One of the ways to help save the Amazon is to visit it. And you can stay in luxury in this Peruvian treehouse above the rainforest canopy

The night before I flew to the rainforest, I stayed at a hotel in Cuzco. There was a startling mural stretching the length of the dining room which showed a fantasy of an Amazonian paradise: bare-breasted maidens bathing in idyllic pools surrounded by luxuriant greenery and compliant jungle animals; the only thing most were wearing was a pendant of vaguely Incaic design. Pass the jojoba shampoo.

I was not quite sure what I expected from the Amazon. It’s become such a romanticised ecological symbol – a flagship of all we stand to lose – that it’s hard to see the trees for the wood. Which is why I wanted to spend some time in them, on a small patch of land, a malaria-free reserve near the Peruvian town of Puerto Maldonado, close to the Bolivian border.

Specifically, I was headed for the Reserva Amazonica, where José Koechlin, the ecologist and hotelier who helped German director Werner Herzog with his epic films Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre: Wrath of God, has just built a bedroom 90ft up a tree.

When the lodge first told me I’d be sleeping up a tree, I had assumed it was Latin hyperbole; but no, there the treehouse was, clinging to the slender trunk of a cepanchila. To get there you had to climb a wooden tower and a series of rope walkways.

As first guest and “guinea pig” (not a comforting concept in Peru), I was issued with a panic button so that if necessary a member of staff could rush in, strap me to their chest and abseil down to the ground, like a ninja turtle. In the event I kept my finger off the button, although sleeping that high was certainly an intense experience. The nearest analogy I can think of is being in a small cabin at sea, with the wind and outside noise amplified, which was quite something the night a troupe of monkeys descended on the cabin, rattled the walkway and played on the roof. In the early morning, the dawn chorus was raucous and spectacular, from the horned screamer bird which some say sounds like a donkey drowning, to the “water dropping from a giant tube” gloop-gloop-gloop noises of the oropendola. There were also tree frogs that sounded exactly like digital cameras bleeping.

My guide Eric joined me in the treehouse at 5am so we could see the sun rise over the top of the Amazon rainforest. It felt Biblical, a moment of creation. I had become used to seeing the sun slowly filter its way to the forest floor – but above the canopy it came up fast, like a searchlight, and illuminated the heads of the matate and ceiba trees so that they looked like fibre optic lamps.

Eric pointed out a paradise tanager in a nearby tree, its blues startlingly vivid. He listed the ways in which the locals could survive: by logging or gold-panning, which was environmentally destructive; by gathering brazil nuts, which was slow and subject to the whims of the market; but the best of all, said Eric, is you – the tourist. Tourism is one of the few economic factors that can persuade a government to preserve a rainforest. It’s a curious thought, but he may be right: if we really want to save the Amazon, we should go and stay there.

• A night at the Inkaterra Canopy Tree House (inkaterra.com) starts from US$300 per person (based on two sharing). Journey Latin America (020-8747 8315, journeylatinamerica.co.uk) sells flights from London to Puerto Maldonado, with a stopover in Lima in both directions, from £825 rtn inc tax

Former soldier shrugs off snakes, scorpions and piranha to complete 4,000 mile walk

After 4,000 miles, an estimated 50,000 mosquito bites, hundreds of wasp stings and encounters with anacondas and scorpions, a British man yesterday completed his record-breaking trek along the path of the Amazon.

Ed Stafford became the first man known to have walked the entire length of the world’s longest river when he reached the Atlantic Ocean in northern Brazil, where he sprinted into the sea.

“I’ve been told I was going to be killed so many times,” Stafford said. “But I’m not dead. I’m here now and … I’ve proved that if you want something enough, you can do anything.”

The 34-year-old former British army captain set out from the south coast of Peru 859 days ago, and has since encountered 18ft caimans, huge anacondas, illness, food shortages and death threats.

Stafford and a British friend began the walk on 2 April 2008. The friend left after three months, but Stafford carried on, joined by locals he met on the way.

After walking for five months he was joined by a Peruvian forestry worker, Gadiel “Cho” Sanchez Rivera, 31, and the pair have travelled together ever since.

Stafford hoped his feat would raise awareness of the destruction of the rain forest, but said he is “no eco-warrior”.

“The crux of it is, if this wasn’t a selfish, boy’s-own adventure, I don’t think it would have worked. I am simply doing it because no one has done it before.”

Stafford said he has seen vast areas of felled jungle during his journey. “It’s the people in power who are benefiting from the extraction of the natural resources here,” he said. “That’s why there are corrupt politicians and laws that aren’t enforced and loads of unconstrained deforestation still going on.”

Stafford and Sanchez Rivera survived on beans and rice, although they supplemented their diet by catching and eating piranha fish.

