It's not often something stops you in your tracks, makes you pull the car over, get out and stand there, gawping. But then I had never seen a tepui before. Let alone thought about climbing one.

In the far southeast of Venezuela, the grasslands of La Gran Sabana stretch across an area the size of Belgium, accessed by only one road and home to the Pemón people. The Angel Falls tumble 979m (3,212ft) to earth from one tepui, making it the world’s tallest waterfall. And across the landscape, rising almost mythically out of early morning mists, are more of the huge, flat-topped table mountains, the tallest of which, Roraima, inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to write The Lost World.

It’s not easy filming a television show in the jungle. We’ve discovered that the humidity, lack of electricity, the mosquitoes and remoteness of the location make production life in Venezuela’s Orinoco Delta difficult.

The mission of our Word Travels TV team is to paddle along the Orinoco River (which flows into the Orinoco Delta, but most certainly not into the Okavango Delta, as I managed to assert in last week’s column; a number of readers were curious as to how I could be in both Venezuela and Botswana at once.)