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Published: April 27th 2007
We arrived in Venezuela on Sat 31 March in Santa Elena de Uairen, just over the border from Brazil. We arrived in much the same way as we would travel around the rest of the country, on a FREEZING bus. Night buses in the rest of South America are pretty cold from the air conditioning, but Venezuela is something special. Kerry was freezing despite wearing 2 t-shirts, 2 fleeces, a rain coat and a sleeping bag inner. It seems a whole industry is built on selling woolly hats, gloves and winter jackets just for bus travel.
Santa Elena was only a quick day stop, where we changed our Brazilian Reais on the black market. The official rate is set by the government, but the black market rate is nearly double, so by bringing lots of dollars, euros or reais, you can make your time in Venezuela much cheaper. Excellent! Afterwards, we hopped on another freezing night bus to Puerto La Cruz.
Puerto la Cruz is a fairly industrial town on the coast, and has a lively promenade with many great restaurants and in the evening throngs of people gather to watch the sun set and browse the many
handicraft stores set up along it. It’s also the gateway to the Mochima national park. We arranged a day boat tour round the islands, visiting many beautiful islands, sunning ourselves on the beaches and swimming in the turquoise water. We also saw many of the dolphins that thrive in this marine park. A highlight was supping a beer whilst floating on a lifejacket in a natural pool “La Piscina”, very relaxing.
One of the more stressful parts of the holiday was when Nick was trying to pay for our trip to Los Roques at the internet café. The plan was simple, Kerry would guard our bags at a restaurant while Nick went to pay. Simple in plan, but impossible in practice. Nick gave up after an hour, but when he arrived back at the restaurant, Kerry had left the bags with the kind waiters, gone to the café to find Nick, missed him, and spent 15 minutes worrying that he’d foolishly tried to change some money on his own and been abducted by the money changers. But he was safe and sound, so after a joyous reunion we rushed off to get the bus to Merida.
On Wednesday
4 April, we arrived in Merida, the capital of the Venezuelan Andes. Our first problem was getting a ticket back to Caracas, it was Semana Santa (the week before Easter and a major holiday period in Latin America). All the bus companies were sold out, meaning we would miss our flight to Los Roques. Nightmare! Luckily, we found a dodgy local company that had spotted an opportunity, pulled all their normal routes to go to Caracas and were charging the same price as the “luxury” buses to get there. We were more than happy to get any sort of transport, our Los Roques trip was saved!
One of the major tourist attractions in Merida is the world’s longest and highest cable car, reaching 4800m. This was also sold out, so we were very disappointed. After visiting many tour agencies trying to sell us overpriced walking tours, the Inparques (National park) office gave us a great idea - the lift didn’t operate at full capacity, to ensure everyone could spend as much time as they wanted at the top and still get down. So as long as you could get up the mountain by yourself, you could get the cable
car down, so with their help a plan was formed. Early Thursday morning, we got a 6 hour jeep ride to Los Nevados, a small village in the middle of the Andes. The jeep trip was quite an experience, on a narrow trail on a steep hillside with wonderful views. We stayed in the Pousada Bella Vista there, and indeed it did have a beautiful view, along with great dinner, breakfast and rooms. We spent the afternoon catching up on some sleep and exploring the one street village. Friday morning, we got up early, to rain. But luckily it wasn’t heavy, so we started off on our walk up the mountain, and during the day the rain stopped. Los Nevados was at 2700m, and our target was the cable car station at Loma Redonda at 4000m, just over a 4200m col. Quite a walk! Even though the night in Merida and Los Nevados had helped us to acclimatise, as we gradually got higher, the lack of oxygen became more apparent, and our breathing became far heavier and our heartbeats far quicker than the speed of our walking merited. 2 months of hanging out on beaches in Brazil probably hadn’t helped!
Other tourists who had hired mules to carry them up must have thought we were crazy. Our spirits were buoyed when Chris and Christina (who we had met in our Pousada in Merida) caught us near the top, and we were even happier when we got to the top of the col with the cable car only 1 km away. The walk had been tough, but with amazing scenery. We elected not to go to the top station of the cable car, the cloud which had covered the mountains all day was still there, and we had seen enough of them during the rest of the walk. We got our tickets to go down the cable car, and our tired legs were very happy to get home.
In Merida we discovered one of our favourite fast foods - Arepas, a sandwich made of corn. Normally it comes with cheese, ham, or the wild combination of both, but in Merida, we found an Arepas café, with 15 different amazing fillings. Lucky that because the other major tourist attraction in this town is an ice cream shop with literally hundreds of flavours like trout, grass, spaghetti etc. It’s even in the
Aiport at Los Roques
Yes, that is the control tower on a truck, and that's the terminal on the left!Guinness book of records. But it’s closed because the owner is ill. Imagine if we had come all the way to Merida and not been able to go up the mountain and not been able to eat famous ice-cream and had not found the yummy arepas shop!
Our dodgy bus to Caracas turned out to be not as bad as we anticipated, although we were very glad to get off it. We stayed a night near the Airport, as Caracas has a bad safety reputation, and our flight to Los Roques left at 6am.
Los Roques is one of our favourite places we have visited in all our travels. An archipelago of coral islands with amazing white sand beaches, turquoise water and few people. Landing at the airport gives a good indication of how relaxing Los Roques is, you get off your plane, walk past the terminal (not through, it’s a shack with 2 people to pay your entrance to the Los Roques national park), barefoot along the streets of sand and 2 minutes later you’re at the main square of Gran Roque village. We stayed at Pousada Dona Carmen, nice place, right on the beach, not that
anywhere is very far from it!
We literally dived into our first activity, scuba with Ecobuzos. The diving is amazing! The dive sites on our first day were Boca de Cota and Maceta de Cota, with amazing coloured soft and hard coral, loads of colourful fish (our favourite was the giant green moray swimming by) and great visibility. The second day we went to la guaza, 3 rock pinnacles that you dive as a multilevel dive to 30m. We were under for 45 minutes and swam through so many schools of fish, can’t even guess how many different species of sealife we saw including a massive barracuda that followed Kez, many morays and a giant lobster. We have never dived in a place with so many fish in our lives, it put the great barrier reef to shame. The last dive was near Madrizqui which had lots of soft coral, but didn´t quite live up to the treats of the first 3 dives. Can definitely recommend Ecobuzos as a good company.
After diving on the first day, we rested on the beach next to our pousada, followed by an amazing strawberry daquiri as a sundowner. The second day
we walked up to the old lighthouse to the great views of the archipelago, again followed by sundowners.
The 3rd day on the Island we did the typical non-diver thing - took a taxi boat to one of the nearby islands, Francisqui, walked 100 metres to our own secluded white sand beach and swam in the turquoise water round the few yachts, and a delicious lunch of barracuda. We also went snokelling in the natural pools on the island, the cuttlefish move in their own funky style. Paradise! It was then time to leave, we checked in at the office on the town square, wandered over to the airport barefoot, sat on the pier waiting for our plane, watched it land then sadly boarded and flew off to amazing views. Hope to see you again someday, Los Roques!
Next day, we flew to Costa Rica. The Caracas airport tax was surprisingly included in our ticket, and not being able to change back our illegally obtained (on the black market) Bolivars, we ended up with about GBP 10/ R140 each, a veritable fortune in venezuela. So we did the only thing that seemed logical (and expensive enough!) we splashed
out on Sushi and cookies!
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Rich
non-member comment
Viva La Revolution
Sounds brilliant guys totally making the most of it. By the way Sunderland have gone up as champions and looks like your beloved United will stay up fella. Enjoy the rest of the holiday. See you soon.