One of Stafford’s hairiest moments came while staying in a community in September 2008. Village leaders radioed ahead to the next community, asking for permission for Stafford to pass through their territory. “The response came back crystal clear,” Stafford wrote on his blog. “If a gringo walks into their community, they will kill him.”

Stafford planned a route around the village, but was detained by men from a different settlement. Having had his possessions picked through, the men allowed him to continue – but only if he hired guides from the tribe.

The two-and-a-half year journey, which has cost around £63,000, has been funded by sponsorship from companies and the public. Stafford has been blogging and posting video clips of his journey, his last entry stating that he had only a 50-mile walk between him and his finishing point – despite passing out while walking the previous day.

Sex workers fear spending on Olympics and World Cup might drive them out of Rio’s largest open-air red light zone

Night fell on the sewage-clogged streets of Vila Mimosa, Rio’s largest open-air red light district, and the area’s jukeboxes erupted into a cacophony of Abba, Lady Gaga and pounding Brazilian funk music.

Outside, an autumn chill descended on Vila Mimosa’s main street – Rua Sotero dos Reis – and rain hammered down onto a sign promising “streeptease”. Inside, hundreds of drunken men packed this sprawling warren of brothels and bars for another evening of shouted conversations and fleeting encounters with the 3,500 or so local prostitutes.

But the rowdy 24-hour parties that have made this labyrinth of excess notorious across Brazil may soon fall silent, as Rio de Janeiro prepares for a multi-billion dollar facelift in the run up to the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics.

Rio’s business association, Firjan, estimates that some R$250bn (£89bn) in public and private money will be invested in the city over the coming six years with plans for a number of ambitious interventions, including a R$130m museum designed by Santiago Calatrava, the Spanish architect behind Dublin’s spectacular Samuel Beckett Bridge.

While most are celebrating the city’s regeneration, Vila Mimosa’s prostitutes and their employers are growing increasingly nervous that the city’s makeover may see them driven out by mooted plans to bulldoze the area and replace it with a platform for a high-speed rail-link between Rio and Brazil’s economic capital Sao Paulo.

“As soon as the rumours started going around people started knocking on my door and saying: ‘How are we going to earn a living if they make us leave’?” said Cleide Nascimento Almeida, the head of Vila Mimosa’s residents association. “The city is going to undergo big changes for the World Cup and the Olympics. [But] the red light district cannot be moved outside of the city centre no matter how shameful the government might think this place is,” she added. “The city centre is where the people come to work and when they are not at work it’s where they come to have fun.”

Uncertainty surrounds the precise nature of plans for the area surrounding Vila Mimosa. Almeida said she believed the government intended to destroy part of the area to make way for the so-called “bullet-train” between Rio and Sao Paulo, while other projects involved “a ring road, a shopping centre [and] parking facilities.”

“We’re not really sure [what they will do]. We just know that they have us in their sights,” she said.Known to its overwhelmingly male clientele as ‘VM’, Vila Mimosa is a place where money talks. The residents’ association claims the red-light district, which is open around the clock, receives around 4,000 “guests” each day. The local commerce as a whole is said to generate around R$1m each month.

For those who run the local clubs – sweaty bars with names such as “Queen 46″ and ‘Men’s 44′ – it is a lucrative business. The former owner of one club said bar managers could draw an annual salary of up to £35,000 from their “pontos” or “points” – a sizeable wage in a country where the minimum monthly wage is around £185.

Life is less kind to the women who work here, earning as little as £10 per “program”, many of them trying to pay college fees or support their families.

“[Vila Mimosa is] 200 metres away from town hall but the problems here are very similar to those of cities in the interior of the Amazon,” said Amazon-born artist Roosevelt Pinheiro, 45, who runs social and artistic projects in the area. “The conditions here are very precarious.”

Prostitution is not a crime in Brazil and for tens of thousands impoverished women – from the wealthy south-eastern metropolises to the isolated frontier towns of the Amazon – it represents a viable if often dangerous means of survival. A recent UN report suggested there could be close to 20,000 South American prostitutes working in Europe, some of them victims of human trafficking. With the World Cup on the way, Brazilian authorities are concerned about a boom in child prostitution, particularly in host cities in the sun-kissed but often poor north-east such as Recife and Fortaleza.

Life in Vila Mimosa, said to be controlled by a mixture of criminal gangs and off-duty police officers who charge a protection tax from workers, brings at least a touch of security. “Working on the streets is the worst,” said a 21-year-old prostitute who uses her salary to pay her seven-year-old son’s R$100 a month school fees.

“The Vila is calm … Here we aren’t risking our lives as much as we are on the streets.”

Almeida, the community leader, said displacing Vila Mimosa’s prostitutes, threatened making life more dangerous for the area’s thousands of workers.

“They depend on this place.The women who work in a confined area of prostitution like this are here because they don’t want to work on the kerb, where they might be seen, or beaten if the client doesn’t want to pay up,” she said.

