Travel: Bitten by the Karanambo bug: The Queen arrives in Georgetown, Guyana, today. Anna Pavord extols some of the delights that await the regal visitor

There are so many things that bite in Guyana that after a few days you stop counting the bumps and accept your role as mobile snack bar for mosquitoes, jiggers and other insects. Most insidious are the cabouri flies, which inflict damage out of all proportion to their size. Weeks after their feasts, you still carry the evidence around with you, each bite centred with a characteristic small black spot.

All this does not sound a very good reason to hack eight hours over the Atlantic, especially when combined with Guyana's reputation as having the most dangerous capital city in South America. That may be a rumour put about by taxi-drivers. But the residents of Georgetown are also eager to tell you about their city's dangers.

Georgetown's wide streets are shaded by tropical trees and lined with the finest collection of clapboard houses, fretwork porches and decorative verandahs you are ever likely to see. They are all crumbling. Everything here is crumbling, except the huge wooden cathedral, freshly painted in white, that stands across Main Street.

It is possible, so they say, to have a luxurious holiday in Guyana, starting off at the Pegasus Hotel in Georgetown and continuing from there to Timberland, a smart lodge on the banks of Kumuri Creek.

Or you can go to the Rupununi River, in the country's South-west, about as far from Georgetown as it is possible to go without falling into Brazil. Most of Guyana is solid rainforest, but this is cattle-ranching country - or was until the bottom fell out of the beef market.

In a country with less road than river, and more impenetrable rainforest than anything else, the most practical way to get about is by plane. We checked in hideously early in the morning for our flight to Lethem, but the plane took a while to catch up.

The journey to Guyana's international airport, about 25 miles out of Georgetown, takes visitors through a kind of tropical fenland, with dykes and sluices and tall gibbet-like sluice gates, remnants of the first efforts by 17th-century Dutch settlers to organise and control this magnificently sleazy landscape. Morris Minors covered in creepers, and carcasses of Land Rovers and Massey Ferguson tractors are the legacy of the British occupation that ended with Guyana's independence in 1966.

Most of the airport, a small gash holding out against the rainforest, works much as you would expect. The rest is under the spell of Guyana Airways, which may or may not produce a plane to your proposed destination. If the plane arrives, the trick is to find it. If you are in the departure lounge, you are in the wrong place. You should be round the corner balanced on a plank of wood strung between oil cans with the sun beating down on your head.

We were due to fly out in a Skyvan, a camelish sort of plane with a high body, made, so the pilot said, in Belfast. It is used for cargo as much as passengers and, having just returned from carrying the former, was ill- equipped to cope with the latter. No seats. After a couple of hours the mechanic had rounded some up and we lumbered off over the Essequibo, a vast, slow soup of a river that does not so much flow as ooze. Here, near the point where it meets the sea, it is more than 20 miles wide.

You find yourself obsessed with modes of transport in Guyana, because getting about anywhere away from Georgetown is so difficult. In the Rupununi region, a cattle truck and an aged Land Rover with a last remnant of canvas flapping over the cabin were our means of transport. During our time there, we saw no other vehicles on the savannahs. A series of trails beaten by trucks over the dry grassland connects one outstation with the next.

You have to make the most of Lethem when you arrive, for it is as much of a town as you find in the Rupununi. It is the only place where traveller's cheques can be cashed and food bought (both at Don and Shirley's shop, just opposite the airstrip). Don and Shirley are Lethem's fixers. Both are astonishingly hospitable, an outstanding trait of all the people we met in the Rupununi. We had breakfast at the back of the Lethem shop - bakes, which are like doughnuts without jam or sugar, and local coffee - and watched ginger-spotted piglets rootling in the rubbish dump.

A smallish ranch here would cover 125 square miles and, in the Rupununi's heyday, the mid-Fifties, 15,000 head of cattle was considered an average-sized herd. Now the herds are reckoned in hundreds rather than thousands. The vaqueiros, cowboys who are actually Indians, appear moulded to their horses. They ride bare-footed, two toes stuck into the stirrups, leather chaps wound between ankle and knee, swirling clouds of dust wherever they go.

Lethem is on a huge plateau, with scrub, dry grass, termite mounds and mountains closing in on two sides. As you move farther into the north savannahs, Macushi Indian country, the stunning shapes of the Pakaraima mountains fill the horizon.

You need a good reason to come to the Rupununi: fishing, bird-watching, plant- hunting or trail-bashing. It is not the sort of place that leads you by the hand. Once in, though, you have the unaccustomed luxury of being completely out of touch with the rest of the world. There are no phones, postal facilities, proper roads or public transport. If your transport breaks down, as it did on our hot, dusty ride to Karanambo, you have to hope the driver can fix it, for nothing else will pass your way.

