In the last few days, I’ve explored a gold mining town, eaten lots of curries and taken a boat down the Essequibo River to visit waterfalls and old Dutch forts — all in Guyana, the English-speaking, Caribbean-influenced country on South America’s north coast. What brings me this virtually tourist-free nation of 750,000?  It’s the first stop on my frugal route to the World Cup, of course.  In April, a friend sold me a $135 ticket for the United States’ World Cup opener versus Ghana, in Natal, Brazil. I was already hoping to be in São Paulo to help The Times cover the tournament. But prices had spiked: Flights from New York to Natal to São Paulo and back for the dates I needed were around $1,700. Surely I could do better than that.  So I pulled up a map of South America and pondered. Perhaps head to Argentina or Uruguay and then some find cheap flight from there into Brazil? Nope — flights from those soccer-crazed countries were booking up like crazy. What about flying to Santa Cruz, Bolivia, and then taking a long bus to the border of Brazil? That would be slightly cheaper, but also put me about as far from Natal — on Brazil’s northeast coast — as imaginable, like crossing the Mexican border to get to Maryland.  Then the Guianas caught my eye. Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana — two countries and a territory I’d never considered visiting — are perched just north of the Brazilian Amazon. New York has lots of Guyanese immigrants, and they’re known more for their cricket than soccer skills, so maybe a flight down there would be reasonable?  Bingo. A $334 one-way trip from Kennedy Airport to Georgetown, Guyana, was available on a slew of dates in late May and early June.  Of course, I’d have to figure out how to get from Guyana to Natal. There was no feasible air connection I could find, and roads directly south to Brazil through the Amazon are not only treacherous and malaria-plagued, but lead only to isolated Boa Vista, which has no direct road connection with the northeast and has few attractions (aside from a billboard with a picture of my family, but that’s another story).  But what if I skirted the coast — through Dutch-speaking Suriname and the practically unknown, boulangerie-enhanced French territory of French Guiana, then across the Brazilian border to the sparsely populated Amazonian state of Amapá? That sounded like a great adventure, and from Amapá it was a straight shot down to Natal, if you didn’t include the small matter of crossing the mouth of the Amazon. (And probably not by swimming — it’s more than 200 miles wide.)  Scouring online discussion groups, it seemed feasible — if not simple. The agenda would something like this: A flight to Georgetown, then bus — ferry — bus — bus — ferry — bus — bus — bus — bus — boat — bus, and hello Natal! Doing it straight through would be brutal, but if I stretched things out I’d have the chance to visit some wildly diverse and little-known lands.  I’d have to get back to São Paulo by plane, but that was just under $200 one-way the day after the game. Then there was the matter of getting back to New York from São Paulo after the Cup, but as I correctly guessed, I’d be able to use a mere 30,000 MileagePlus miles from United to get a flight home. (Inconveniently through Chicago, with $54.60 in fees, but hey, that’s still pretty good.)  When I started planning things out, I found just one more catch — I could take a 24-hour boat ride from Amapá across the Amazon’s mouth to Belém, but the bus trip from there to Natal was both expensive, about $150, and quite long, about 30 hours. Flights were more costly, and indirect.  I remembered a little trick — awards programs that are next to useless on their own airlines can work wonders with their partners. I recalled my languishing Avios points from British Airways, which famously charges outrageous fees for awards travel on its own airline. (Round trip to London for 40,000 miles and $708 in fees? No thanks.) But when I called B.A., they found me a spot on a flight from Belém to Natal via Brasília on the day before the game for just 12,000 miles and $9, on TAM Brazilian Airlines.  That left the total cost of flights for the trip, valuing the miles at one cent each (the United ones are probably worth slightly more but the British Airways ones definitely less), at just over $1,000. I’m not quite sure how much those bus and ferry fares will be, but they won’t be more than $150, that’s for sure. So that’s a total of just about $1,150 in transport — a $550 saving over the original plan. Of course, it’s indirect — but by stretching out what would have been a grueling five-day odyssey to a semileisurely 17-day trip, I’m getting to make a vacation of it and in places I wouldn’t otherwise get to visit.  The complicated itinerary, of course, means that plenty of things could go wrong. When I called the port in Amapá to find out details on that 24-hour boat trip across the Amazon, for example, the man who answered told me it could be 24 hours — or not. “There’s no scheduled arrival time, and something unexpected could happen,” he said. “And sometimes the boat doesn’t leave at all.” So will I actually make it to Natal by the June 16 7 p.m. kickoff? To find out, follow along on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. And of course, right here.
The goal: Reach Natal, Brazil, in time for the United States’ opening match. The route: That’s a lot less straightforward.