Not all of the women in Vila Mimosa oppose the move. “I’d go happily. Have you seen it in there?” said Monique, the 64-year-old manager of one of the area’s “houses”. She pointed out onto Rua Sotero dos Reis, where more than 70 brothels cram into squalid alleyways, buzzing with gyrating bodies. “It’s horrible. It stinks and the access [for cars] is bad. Maybe the next place will be better.”

The proliferation of more convenient “saunas” in Rio’s downtown business centre had hit the area hard, she claimed. “In the olden days it would be packed now with lawyers, oil executives, all sorts,” she said, looking around at her half empty bar decorated with red neon strip lights and a clay plant pot filled with five drooping yellow roses. “Now just look at this place.”

But wherever Vila Mimosa is moved to, locals say their work will go on.

“This is the oldest job in the world. They can kick us out but this will never die,” said Monique. “You know why? Because the women here don’t hurt anyone. They won’t hurt your marriage – they’ll help it,”

“Men will go anywhere [for sex],” said the 21-year-old prostitute, who works under the name Julia and dreams of leaving the Vila to open a fish shop on the beach. “Men are addicts – this is an addiction.”

The polar explorer remembers a week of solitary bliss, trekking on horseback around Chile’s timeless Chiloé islands

]The horse I hired was knackered and nameless, the chicha apple brew knocked me sideways, and I caught scabies in a cheap hotel. But I remember my week in Chiloé as one of the happiest of my life. After the buzz of the South American mainland, I found on these Pacific islands a temperate wilderness of misty pastures, 3,000-year-old alerce forest, and a very particular people who cherish their geographical isolation.

Two-thirds of the way down Chile’s long, rugged coastline, the 40 or so small islands of Chiloé are seldom visited by the mainland population. The archipelago is celebrated for its damp climate and high rainfall (residents of the capital Santiago make jokes about Chilotés having webbed feet). But I was lucky. The sun shone for seven days. One afternoon, on the north coast of Isla Grande de Chiloé, the largest island in the group, the horse and I stopped at Ancud Bay. He stamped his arthritic legs while I watched flocks of oyster catchers and silvery grebe skimming the shallows. On the Patagonian horizon to the east, Andean volcanoes stood flat against an enamelled sky.

“We are not Chilean,” a farmer’s wife told me at Ancud market. “Estamos Chilote, no mas.” There was no nod to the Americanised cuisine of Santiago. For the entire week I lived off milcao, grated potato patties cooked in pork fat. Heaven.

I didn’t do much – just rode between flophouses of the $1-a-night variety, and drank chicha, the robust cider much loved in the interior. (It took my mind off the itching.) The plots of subsistence farmers harlequinned the land. Single churns were left to be collected at the end of lanes. The peaty light of fuchsia thickets and woodland held a stillness that had vanished from the mainland.

Mountains wall off the exposed west coast of Isla Grande, a re-emergence of the coastal cordillera of Chile which sinks into the ocean somewhere south of Santiago. At Duhatoa, the last beach before the road ran out, the horse and I trekked along the dromedary line of the dunes, beyond bamboo-like quila stands where nature outdid itself in elaborate fructification. But down in the unpeopled south-west, industrial logging was making deadly inroads into old-growth forest.

For 200 years, Chiloé marked the southern frontier of Catholicism. When the first conquistadores canoed across from the South American mainland in the third quarter of the 16th century, 400 horses swam alongside them. Their legacy (the Spaniards’, not the horses’) survives in 100 wooden churches carved by the golden hands of Chiloté craftsmen. The best carpenters were boat-builders, with the result that many churches look like upturned boats. At Colo, a village of three families, I sat on the low church wall to eat another chunk of pork fat. A pair of oxen swayed past drawing a sledge piled with timber. They were heading to the boat-building yard at Montmar. The ox driver sat next to me on the wall. He was 83.

“I suppose you’ve seen a lot of changes,” I said, after we had chatted for a few minutes.

He thought for a while. “No tanto,” he said – not so many.

• Last Frontiers (01296 653000) offers a seven-day trip to Chiloé from £2,147 per person. The price includes internal and international flights, a night in Santiago, a visit to a penguin colony, a boat/kayak trip through a “sunken forest”, accommodation in a family farmhouse and a stilt village hotel, all activities and most meals

Sara Wheeler’s latest book, The Magnetic North: Travels in the Arctic (Vintage, £8.99), is out now

As a three-month festival of Brazilian culture opens in London, why not try out the real thing in Salvador, the country’s – and possibly the world’s – party capital

The rest of the world looks up to Brazil as world champions of partying, and by the same token, Brazilians doff their hats to the north-eastern state of Bahia and its capital, Salvador, as the undisputed kings and queens of carnival, music and knowing how to have a bloody good time.

