Venezuelan Border crossing

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So that was it for Brazil and we booked a 15 hour bus journey to Santa Elena, Venezuela which turned out to be 18! We left sweating our backs out in the bus station and then got on a freezing air con bus for 12 hours north to Boa Vista. I would like to say we just slept through the night but with the bus being freezing, stopping every three hours and all the pot holes it was very tiring and irritable journey. The best thing about the journey was natures own views from the bright stars shining above the Amazon to the fierce electrical storm with lots of bright lightening flashes in the distance. Eventually we caught up to it and it was a torrential downpour only like you can get in the Amazon and the bus had to slow down to a snails pace, I was just hoping that we weren’t going to float away!

We finally arrived in Boa Vista to change buses for Santa Elena, unfortunately the driver wasn’t in any rush to leave and we had to sit around for 2 hours. The station was a shit hole and the heat didn’t help the dingy feeling and because we only had high denominations in Real’s we couldn’t get anything to eat as we knew once we crossed the border it would be difficult to change the lower value notes.

With no problems at the border we finally arrived in Santa Elena in the heart of the Gran Sabana which is famous for its table top mountains and the setting for Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle’s story the ‘Lost World‘. We were slightly worried when we arrived as we had no Venezuelan Bolivar’s and because we heard that they have a Black Market rate wasn’t too sure about how it was all going to work. Fortunately we were back in a Spanish speaking country and it was great, we could communicate again! We had a chat with one of the bus companies as we needed to find out what time the buses were the next day for Cuidad Bolivar. The lady introduced us to a local policeman who would exchange our money. This felt dodgy but the lady was very nice so we trusted her and the police man offered us nearly double the official exchange rate at 2000 Bols to 1 Brazilian Real so we exchanged just enough to get us into town and pay for a nights accommodation just in case.

We stayed in Posada Michelle and with the black market exchange rate meant we were paying 3 pound a night, nice and cheap but it wasn‘t worth much more! We headed into town to try and find out what we could get for the rest of our Real’s and also the US dollars that we have been saving for emergency. After haggling with a number of men we managed to get 2400 Bs for 1 Real and 5100 for one US $ the officially rate for US$ is 2150! Even though this all very illegal the money exchangers were all good humoured and we never felt threatened. We did feel a bit paranoid after the exchange as we were walking around with close to 5 million Bs at one point! We did a number of exchanges as we didn’t want to do it all at once just in case and all was fine. For anybody thinking of coming to Venezuela bring US dollars and if possible in high denominations 50’s and 100’s as higher the note better the exchange. We were so glad we saved all these dollars, Venezuela was going be cheap and it was great to be getting such a bargain after the expense of Brazil!

There wasn’t anything else for us to do here as the main reason people come here is to hike to Mount Roraima but the shortest trip is 6 days and we didn’t have enough time as we needed to sort out a few things for my Mum and Sister as they will be here in a week!

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