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Published: September 9th 2008
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Ciudad Bolivar
Old Church accross our posada Just to catch up from our last blog entry, we flew from Cusco to Lima, spent a day or two there to get Visas for Venezuela and Colombia. We found that we don't need visas for both countries, so we left for Caracas as soon as we could.
Usually we use the internet to book hostels or hotels wherever we are going to be, so that we are guaranteed to have space. For some reason no hostels in Venezuela are available on the internet. The only place I could find was the Embassy Suites Hotel, a hotel of the Hilton group. Since we would be arriving in Caracas late at night, we felt that we would need to book ahead, as Caracas is quite a dangerous place. We ended up booking at the Embassy Suites and had an evening of sleeping in luxury. It cost us a week's budget, though.
Caracas is a strange place. It is set between beautiful densely forested mountains, with a sprawling, densely populated city inbetween. It is almost as if the population density is competing with the flora in the hillsides for space. The crime rate is awesomely high, with many express kidnappings with
the purpose of extorting money.
We left the next morning by bus to Puerto La Cruz, a port town in the Carribean. Sounds good, eh? The place is horrid: we hated it.
We left as soon as possible to Ciudad Bolivar by bus (The buses in Venezuela are good). Ciudad Bolivar is quite a pretty town next to the Orinoco River. Cobblestone streets with colourful buildings in the historic city centre, the place is very charming. It is also bloody hot and absolutely infested with mosquitos of the worst kind (Bernhard's whole foot was swollen from one bite). We stayed in a niceish hostel called Amor Patrio, which was nice, but very hot. The manager of the hostel is also slightly neurotic, but harmless. The only thing about Ciudad Bolivar is that one struggles to get anything done. The shops don't sell much, and basic amenities are not easy to come by.
We planned on doing three adventure trips:
Angel Falls,
Orinoco River Delta and hiking of
Roraima, a mystical Tepui. We ended up doing only Angel Falls. The reason for this is as follows: The exchange services in Venezuela have gone haywire the last few months. In effect, this
means that instead of getting 4 Bolivars for a dollar, you now get 2. This means that everything costs double than what it should. We did not know about the situation, else we could have remedied it by taking lots of dollars and exchanging in the "black market", which is just any shop that exchanges, as long as it is not a bank. We also really struggled to get hold of cash in Venezuela, as most ATM's did not accept our Visa and Mastercards. NO guest house or any shop accepts credit cards. In effect, all three trips would have killed our budget, so we only did Angel Falls.
Venezuela is not a very tourist friendly place.
Angel Falls
We flew from Ciudad Bolivar to Canaima National Park with a small Cessna. The flight was quite hectic as we flew through a heavy rainstorm, and the aircraft leaked a lot of water through the dashboard in the front. The water came through as foam for some reason. On the way back the weather had cleared, so we managed to catch the view, which is absolutely magificent.
The first day of the Angel Falls excursion (3 days,
2 nights) we arrived, ate lunch and left for Salto Sapo (Frog Fall). We started on a boat in the lagoon, moved past a set of three beautiful waterfalls and had a lovely hike over some savanna. This place has very unique plants and rock formations for reasons we'll explain shortly.
We reached Salto Sapo, quite a substantial waterfall. The attraction of this fall is that you can walk behind the fall to the other side of the riverbank. Doing this is quite amazing. When you start walking, you think it is easy, you hardly get wet. At a certain point, however, the water really comes down hard on you and you get absolutely drenched. The wind that the fall generates is quite strong. We spent some time at the top of the fall, just looking at the beautiful scenery.
On the second day we left for Angel Falls, where we would also stay for the evening. This whole day is so much fun, as one takes a wooden river boat to the falls, through a whole bunch of rapids and amazing scenery. The river winds between forested hills, and one sees many of the
Tepuis in the
Cessna
Is leaky region. The whole scene is quite surreal. On the way, we stopped at the happiness pool, which is a pool in front of a small waterfall. We swam and lunched there, before continuing to Angel Falls. After about 4 hours of boating and hiking, we reached the camping point, where we disembarked and hiked through a forest for an hour to reach the first viewpoint of Angel Falls.
The falls are amazing (We are getting tired of that word in South America, it does not carry the deserved weight anymore for us, we will need to find more adjectives to use), spectacular, marvelous, etc. Any person that is not impressed by the sheer brilliance of the fall is probably a vegetable. Angel Falls is the world's highest free-falling waterfall at 979 m, with a clear drop of 807 m (thanks Wikipedia).
The fall generates quite a gale, so even at the viewpoint which is probably about 600 m away from the fall itself, the wind blows your hair back. The fall also blows your mind back, in a very good way.
We went to swim in the pool of water (very cold) just below Angel Falls. Had
Us in Canaima
In front of the lagoon some rum in the pool, courtesy of the team of Astronomers from the University of Cardiff in Wales with us. (We had great fun with them and their rum the previous evening as well.)
After all this fun, we hiked back through the jungle to the camping spot and slept in hammocks for the night.
The next morning, we travelled back by boat to Canaima. This boat trip was so much fun, as we travelled downstream at quite a speed. We missed some boulders by millimeters, literally.
As mentioned previously, the flora and rocks are quite interesting. The frogs and plants of the area are similar to that of West Africa, as they were close when the continents were together (400 - 250 million years ago). When the continents started drifting apart, many of the Tepuis started forming as a result of tectonic pressure. The ecosystems on these remained quite distinct from the rest of the place.
All in all we can most highly recommend Angel Falls to anyone. It is worth every cent.
After flying back to Ciudad Bolivar we started busing to Colombia via Maracay, Maracaibo and then Santa Marta in Colombia. This
took us 4 days and cost a bunch of money, and was not really worth it, as the rest of Venezuela really sucks.
For the other travellers out there, take a "por supuesto" from Maracaibo to the border, it works out way cheaper and its a good experience driving with a 1960 Ford of huge proportions at about 180 km/h.
On that note, it is worthwhile to note that Venezuelans pay about R0.40 per liter of petrol, so one sees all sorts of old American cars with huge engines cruising around.
Colombia is great, the people are friendly and it is the topic of the next post!
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Donna
non-member comment
wow...
lovely details....thanks