As early as the 17th century the magnificent Bahia de Todos os Santos (Bay of All Saints, which Salvador overlooks and which gives the state its name) was given the epithet e de Quase Todos os Pecados (and of Nearly All the Sins), because of its reputation for decadence and bawdiness. Today it’s a funky town – tropical, soulful and intoxicating. I went on holiday to Brazil in the early 1990s, fell in love with Salvador and stayed for five years.

But unlike in Rio or São Paulo, you won’t find a hip party scene here. In fact they don’t do nightclubs or trendy bars too well at all in Salvador – the best parties take place in outdoor spaces or in the street, and no one really cares how you’re dressed – shorts and flip-flops will do. Paradoxically, the carefree spirit exuded by Bahians is the direct result of 350 years of slavery. Around 40% of all African slaves transported to the New World came to Brazil – officially 4.5 million, perhaps many more. Millions came to Bahia, the centre of Brazil’s sugar and slave trades, and today more than 80% of the population has African ancestry.

Salvador is the oldest city in Brazil and was its capital for more than 200 years, until it was replaced by Rio de Janeiro in 1763. Bahia then went into decline. Isolated from Brazil’s wealthy south, it was left to simmer under the tropical sun for two centuries, a melting pot of Africans in exile who developed a culture – music, dance, cuisine and religion – unique to this corner of Brazil, and more connected to Africa than anywhere else in the Americas. On the great sugarcane plantations of Bahia’s interior, samba slowly evolved from the ancient African rhythms. Sugar was to samba what cotton was to the blues in the American south.

Bahia’s energy is celebrated in Brazil! Brazil!, a show that has just opened in London, part of a summer-long festival showcasing Brazil’s music and arts. It is an adrenaline-pumping journey through Bahia’s musical history, taking in samba, capoeira (the fusion of dance and martial arts), slavery and even football, performed by a troupe of musicians and acrobatic dancers.

Its producer, Toby Gough, found inspiration for the show after visiting Salvador and meeting Carlinhos Brown, the city’s most gifted musician and songwriter, who helped cast many of the performers of Brazil! Brazil!, some from his own music school Pracatum (named after the noise the hand makes when striking a timbal drum), which he set up in Candeal, the poor neighbourhood he grew up in. Brown is a musical phenomenon who always has a string of projects on the go. One of his most recent was the restoration of the old gold market in the lower city and turning it into a music venue, the Museu du Ritmo. It’s worth catching his funky percussion group Timbalada there for their ensaios, the rehearsals-cum-shows that all of Salvador’s main music acts hold in the months before carnival.

The music industry in Bahia revolves around carnival (and the preparations for it) when for six days and nights every February a million and a half people dance, sing, drink and flirt their way through the streets behind trios elétricos. There are dozens of these giant trucks, banked with walls of ear-splitting speakers with the band on top. It is by some distance the biggest party on earth and I still count my first two or three carnivals as the most joyous weeks of my life.

For me the highlight of carnival is always the soulful rhythms of Ilê Aiyê, an Afro bloco, or street band, of more than 100 drummers playing in the suburb of Curuzu, miles from the centre of town. Ilê was formed in the mid-70s as an alternative to the whites-only carnival schools of the time. Only black people are allowed to join the bloco at carnival, but all are welcome to its brilliant Saturday-night ensaios which take place throughout the year. Sadly these have moved from the atmospheric yard of a colonial fort to an indoor space in Curuzu, but it is still well worth the trip out there. Take a taxi (all the drivers know it) and don’t bother showing up until after midnight.

Many other Afro blocos play in Praça Tereza Batista in the Pelourinho, Salvador’s magnificent but neglected old town, home to some of the finest colonial architecture in South America. You can still find good music here on Tuesday nights and weekends but the Pelourinho (which means whipping post) is in such a sorry state that last week the President of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, went to Salvador to pledge money to renovate the area and appease Unesco’s threat of withdrawing its world heritage site status.

A bar close to the old town is Galpão Cheio de Assunto (Rua Djalma Dultra 40, Sete Portas), brainchild of percussionist Peu Meurray. It attracts a cool clientele on Saturday nights and big names such as Mano Chão and Seu Jorge. If you want to combine a great vibe with music and a spectacular setting, the Saturday afternoon jam session at Solar do Unhão is the place. This former old sugar mill is a complex of colonial buildings, including a modern art museum overlooking the bay.

Rio Vermelho is the lively Atlantic suburb that is the home of the Yemanjá festival on 2 February. It’s the best pre-carnival warm-up party, with followers of Candomblé, the animist religion introduced by west African slaves, presenting flowers and other gifts to the sea goddess. On the day of the festival the small beach is crammed with devotees dressed in white offering flowers to the sea. The rest of the year Rio Vermelho’s Teatro SESI has live regional music on the patio every night of the week. Across the street is Boteco São Jorge, which is good for samba.

