Dinner could be jerk pork chop with black beans, followed by local black pineapple, grilled and served with rum and raisin ice-cream.
Back in Georgetown, waiting for a taxi to the airport, we do a last-minute dash around the street stalls: all I salvage are an oil painting of the Kaieteur Falls (a rather Surrealist interpretation), a shell necklace, a woven basket and as much El Dorado rum as possible, before the plane carries us to a connecting flight at Barbados, and the waters change from brown to a shock of bright blue.
Click here to order a copy for £20.80 from Guardian Bookshop Enough for 4-6 people butter 125g sugar 125g milk 1 teacup egg 1 chocolate 250g macaroons 12 16 rum or brandy a little Cream the butter and the sugar until they are well amalgamated.
Serves 20. 1 bottle of Lepanto Spanish brandy or any good brandy ½ bottle Alwick rum 500g Muscovado sugar 500g white sugar 300g unsalted butter 5 litres water 5 cinnamon sticks 10 cloves Combine all the ingredients in a saucepan on a low heat or in a slow cooker.
Put the rum, syrup and lime in a cocktail shaker, shake over ice and strain into a chilled glass.
There is one small ranch store, and every night a congregation forms outside it to share cowboy stories over rum.
Serves 4 For the chilli salt 1 tbsp sea salt flakes 1 tbsp golden caster sugar ½ tsp cayenne pepper Zest of 1 lime For the pineapple 1 pineapple, peeled and sliced into rings 1 tbsp butter 20ml water or rum 1 To make the chilli salt, put all the ingredients into a food processor and blitz to a fine powder. 2 Put a heavy-bottomed frying pan or skillet over a medium-to-high heat.
In the end, we rustled up the promise of feeding wild monkeys in the island's mountainous Grand Etang Forest Reserve in exchange for a spice farm, a botanical garden, a rum distillery, an extinct volcano, a nutmeg factory and an organic chocolate producer.
Then the French arrived and 'bought' the island for some glass beads and a couple of cases of rum.
The night's rain leaves behind a sweet freshness each morning and our days are all shot through with coconut water, Banks beer and El Dorado rum.
("There's a lot of rum," reveals one institute insider).
