaquero at Easter. The landscape of Rupununi with its sweeping savannah, punctuated by huge termite mounds against the backdrop of the Kanuku mountains was unique. We also undertook a challenging hike following the course of a river over rocky terrain at the base of the mountain. We eventually reached a waterfall where we were rewarded with the opportunity to cool off.
As far as the Rupununi was concerned, Venezuela’s ridiculous claim on all its territory notwithstanding, I had finally stepped foot on the land on which my father worked in the 30s when the boundary with Brazil was being surveyed by Colonel Hudson and the Boundary Commission.
In conversation with Andave, a guide in his early 20s, I tried raising the question of the Rupununi rebellion which took place in 1969, long before he was born. “Never even heard of it in my history classes at school”, he asserted. I preferred not to pursue the question and must rely on my own research thanks to reports in Guyanese newspapers at the time of the rebellion.
In a nutshell, 3 years after British Guiana became Guyana, an independent state, a number of privileged cattle ranchers and their supporters, including Amerindians from the Rupununi, fearing takeover of their land by President Forbes Burnham and encouraged by Valerie Hart, a politician associated with the minority party United Force, crossed the border to Venezuela. It was rumoured that the Hart and Melville families ( the Savannah elite ) wanted to form an independent “Republic of the Rupununi” with help from neighbouring Venezuela.
There, it is alleged, they received weapons and training from the Venezuelan military. They returned after a week with weapons like bazookas and almost immediately launched an attack on the Lethem Police station resulting in the death of five Police Officers, two of senior rank and two civilians.
Meanwhile, the Guyanese Defence Force, got word of the plot and flew in aircraft with soldiers aboard and stopped a rebellion which was clearly poorly planned. While Hart and other key leaders sought and received asylum in Venezuela and Brazil, the vast majority of rebels who were arrested and brought to Georgetown for trial had charges of murder and related crimes dropped almost immediately while in January 1970, of the ten men who were put on trial for murder, seven were found not guilty by the jury and the remaining three were discharged without conviction by the magistrate on no-case submissions.

