As more information comes in, the tweaking continues.

Whilst this trip is likely still to be in the planning stage for the next few weeks, I think it’s useful to allow everyone to see the engineering which goes into the building of the trip. There’s still likely to be a fair amount of jiggling as we ensure that we’re allowing enough days to get from A to B to C and see what there is to see. But here’s some of what Venezuela has to offer.

Apropos Bolivian road signs warning drivers that an alpaca or llama might leap across the path at any moment, I was cycling in Norfolk last weekend, and passed a road sign warning of toads.

Starting either in August or September 2010, the plan so far is that this will be a 22-day trip. It's too early to get firm flight prices, but the cheapest is likely to be on Iberia, via Madrid. The trip itself will start in Caracas and end in Rio, although at this intermediate planning stage, it looks as though it'll be possible to curtail at Cayenne in French Guyana at about day 17.This latter option would mean using Air France, which is £150-200 more expensive for the flight element

Evo Morales, president of Bolivia, is a populist, a man of the people. He has huge support from the bulk of the population - the indigenous people of the Andean highlands, Quechua or Aymara-speaking; from which group Morales himself is drawn. But in August 2008 he had set himself on a collision course with the governors of the eastern/lowland states. The issue was mainly(and still is) the huge tax burden imposed by the government on the oil-producing areas, particularly the wealthy city of Santa Cruz.