If drumming and samba provide the rhythm to life in Salvador, Candomblé is its spiritual driving force and practised as widely as Catholicism – from which it has borrowed certain rituals. It was illegal to follow Candomblé until the 60s, and even when I lived here in the 90s it was a difficult world for outsiders to enter.

It was impossible back then to visit genuine terreiros, or places of worship. But I found a new spirit of openness on my most recent visit, last year. At the Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá terreiro, one of the oldest in Salvador, I was welcomed as if attending a church ceremony – although any comparison with orthodox religion stopped there.

Around 20 men and women in white and green African costumes were circling the room, singing to the beat of three drums. Round and round they went, swaying to an ancient rhythm. Suddenly a woman started to jerk, shout and then spin like a dervish. An older man and several more women followed, entering the same trance-like state. The orixás, ancestral spirits, had taken temporary possession of their bodies. Their faces were contorted by the orixás, yet they were clearly in a blissful place, and for the next hour they shuffled and danced in and out of the room in a joyous procession. I was the only outsider there; it may be a good idea to take a guide to explain the complex rituals.

Afro-Brazilian tourism – for decades ignored by the white elite – has also come a long way. The state government has a department tasked with encouraging visitors to get more involved with this heritage. I tried two classes recently launched by UK tour operator Audley Travel – drumming and Bahian cookery. (It also offers Afro-Brazilian dance and capoeira but my knees creaked at the very idea.)

Down in the seaside suburb of Pedra Furada, in the lower part of Salvador, Tia Maria (yes, really; it means Auntie Mary) taught me to make a moqueca, Bahia’s delicious signature dish – seafood stewed in coconut milk and dendê (palm oil).

“The cooker’s playing up again,” said Maria pointing at the rusting four-ring hob. There are no laminated recipes to follow during lessons in her kitchen (Restaurante Tia Maria) – we just got a big knife and a bucket of fresh fish. The restaurant is the converted garage of her home – a few plastic tables and chairs overlooking the fishing boats which supply Maria’s seafood. I had great fun letting Maria boss me round the kitchen, and the moqueca was one of the best I’d ever eaten.

Thanks to the pedigree of my tutor Giba Conceição (click here to see him in action), my drumming lesson was more professional – he has played with many of Bahia’s top artists, including Gilberto Gil, now Brazil’s minister of culture. Giba taught me the basics of creating a rhythm on the tall timbal. I sounded like a kid banging a drum – and had just as much fun – while Giba coaxed such complex rhythms out of his that he seemed to have an orchestra in his fingers.

My dreams of becoming a baterista were shattered, but a couple of hours listening to Giba explain, in words and music, the history of Afro-Brazilian percussion, did lead to a tiny epiphany. I had danced many times to this beat in the streets of Salvador without ever really knowing why it made me feel so alive. One of the reasons, I now realised, is that every time you hear it, it is playing out the history of Bahia.

• TAM Airlines (+44 (0)20-8897 0005) flies daily from Heathrow to Salvador via São Paulo from £673 return. From 10 August TAM will also fly to Salvador via Rio. An 11-night trip with Audley Travel (01993 838 650), staying three nights in Rio, three nights in Salvador (with classes including drumming and cuisine) plus three nights at a Bahian beach hotel, costs from £1,250, including breakfast (and dinner on the beach), but excluding international flights. For further information visit braziltour.com

Brazil! Brazil! is on in London until 18 July as part of the Southbank Centre’s Festival Brazil which opens today and runs until 5 September, and at the Edinburgh festival from 5-30 August

Offering your skills and time is a great way to see new places. Here are 10 voluntourist trips that really help put something back…

Count turtles in the Seychelles

It’s not cheap, but it is probably the ultimate experience for a scuba-diving enthusiast. This is a rare opportunity to be part of a scientific research team, diving the reef as you collect data on coral and fish, and taking part in vital surveys of whale sharks, turtle, octopus and lobster species. Be prepared to spend the first fortnight in intensive teaching sessions.
Price From £1,745 for five weeks excluding flights; departures on 2 Jul, 6 Aug, 1 Oct, 5 Nov
Book it responsibletravel.com/Trip/Trip101021.htm

Help street children in Peru

If you can handle a hammer, you can make a practical difference to the lives of streetchildren in Peru. The Vine Trust’s working parties offer basic manual labour to help build and maintain centres for abandoned boys and girls, in a country where thousands of children are purposefully “lost” by parents who can no longer afford to care for them. Your two-week visit will take in the capital, Lima, and one of the charity’s more remotely located centres – which likely means a jungle expedition. And you can opt to stay on to visit Macchu Picchu and the Inca Trail.
Price £900 for two weeks excluding flights; £300 goes to building materials
Book it vinetrust.org/workparties