10/09/2026

PART 2 Travel 2026 by Jan Westmaas
Visits to museums are an inevitable part of the experience of the traveller with an enquiring mind. To sleep in a museum sounds a bit much but the Casa Dos Frades, the former Franciscan Friary, was converted into a hotel with such taste and imagination that no traveller in his or her right mind could possibly have been disenchanted with it.
The hotel’s rooms and baths are spotlessly clean, and its buffet breakfasts are sumptuous and varied as one would expect. Most of all, the preservation of period furniture, religious artifacts and delicately displayed heritage items belonging to friars of past and the peaceful ambience that prevails, is what gives the Friar’s Hotel an edge over others.
Before embarking on our ultimate adventure in Manaus- a 2-night 3 -day stay in Gero’s lodge in the jungle on the other side of the river, we all explored downtown together in the company of the man himself. Later, those inclined paid 25 reais or US$5.00 for a one hour guided visit to the Teatro Amazonas) (the Opera House), just across the square from our hotel. To this day it baffles me that Christine and I were allowed free entry.
We had no reais (Brazilian currency) with us. The officials seemed willing to accept our US dollars, but they had no change. Nevertheless, they kindly waved us in. I wondered whether the same would happen to a foreigner in a similar position in our own country. The visit to the Teatro Amazonas was worth every minute of the hour of the English-guided tour.
With roofing tiles and furnishings from France, marble and crystal chandeliers from Italy, steel walls and iron work from England and Scotland, this indeed was Europe transported into the jungle. “The Italian architect Celestial Sacardim designed the 700-seat auditorium in the distinct shape of a lyre in the fashion of the Palais Garnier Opera House in Paris,” said our guide.
“But not everything is European”, our guide emphasized. “Look at the curtain on the stage. The illustration on it is by Brazilian painter Crispim do Amaral. It depicts the local water goddess Iara near where the waters meet” he added. “When was the first opera performed here?”, asked one eager European-sounding tourist”. “In 1897, a year after its official opening, Amilcare Ponchiellis’ La Giocanda was performed”, the guide responded. “The Italian tenor Enrique Caruso starred in it “, he added.
We also learnt that the theatre closed in 1924 after the Brazilian rubber industry went into sharp decline because of competition from British – owned rubber plantations in Malaysia and Sri Lanka. Surreptitiously, an Englishman had smuggled rubber pods to these British colonies which began producing rubber more cheaply and efficiently than the Brazilian rubber barons could. It reopened in 1997 for regular concerts.
For more reasons than one, it held not a single concert for some 70 years! Deservedly, in July of this year the Manaus Opera House and San Sebastian square nearby were officially inscribed onto Unesco’s World Heritage list. If I had a say, I would include Hotel Dos Frades in the list.
At the height of the rubber boom, Manaus was the first city in Brazil to elect a mixed-race Governor. Eduardo Gonsalves Ribeiro was Governor of Amazonas from 1890-1891 and from 1892-1896. His contribution to the transformation of Manaus from a provincial town to a major city of trade and culture is well-acknowledged on plaques and exhibits on the wall of the theatre.
We’re now back at the hotel preparing to leave early the following morning for Gero’s eco-lodge where we were to spend 2 nights. I arranged with Claudia to leave a room free for our group to have the bulk of our luggage stored, small back packs being more practical for such a short stay. Shortly after breakfast, Gero arrived, greeting us in his own inimitable style that he perfected over the years. “Walla Walla Walla”, he screamed, and we all knew it was time to get on the move. The bus had arrived to take us to the Ceasa market and port (a 15-minute drive if that much) from where speed boats would be waiting to take us to the village of Careiro, gateway to the Amazon rain forest on the other side of the Rio Negro.
With a group of our size (34), we used 2 speed boats to get across the Rio Negro, stopping to witness the point where the Rio Negro met and ran alongside the Solimoes. By pure chance, Christine and I crossed in the boat in which Gero happened to be. “See where the rivers meet. They flow side by side for miles without mixing”, said Gero, enthusiastically, his words tumbling one after the other.
“The dark colour of Rio Negro flowing all the way from Colombia comes from decayed leaves and plant matter. And the pale, sandy colour of the Solimoes, the experts say, comes from erosion from the Andes Mountain in Peru” continued Gero. “Do both rivers ever mix”? asked one traveller, quizzically. “They start mixing about 6 kilometres from this point and merge fully about 80 kilometres downstream to form one river,” Gero dutifully responded.
Meanwhile, we have reached the other side of the Rio Negro to the municipality of Careiro where we transferred to two buses, stopping briefly to stock up on water before undertaking the final part of our journey to Gero’s lodge located in the Mamori basin. For part of the way we drove on an access road to the controversial Trans Amazon highway 319 which was hastily built through the rain forest to link Manaus to Porto Velho in the state of Rondonia- a distance of 900 kilometres !
It’s been nicknamed the Road of Ghosts. In July of this year in one of President Lula’s campaigns, against the advice of environmentalists and experts, he promised to have the largely abandoned road re-opened. Only time will tell whether in November, Luiz Lula Da Silva will be re-elected or whether he will lose to right -wing candidate, Flavio Bolsonaro, son of former President, Jair Bolsonaro, who’s serving a 27-year sentence for plotting a coup against the state after the elections in 2022. You can be sure that Flavio Bolsonaro will not get Gero’s vote.
We’re on the final stages of an odyssey to Gero’s lodge, the Ararinha Jungle Hotel. which in fact comprises 6 individual lodges, enough to house comfortably 29 members of our group. The remaining 5 members will be housed nearby, a half an hour journey by canoe, Gero assures them. We say goodbye to the bus drivers at a jetty on the Mamori Basin where we transfer to two speed boats which bring us closer to our destination.
We then transfer into 3 canoes, the boatmen first ensuring that their vessels are well balanced before setting off across the lake for our jungle hotel As we draw closer to the lush embankment where the main building stands , a flush of excitement comes over us. Waiting to greet us was Kelly (Gero’s wife) and his crew of guides, cooks, housekeepers, and other members of staff.
Presumably we had come to relax but there was not a dull moment during our brief stay at Ararinha Lodge. With the aid of guides particularly keen on pointing out to us an array of medicinal plants and what they are used for, we explored the jungle by day and night, becoming experts in getting in and out of canoes in the process. We all went fishing in our canoes for piranhas with limited luck. We had slightly better luck wildlife spotting. We saw pink belly and grey belly dolphins, caimans, monkeys, and a variety of birds. We even had the opportunity to visit by canoe a farm belonging to a Caboclo family (mixture of the indigenous and the Portuguese-descended Brazilian). Some of us were moved to take a dip or a swim in the water of the Amazon not far from Ararinha Lodge. It was with sad hearts that we said goodbye to the jungle as we made our way back to Manaus to continue the next leg of our journey.

29/08/2026

Westmaas touring on tour. Jan’s son Tim and his wife Kasia recently returned from a short self guided tour of Venice including the colourful islands of Burano and Murano.

It’s a lovely place to visit with friendly people.

16/08/2026

Sunrise in Babia Gora National Park, Poland

16/08/2026

Westmaas touring on tour in Poland. Members of the Westmaas family went on a night hike to Diablak Summit in the Babia Gora national park to see the sun rise. It is becoming a very popular outing. The Poles are great mountaineers.

14/06/2026

29/05/2026

Westmaas touring on tour in Malta. Visit to the Grand Harbour, Valletta, Malta.

28/05/2026

Members of the Westmaas Touring Family on tour in Malta. These photos were taken in the ancient city of Mdina