The tour costs from $1,000pp, including four nights' accommodation (two at Managua's Hotel Los Robles), domestic flights, private car and boat, guide and meals.
This particular "uh oh" came from the least likely person – our boat guide Ramiro, who is incredibly nonchalant, always telling us not to worry and that bullet ants only hurt un poco.
…a teleautomatic boat guided by remote control.
She was referring to the West Lake, or Xi Hu, above, which she toured in a sampan, a traditional wooden boat, guided by a boatman.
The key to this localised success seems to be community involvement: boat guides get a good income (tourism is increasing rapidly) and have a vested interest in sustainability.
On a recent morning, Alex Powers, the founder and president of Osprey Travel, which organizes fishing trips around the world, sat on his perch at the back of the 18-foot boat guiding two anglers.
BACK AT OUR BASE camp that last night, still worked up from the day's earlier turn with Little Nut and his mother, I sat up late talking with Mayoral and a number of the other boat guides, or pangeros.
For example, the dive industry in Gansbaai, South Africa, consists of six boat operators with each boat guiding 30 people each day.
AquaSurvey was there, on the boat, guiding them, and I had really missed nothing because of how much time it takes to stage the scene.
The show's one incidental delight is the touching Kevin Chamberlin, who, as Captain Mike, the Niagara tour-boat guide who falls for Cass, brings a palpable sweetness and a welcome complexity to the otherwise aimless comic playing.
"It's like Alaska," said John Sinton, one of the authors of "The Connecticut River Boating Guide" (Connecticut River Watershed Council, 2007).