Crew a tall ship

Sailing a 55ft ship isn’t something many people can claim to do – and that’s the point of the Jubilee Sailing Trust’s holidays. It operates a buddy system which pairs able-bodied and physically disabled crew members in an environment so challenging and unknown that no one has an advantage. Involved in every part of running the ship, from helming to scrubbing the decks, you can take a day trip to Jersey, a week-long sail along the coast, or a longer expedition in the Mediterranean or the Caribbean.
Price From £135 for a daysail to £1,350 for a month-long passage to Antigua
Book it jst.org.uk

Join a South African village

The rural village of Mapoch, 40km outside Pretoria, was hit hard during the apartheid years: villagers were forced from their land to an area with no infrastructure and little employment. People and Places UK, which was named “best volunteering organisation” in the Responsible Tourism Awards 2009, has worked with the Mapoch’s Ndebele community to set up various businesses, amenities and education projects. Whether your skills are practical (construction, crafts, catering) or more cerebral (IT, teaching, business and marketing), they can find a way for you to benefit the village.
Price From £1,295 for four weeks, excluding flights
Book it responsibletravel.com/Trip/Trip900591.htm

Care for Cambodian orphans

Visitors are more than welcome – they’re positively encouraged at this small orphanage in rural Cambodia. Caring for around 50 children of all ages, the orphanage feels like a large family home but also offers a range of educational and vocational opportunities, including a workshop, beauty salon and an arts and crafts centre. Volunteers help to widen the children’s horizons even further with new skills and languages. Accommodation is at a large house in the centre of the town; Phnom Penh is an hour and a half away, and there are plenty of opportunities for sightseeing.
Price From £399 for two weeks excluding flights

Book it thepodsite.co.uk/projects-destinations/cambodia-orphanage.html

Preserve your environment

Whether it’s building hiking trails in Iceland’s National Parks or coppicing on the banks of the Kennet, BTCV (the British Trust for Conservation Volunteers) runs holidays that offer a unique chance to get back to nature. There are more than 200 holidays a year on offer; accommodation can range from a humble tent to a luxury cottage, depending on your preference and budget, and food is included. You’ll need to arrange your own travel – and expect to cook your own meals.
Price Current deals include £180 (for seven nights) protecting butterfly habitats in Dartmoor; £570 (10 nights) cultivating orchards in Romania.
Book it btcv.org

Coach sports in Brazil

Infected by World Cup fever? Responsible Travel’s football break in Brazil offers you the chance to play the beautiful game in the most obsessed nation on earth. In one of the poorest areas of Rio you’ll help at a club specially created for children who would otherwise be on the streets: no coaching qualifications necessary, just an enthusiasm for the game that matches theirs. And it’s not just footy – other projects cover a wide range of sports from athletics to volleyball and dance to martial arts.
Price From £795 for 14 days excluding flights
Book it responsibletravel.com/Trip/Trip902407.htm

Run a stately home

For variety and value, few organisations can match the National Trust’s working holidays, where you help to protect some of Britain’s most beautiful countryside and historic houses. For £90 for a week, staying in hostel-style accommodation, the Trust offers hundreds of different activities, from goat-herding and dry stone walling to archaeology and children’s work; some also provide the opportunity for outdoor pursuits like surfing and sailing. New projects this year include tending the medieval knot garden at Norbury in Derbyshire and helping to run a food fair at the romantic Godolphin estate in Cornwall (pictured, above left).
Price From £55 for a weekend
Book it nationaltrust.org.uk/workingholidays

Wash an elephant in Thailand

You don’t have to join the circus to work with elephants. At a wildlife rescue centre in Tha Yang, Thailand, volunteers work alongside professional “mahouts” (keepers) to walk, water, feed and bathe the animals. The six domesticated elephants here have been rescued from the city streets where they were used for begging; with up to 10 others, you can spend a week or three getting to know these magnificent creatures. It’s not all clearing dung: Bangkok is two and a half hours away, and there are tropical beaches close by.
Price From £425 for one week, excluding flights
Book it thepodsite.co.uk/projects-destinations/elephant-care.html

Join a blind person in an adventure

Blind filmmaker Amar Latif came up with Traveleyes’ unique tours, in which blind and sighted travellers holiday together in equal numbers. In return for a discounted holiday, you’ll use your eyes to share the experience with your companions, whether it’s Turkey’s Turquoise Coast, the golden beaches of California or Florence’s majestic Campanile. Traveleyes has won Latif several awards, and its customers – both sighted and blind – keep coming back.
Price From £499 for 8 days
Book it traveleyes-international.com

Sun, sea and sugar-fine sand – Venezuela’s little-known Los Roques are the stuff of holiday legend. And it’s all thanks to a presidential snub by Hugo Chávez

Thank God for Hugo Chávez, president of Venezuela. Laugh at him showboating at the UN about the evils of America, sending impoverished Londoners cheap fuel for their buses, telling off his fattie compañeros for eating too much. But love him for his little idiosyncratic ways, because they are keeping safe one of the Caribbean’s best-kept secrets.

