Venezuela

The flight from Aruba to the Las Piedras airfield near Punto Fijo was uneventful. It was a 'miniature' plane (about 20 seats) and the lone flight attendant came around with miniature, half-sized bottles of lemonade.

 

At the Las Piedras airport, we really bent over on the exchange rate. Due to some series of unfortunate events involving the value of the US dollars and the Venezuelan Bolivar, the official rate of exchange is USD$1 = 2150 Bolviars or so. The black market rate, on the other hand, is USD$1 = 4400, 4800, even 5000+ Bolivars. Of course, we didn't know this until later.

 

We hopped a bus down to Coro that afternoon. Our first night in Coro was marked by bad Chinese food, a lot of raised eyebrows and blank stares when I tried the words for 'youth hostel,' and then ending up a dumpy hotel near the main road. The only redeeming feature there was that it had a TV and we watched back-to-back episodes of House with Spanish subtitles. (The intro music IS different outside the US, as the Wikipedia page says.)

 

The next day we hit an Internet cafe and bought the Western Venezuela and 'Carribbean Coast' Colombia chapters off the Lonely Planet website. It felt like a cop out, and like it put us in danger of ending up at every popular backpacker dive with a bunch of other white people, but it helps immensely to know where the bus terminal is, how long the rides are between major cities, roughly how much we should pay, where some affordable hotels are, etc. The chapters are available for individual purchase and are downloadable as PDF. It took almost two hours to get the cafe clerks to give us a discount on printing, copy the PDF to the main computer, print from Adobe into their Canon print spooler, etc, but it eventually worked.

 

With Lonely Planet in our back pocket, we quickly located a charming little hostel run by a Belgian couple with a beautiful 3-month old boy. It was called Casa Tun Tun ('Knock Knock') and was chock full of a South American version of the hippie-cum-circus performer. During the day, they wove bracelets and carved necklace pieces to sell in the market. At night, they had a drum circle and practiced juggling bowling pins. There was a unicycle in the corner.

 

We ate at a cafe on the nearby plaza that had jokes written all over the walls. I could only translate the simplest of them. (What did the elephant say to the naked man? 'How do you breath through that thing?!') Others must have been puns as they were simple to translate but made no sense without some larger picture.

 

The main strip of Coro, where we spent the first night, seemed like any noisy, rundown town that happens to spring up around a large thoroughfare. A mile or so away, however, at Casa Tun Tun and on the plaza, the city has a pleasant colonial feel. The streets are cobblestone, couples walk hand-in-hand, kids play, locals hawk handicrafts to visitors.

 

Alden wanted to get to a beach, so we left Coro after a second night and headed west to Maracaibo. On the bus ride, we tried to remember lines of poetry. Alden came up with 'Beware the Jabberwock, my son' and something about a man from Nantucket. I remembered a stanza that I used to be very fond of, years ago. 'The splendor falls on castle walls and snowy summits old in story. The long light shakes across the lake and wild cataracts leap in glory.' I don't remember the author. I think it might be Tennyson.

 

I don't have much to say about Maracaibo except that it's rich and has a McDonalds, a Wendy's, and a Hooters. There's a whiskey bar with the 'W' logo lifted straight from the hotel chain. There're gaudy Christmas decorations all over the place, many so large they block the sidewalk, forcing you into the street to skirt around them. It also took us four hours to find a room and we ended up another 'love hotel,' this time for 90,000 Bolivars -- our most expensive hotel yet.

 

We were up and out the door before 6a the next day, off to the bus stop to try to get a direct bus through to Santa Marta, Colombia. There either were no direct busses, or 6a wasn't nearly early enough. We ended up buying seats in a 'colectivo' (shared taxi) and crossed the border that way. There's a 36,000 Bolivar exit tax before the border. While we waited in line for our exit stamps from Venezuela (with tax receipts in hand), our car-mates got in line at the Colombian entry area, speeding up the second half of the border crossing.

 

I was pleased that it was one of the smoothest (albeit not quickest) border crossings I've had.

 

-------:: Tidbits

 

Gasoline is dirt cheap in Venezuela and it shows. The backbone of the non-bus transportation system is old Detroit iron. 60s and 70s American muscle cars are everywhere and I can't imagine any of the old rust buckets getting over 15 MPG, max. Novas, Chevettes, Malibus, Darts. Alden and I rode from Maracaibo to the Colombian border in an Impala. Oncoming traffic here looks like a chase scene from a late-60s police drama.

 

Like most of the poorer countries I've visited, the two lane road effectively becomes three or four lanes as necessary, with a honk, a flash of the headlights, and a momentary holding of the breath being the only things that keep cars from careening head-on into each other.

 

Approximately two weeks ago, the country voted on whether or not to pass a series of sweeping reforms championed by Chavez which would have further consolidated his power base. The vote failed and in the days following there've been student protests in Caracas, Chavez defending the reforms as being constitutional in the local papers, etc. The country also bears the market of the campaigning. City walls remain covered in nicely stencilled slogans. 'Vota 'Si!' con Chavez!' is more popular in the state of Falcon (where Coro is), whereas an outstretched 'stop' hand in the flag colors with 'No!' across the palm is more popular in Zulia (where Maracaibo is). At the time that the most recent Lonely Planet guide was written/published, Zulia was the only state in the country aganist the reforms.

 

There're also menacing graffiti slogans and large (formal) signs that say, 'Patria Socialismo... o muerte!' Yikes. I hope I'm misunderstanding the tone and meaning of that.

 

On December 9th, Venezuela did something akin to Daylight Saving's Time by rolling back all clocks by... HALF an hour.