It was difficult to find the old sugar estate at San Mateo where Simón Bolívar had once lived. But when we finally did arrive the old plantation house and an adjoining museum were - according to the makeshift signs pegged to their gates - "closed for fumigation". This was emblematic in a way.

I was in the middle of a trip across Venezuela to find out more about the country's 19th-century independence hero who has achieved more recent fame as the moral and intellectual inspiration behind President Hugo Chávez's "Bolivarian" Revolution.