Three years ago he took his weekly Aló Presidente TV roadshow to Los Roques, an archipelago a half hour’s flight from Caracas. The live show has no script. Chávez just talks, and sometimes sings, about whatever comes into his head. He makes up gags, insults and nuclear defence policy. Venezuelans joke that he must have a bucket under the desk because he will talk for hours without a break.

Los Roqueños didn’t give him the chance. Twenty minutes in they started pelting him with tomatoes. Chávez pulled the plug and stropped off, telling the ingrate locals the islands would be getting nada in way of government help for their impertinence. And certainly no cash for attracting tourists. So that’s why the islands have fallen off the tourist map.

Caracas airport did nothing to dispel the gnawing sensation that my girlfriend and I weren’t going to find our way to Los Roques. It was a holiday weekend and there was chaos in the terminal. The whole of Venezuela seemed to be on the move, most of them trying to check in flatscreen TVs the size of a multiplex.

The departure board bore witness to a Venezuelan diaspora – there were flights to Miami and Houston, Moscow and Havana. But there was no sign of a flight to Los Roques. Finally we discovered a tiny doughnut concession/airline desk tucked away in a corner of the terminal, surrounded by a crowd of shouting Venezuelans: check-in. I found the crush oddly reassuring. It meant safety – it meant a biggish plane, not the deadly single-engined Caracas-Los Roques hoppers I’d been warned about since booking the holiday.

Two dozen of us were bussed out beyond the new Airbus 320s, ageing Boeing 737s and terrifyingly doddery DC9s, to a tired but sturdy turbo-prop. After 30 minutes a necklace of islands appeared in the dark-blue water. Specks of sand and shrub, ringed by turquoise lagoons. There was no sign of an airstrip, but the plane banked sharply and fell steeply towards the sea. We skimmed a few metres over the masts of a couple of yachts and dropped on to the tarmac on the island of Gran Roque, the archipelago’s big smoke.

We were confronted on the ground by the full force of Chávez’s police state – a dozing sniffer dog which only raised an eyelid when one arriving tourist tore open a packet of crisps.

A man appeared with a trolley and took us to our posada (a small guesthouse) nearby. Minutes later we were stripped of our luggage and stripped of our clothes, down to our cossies. Then we were put on a speedboat, taken to a desert island and abandoned. Castaways. Nothing but us, a huge stretch of empty beach of the softest, whitest sand and a blue, blue sea. And the sun canopy, chairs and cool box our guesthouse had kindly provided as our desert island luxury.

Holiday hell at Caracas airport had been turned into tourist heaven in two hours. We laid out towels on our seats, sat down, surveyed the scene for a few minutes, did a few oohs and aahs at our good luck and then looked at each other and whispered: “What the hell are we going to do now?”

Carolyn pretended to read her book. I splashed around in the water. Then we dived into our cool box, pulling out drinks, crisps and sandwiches like excited children on a school trip.

I went for another swim while Carolyn fell asleep. And then we looked at the empty beach again and perfect sea and looked at each other. We weren’t going to be picked up by the boat and returned to our posada for another four hours. We whispered: “What the hell are we going to do now?”

Then we looked at the empty beach and perfect sea again. And finally we got it. The speedboat came back on time, but far too early…

We didn’t see another British person all week. Los Roques only really registers on the tourist radar in one country outside Venezuela. Italians discovered the islands a couple of decades ago and bought houses in Gran Roque. Some were turned into posadas and more Italians came. Now there are a couple of dozen posadas to be found on the fishing village’s unmade, sandy streets of brightly coloured buildings, almost all run by Italians.

We were staying at Posada Albacora, with three guest rooms and a roof terrace where we ate fantastic island food with an Italian flavour: zucchini carpaccio, marinated barracuda and a mango mousse. From below came the sounds of Caribbean street life. Our meal was punctuated by power cuts; a late-night wander to find a mojito was conducted by torchlight.

Each day we had our choice of islands to explore. Our favourite was Crasqui, which was only 20 minutes or so from Gran Roque. We didn’t have it to ourselves but that was part of the fun. We got to see the Venezuelans at play. It was the perfect place to witness three Venezuelan obsessions: booze, BlackBerrys and boob jobs.

Spoilt over the years by the riches from its oil reserves, until recently Venezuelans were the kings of bling. Giant American cars, from 1970s red Corvettes to brand-new black SUVs, rumbled through the streets of a country where filling up the tank costs little more than the price of a beer. But Chávez’s policies have started to squeeze the middle-classes, putting a dampener on their party and making them more than a little resentful.

Take telephone salesman Enrico, our neighbour one day on the beach at Crasqui. Our small cool box was full of food, water and the occasional beer. Enrico’s giant cool box was full of ice. And bottles of Scotch. It was barely 10am and Enrico, splendid in his leopard-spot Speedos, was guzzling from a half-pint mug of ice and whisky. He boasted that Venezuela was the third biggest consumer of Scotch in the world and said his bottle had cost nearly $100 – I didn’t recognise the brand, but that didn’t stop me accepting his generosity.

