I'LL ADMIT THERE ARE MOMENTS, even on the mainland. The climate in Caracas is nearly ideal. People love to crowd the traditional bars, called tascas, to eat peanuts, chat with strangers, and cheer on their baseball teams. Venezuelans rank themselves among the happiest people on the planet.

But somehow it all looks better from a distance. For the nicest view of this country, you have to retreat all the way to Los Roques, the islands 70 miles offshore. The water is azure, full of bonefish, dotted with dive-bombing pelicans, rimmed with powdery white beaches. The Caribbean is so clear out there that when I hooked a four-foot wahoo a menacing, gray-striped creature, the largest fish I've ever caught I could see it twisting and thrashing 35 feet down, a tinfoil glitter in the featureless depths.

Everything on Los Roques is imported, except the sunshine and the fish. In Gran Roque, the only town, the streets are made of sand. An old landing craft called the Normandía sputters in every few days with the whiskey, beef, toys, and statues of the Virgin Mary ordered by the village's 1,500 people. If the Normandía shows up bearing only frozen strawberries, then every daiquiri served on the island that week will be a strawberry daiquiri. At the beach bars, your table comes with a sleeping dog underneath and fishing boats pulled up on all sides.

Even in Gran Roque, however, there is revolution. The old high school got renovated a few years ago, thanks to el presidente, Hugo Chávez. Now the people on Los Roques nearly all wear red caps or T-shirts not just red, but the red-red of the revolution, rojo rojito. When a boatful of young fishermen, all in rojito caps and T-shirts, comes zooming by, they deliberately cut in close, scattering the bonefish, running over your fly line, laughing as they do it. Bonefishing is for the oligarchs, not the people.

So eventually you must return to that other country, to the real Venezuela. The flights from the islands return to only one place: Caracas, and reality.

IN THEORY, THERE IS A LOT TO LOVE IN VENEZUELA. It's the only place on earth where a chain of 15,000-foot peaks runs to the sea the Andes with beaches, and mountain towns with tropical warmth. The fishing is great, from those Caribbean wahoo to the toothy peacock bass in the jungle interior. A full fifth of Venezuela is untapped wilderness, and huge grasslands stretch across the interior toward the tepuis, flat-topped mountains full of biological oddities and punctured by the oldest caves in the world. Before my trip took a nasty detour, I was hoping to reach Angel Falls, the world's tallest waterfall, at 3,212 feet.