GUYANA IS the starting point as freelance journalist, Olivier Lattuga prepares to depart on an ambitious journey across the Americas.
The 24-year-old, who is from Paris, maintains Internet blogs about his travels, updating his following each time he leaves a country.
Lattuga, who hitchhikes around the world, arrived in Guyana last Monday, and plans to stay more than a week. Though he had to travel to Guyana by air, his mode of transportation will henceforth be by foot, vehicle and boat.
From  Guyana, the intrepid Frenchman will head for Brazil, using the Lethem trail, from whence he will travel in a clockwise movement, going first to Venezuela, then progressing to and crossing the Panama Canal and into Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala and so on, making his way back northeastwards to North America.
The adventurer says he created the project so as to give himself an opportunity to travel. He admits that in Europe, persons don’t know much about Guyana. “We know French Guiana, but we don’t know Guyana,” he said.
Asked whether they think Guyana is in Africa, he laughs and says: “No! I know geography!” He however maintained that seeing that most persons don’t know much about Guyana, he wants to educate them on the subject. “I want to show them… I want to show them it’s safe.”
Lattuga has faith in the goodness of humanity, it seems, and insists that the world is not as unsafe as many of us believe. He says it is for this very reason he doesn’t watch television much, because when he watches the news, he doesn’t want to go anywhere; he just wants to stay in his home. “The world is safe; you can travel and meet people, and go to resorts…” he insists. 
He travels with a huge knapsack, in which he carries his personal items, such as electronic equipment. This caused me to enquire whether he had ever been robbed, and to my surprise, his reply was: “Yes; at the French airports!” 
Asked whether he had a favourite country, he said that would be Cape Verde, a Portuguese-speaking island chain in the mid-Atlantic, just off West Africa. And the reason he fancies the place is not only because of its friendly people, and its many beautiful resorts, but also because of its “…incredible women.”
A variety of interesting piece of jewellery snake their way up his arms; they read like a map of Lattugas travels, and serve as a reminder of the many places he’s been to.  He shows the pieces one by one to me, and thus I learnt that they came from many places, including his beloved Cape Verde, Guadeloupe, Martinique and The Canary Islands.
Travel aside, he loves children, and has started his own pen-pal programme for children in France to correspond with children he meets during the course of his travels. He wants to help those children who don’t have computers and access to email, and so he plays postman by delivering the letters from the French children to those he meets so that they can strike up a friendship with them.
His some twenty sponsors include Rotary International, the French Embassy in Panama, Photostock, and the Tourism Office of Tahiti.
The following is a translated extract from ‘Cupid does not Care’, the latest article on his blogsite, which he wrote after a recent trip to the Grenadines.
“I do not like beaches. Sand in the eyes, turquoise waters, coconut palms and tourists often the same size sharing the same advanced age and the same corner of shadows … If they are different, the tracks eventually all look alike. Black sand or pebbles, much nicer. But I’m not really a fan of the beach towel and toes in the sand.
“Naturally, I dread my trip to the Grenadines. Located in the southern Lesser Antilles, archipelago consists of more than six hundred islands and islets! Of hundred meters to thirty kilometers, bordered all, I admit, with magnificent white sand beaches. What makes me nervous when you board the small aircraft company Airawak from Martinique…”
To read more of Olivier’s work, visit http://olivierlattuga.wordpress.com/partenaires/