Then he wandered off down the beach, to send an urgent email. A couple of days later, I saw him with a table of friends in Gran Roque. They weren’t saying a word to each other; each was furiously stabbing away at their BlackBerrys, only stopping occasionally to rip a few lobsters apart.

Enrico introduced me to his girlfriend and explained just what he’d spent on her breasts. It seemed rude not to look impressed. He pointed down the beach and explained how all Venezuelan women have had plastic surgery – even if some can only afford one breast at a time. Even the shop mannequins on the island were surgically enhanced.

On the beaches, men took pictures of their girlfriends and wives. Completely unselfconscious, the women rolled in the sand and the surf, striking porn-star poses.

Enrico cussed when I mentioned Chávez. “He’s ruining our lives,” he cried. “All the money’s going to his cronies now.” I don’t think El Presidente can count on the Los Roques vote quite yet.

How to get there

A seven-night holiday to Los Roques and Caracas with Journey Latin America (+44 (0)20 8747 8315) starts at £1,677, including flights from London, airport transfers in Caracas, flights to Los Roques and B&B.

Despite their lack of education and resources, the hard-working and ingenious people of Favela Mare have created micro-business opportunities and a thriving local economy

Four Scots held in Rio de Janeiro for allegedly stripping naked and making obscene gestures to women on Copacabana beach

Police in Rio have arrested four Scottish tourists after the men were caught removing their clothes and making “obscene gestures” on one of the world’s most famous beaches.

An intelligence official from the military police battalion in Copacabana told the Guardian the men were arrested on Tuesday after a 52-year-old woman made a complaint to a passing police patrol on Copacabana beach in Rio’s south zone.

According to reports in the local media, police were able to charge only one of the men because witnesses could positively identify only one of the group.

The tourist, named by police as 42-year-old Paul Terrance Walker, was charged with “inconvenient conduct” after witnesses told police he had stripped naked and harassed locals on Avenida Atlantica, the beachside avenue that runs alongside Copacabana beach, at about 8pm on Tuesday.

“He was making obscene gestures, showing his intimate parts to women and waving himself around,” said the police official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “We’re not sure what he thought he was doing.”

Ministers in Argentina and Paraguay say new film Triple Frontier could harm tourism

For many countries hoping to boost their profile on the world stage it might be seen as a minor coup – to be chosen as the setting for the next film by one of the world’s most celebrated directors.

But this week South American politicians reacted angrily to plans for Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow’s latest project, an adrenaline-filled exposé of life in the notorious triple border region between Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay.

According to reports last year in the industry magazine Variety, the film, provisionally entitled Triple Frontier, will be an “action adventure … set in the [region's] notorious border zone”.

Variety said the film would be directed by Bigelow and scripted by Mark Boal, the American journalist whose dispatches from Iraq were the inspiration for The Hurt Locker, the winner of six Academy Awards in March.

During a visit to the region on Tuesday, however, Paraguay’s tourism minister, Liz Cramer, told her country’s La Nación newspaper the film should receive “no support” from the government and local politicians and businesses were furious.

“How much will it cost us to clean up our image [afterwards]?” Cramer said in Ciudad del Este, a rugged border town where security guards armed with shotguns keep watch over hundreds of electronics stores filled with cheap laptops and stereos. “It would be stupid for us to support [the film].”

She added: “We are all furious because it seems like they are lacking ideas, as if there aren’t sufficient themes in the world,” suggesting Bigelow should instead make a film about “the 8,000 executions on the frontier with the United States”.

Enrique Meyer, Argentina’s tourism minister, told AFP the authorities were “deeply indignant when we discovered that this project seeks to negatively portray this region”.

The border between Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay is also one of South America’s most visited tourist destinations. It is home to the Iguaçu Falls – one of the largest series of waterfalls on Earth – and is based around three cities, Ciudad del Este in Paraguay, Puerto Iguazú in Argentina and Foz do Iguaçu in Brazil.

The region is also a notorious base for smugglers and arms and drug traffickers. US authorities have repeatedly claimed that Ciudad del Este, which has a large Arab community, is home to groups involved in fundraising for international terrorist groups.

Brazilian and Paraguayan authorities are growing increasingly alarmed at the presence of drug traffickers along their 600 miles of shared borders.

But Brazilian responses to Triple Frontier have been more sanguine. Carlos Duso, a representative of Foz do Iguaçu’s town hall, said his city was “prepared to help in any way necessary”.

“It’s just a film, isn’t it?” he told the Brazilian news site G1. “New York has been destroyed many times in the cinema and this hasn’t damaged the city’s image. We have to keep an open mind.”