Karanambo is one of a group of ranches in the south savannah that take in visitors. There are no hotels. To enjoy a place such as Karanambo, its owner, Diane McTurk (who, on her own, is worth the journey), says you need to be 'fit enough to bounce around on the savannah all day, tough enough to push the Land Rover out of a swamp if necessary, and involved enough not to feel aggrieved if it breaks down'.

The place is less like a ranch than a compound. The main house, its rafters jutting out like the ribs of a bleached skeleton, is surrounded by smaller thatched huts and a cookhouse - Club Med before Club Med was invented.

The huts each have a verandah with a hammock, and a bedroom with slatted windows and mosquito nets. Behind is a place to wash. Big mango trees and cashew nut trees provide shade. Meals are served in the big hut: Guyanese pepperpot, fish from the river, and piglet. The food is exceptionally good and the rum punch famed throughout the Rupununi.

Flocks of parakeets zoom through the compound, and down on the reservoir are whistling ducks, cranes, spoonbills and white and grey herons. There is a tapir that shambles around the huts, an otter that thinks it is a dog, jaguars in the bush and cayman in the river.

Karanambo is an odd place that will not appeal to everyone. The atmosphere shifts perceptibly. Sometimes the final scene from Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust comes unbidden to mind: Tony Last, trapped by Mr Todd at his ranch in the bush, reading, reading, reading. Don't mention Dickens.

Waugh came through this way, between marriages, back in 1932, and wrote an account of his journey in Ninety-Two Days. Little has changed since. We were travelling in the opposite direction, for we ended our stay at Annai, where Waugh first emerged, exhilarated, from 'the cramped weeks in the forest'.

Annai is a well-established village of mud-brick huts with palm thatch scattered over a wide area and shaded with coconut palms and mango trees. A little way outside the village, underneath the mountains, is Rock View, a well-organised, beautifully planted place specialising in newly fashionable eco-tourism.

From here, you can climb at last into the mountains, a steep pull through undergrowth that brings you out on to the huge, smooth, rounded rocks of the summit. We sat and watched buzzards hunting over the plain, the last piece of open ground left before the rainforest took over, rolling in an unbroken mass right back to Georgetown.

We flew over the rainforest one day from Georgetown, having fallen in with four prospectors who were going up to their workings on the Venezuelan border. Ogle airstrip, on the outskirts of Guyana, is the take-off point for expeditions such as this. You can fly all day in Guyana over the canopy of the rainforest, broken only by swirls of river the colour of Marmite.

You can drop in as we did for a picnic at the Kaiteur Falls, where the Potaro River falls off the edge of the world and crashes, 741ft below, into a gorge of clouds and rainbows. Kaiteur is almost four times as high as Niagara, but there are no hamburger stands here and no 'I have seen the falls'

T-shirts. You just bump down on an airstrip and trek through the bush, the thunder of the water pushing everything else out of your head. Then you emerge by the wide, dark river rimmed with bromeliads and orchids, dashing itself to bits on the rocks below. See Kaiteur and die.

Later that day, we dropped the prospectors (pork knockers, they call them) on the border and turned for home. We drifted over a landscape of huge, flat-topped mountains rearing out of the rainforest, long shadows misting the brilliant colours of the flowering trees below. We followed a ravine, flying with the river as it tumbled itself over ledges of pure jasper.

Sitting in the co-pilot's seat of the little twin-engined Islander as it wound its way through this Conan Doyle Lost World landscape, I was as happy as I have ever been in my life.

WE BOOKED flights through Transatlantic Wings, 70 Pembroke Road, London W8 6NX (071-602 4021) and flew BWIA to Georgetown via Antigua. We stayed in Georgetown at the Hotel Tower (Evelyn Waugh did, too) at 74 Main St, Georgetown (010 5922 72011). Rooms are about pounds 52 a night. The smartest place to stay is the Pegasus, Seawall Road, (010 5922 52853). The Park, 37 Main Street (010 5922 54911), is much cheaper. Taxi fares are negotiated. Guyana Airways flies from Georgetown to Lethem. The fare is 14,000 Guyanese dollars (about pounds 76) return.

For general information, consult the Tourism Association of Guyana at the Hotel Tower. For information on Annai, managed by an Englishman, Colin Edwards, contact Trans Guyana Aviation, 158 Charlotte Street, Lacytown, Georgetown (010 5922 60605). All ranches have airstrips. It will cost an extra dollars G12,000 ( pounds 65) to divert Guyana Airways' Lethem plane to Annai. Private charter through Trans Guyana Aviation costs dollars G102,917 (about pounds 550) for an eight-seater plane. Seats on bush trucks from Georgetown are available at about dollars G3,000 ( pounds 16), but you need your own hammock and food. The journey takes about three days. Daily rates at the ranches vary. At Annai, pounds 67 includes accommodation, meals, drinks and activities. Karanambo charges about pounds 70, all-inclusive.

(Photograph omitted)