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Published: June 26th 2007
Paragliding
Ake taking off
Merida is a town in the southwest of Venezuela. It is situated in a mountainous area and thus it is somewhat cooler than most other towns. Therefor it has become a popular tourist town both among foreigners and locals. We decided to go to Merida partly to go on a tour to Los Llanos, which we have told about in a previous entry on the blog, and partly to see the town itself and enjoy its sights.
One of the main tourist sights in Merida is the teleferico (the cable car). In the off season it is not running on Mondays and Tuesdays. Since we originally planned to go on a Monday this forced us to stay slightly longer in Merida than we thought we would. Because there is no way we would leave without taking a ride on it.
Now staying two extra days in Merida is not the end of the World. It is a nice town to get stuck in for a while. There are good restaurants in town, there is some nightlife and there are plenty of activities you can attend if you are in the mood. Or you can just take a stroll
Paragliding
Ake flying into the sunset
in the town or sit at a cafè and have a coffee.
Here we would like to write a little about three things we did in Merida: paragliding, the teleferico and the Heladeria Coromoto.
Paragliding is a sport where a paraglider wing, looks like a parachute, is used for flying using lift from air currents and winds. Outside Merida the paragliders take off from a mountain more than 1000 meters above the valley below. The winds can easily keep an experienced paraglider airborne for 40 minutes. Since neither of us have tried paragliding before we, of course, had to do a tandem flight, that is a pilot take us as passengers.
It is a magnificent expereince to paraglide. It is just like flying like a bird. We flew for about 40 minutes each and we loved it! This is Emma´s birthday present from Ake. Ake is now worried that Emma is going to expect something similar on each birthday in the future...
The teleferico (Spanish for cable car) is advertised as the highest and the longest cable car in the World. The highest it might be. It goes to Pico Espejo at 4765 meters and we haven´t
Paragliding
Emma has taken off and is enjoying her flight
heard of any cable car going higher than that. But it is
not the longest. The longest is according to Guinness Book of World Records
Norsjö aerial tramway in the north of Sweden.
The teleferico ride goes from Merida town to a mountain peak 4765 meters above sea level. In clear weather the ride provides spectacular views of Merida and the Sierra Nevada mountains. From the top it is also possible to get a good view of Pico Bolivar, the highest mountain in Venezuela. It was really nice to go on the cable car and it was definitely worth staying two days for it. On the top of the mountain there was snow that had fallen the previous night and it was freezingly cold. The altitude also makes the air much thinner. Standing still or a slight walk was not a problem but any more strenous exercise made you breathe hard.
Heladeria Coromoto is an ice-cream parlour owned by Manuel Oliveira. Senor Oliveira's largest passion in life is to make ice-cream with unusual flavours. Over the many years that senor Oliviera has owned the heladeria he has developed so many flavours that his shop is now mentioned in the Guinness
Paragliding
View over the hills where we started from
Book of World Records for being the ice-cream parlour with the most flavours in the world. In total almost 1000 different flavours have been served there. The flavours include corn, cheese, spagetti, rose, coca cola, vodka, shrimp, trout and meat among other. Meat was surprisingly good and so was ham. Calamares-flavour was horrible and salmon was almost as bad.
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Harvey Follender
non-member comment
Ice cream parlour
The ice cream parlour sounded great. Corn ice cream. Wow!!!