Christmas Holidays

Happy New year everyone! I hope that you all had a lovely Christmas and that it doesn’t seem like a distant memory just yet. Matt and I had the most fantastic time; an amazing travel experience. There were some trying times due to the quite frankly ridiculous Venezuelan banking system, transport system, in fact perhaps just the entire infrastructure, and also having stomach problems in possibly the most remote and uncivilised place I have ever been in my life! Regardless, overall it was truly eye opening in many ways and we did some crazy things, saw some incredible places and met some really interesting people.

After spending a few days here in Coro we took a twelve hour bus to Mérida, a town in the southwest of the country up in the Andes. We arrived at about five in the morning on a Sunday so everything was rather sleepy. The town is beautiful and has quite an Alpine feel, very different to anywhere else I’ve been in Venezuela. We stayed in a great little posada right in the centre at the bottom of the cable car. Unfortunately the cable car, the longest and highest in the world going up to a height of almost 5000 m, has been broken for 3 years and there was certainly no sign of it being fixed anytime soon. Venezuela in a nutshell really! On our first day we went paragliding which was a thrilling experience.

The actual descent, over 1000 m took about forty minutes and was a lot slower and smoother than I was expecting. The main adrenalin rush was at the beginning when your pilot says, “Right now just walk forward off the edge of the cliff…!” We floated down whilst admiring the beautiful scenery of a crisp Andean morning and chatting away to my pilot in Spanish who had actually spent a year living in Mile End would you believe! We spent the afternoon swinging in hammocks on the terrace staring up at Pico Bolívar, the highest peak in Venezuela. The following day we went canyoning, one of the most popular adventure sports in Mérida. It essentially involves abseiling down waterfalls, the highest being 35 m, along with various other jumps and slides, with or without ropes. Dressed in wetsuits and helmets we spent the day hurling ourselves four km down the river. The Lonely Planet describes it as “just about the maddest thing you can do without being killed!” I told Mum about it afterwards.

From Mérida we booked a four day tour to Los Llanos, the low flat plains of Venezuela that also stretch west into Colombia. It’s pure cowboy territory, savannah flora dots the horizon and it’s very very hot – almost forty degrees when we were there. The drive from Mérida took ten hours but it was incredible. In a Land Cruiser we ascended to 4000 m in a canyon where two tectonic plates meet; the South American and Caribbean. We stopped at a beautiful lake to admire the breath taking view. From there we took the Trans Andean highway down into the high plains and it immediately began to get more humid and foresty. Through the town of Barinas and into the low plains, across the Apure River and on to the family ranch we would be staying at. Our accommodation was a hammock strung up in an adobe hut. The shower had a tarantula in it. Various animals; chickens, stalks, puppies, ducks and lizards ran about the place. During our days on the ranch we took a safari boat trip and saw caiman, capybara (the world’s biggest rodent), Mata Mata turtles, river dolphins and lots of exotic birds. We also went horse riding at sunset, piranha fishing and then ate them for dinner, anaconda hunting in the swamps and I even learnt to dance joropo!

From Los Llanos we went to Barinas, a humid dirty town in which we had an eleven hour wait until our bus to Ciudad Bolívar on the other side of the country. We’d picked up some other friends in Los Llanos who were also going to Ciudad Bolívar; a lovely German called Markus and two slightly mad Slovenians, both called Mojce! We decided to get a cheap hotel room between the five of us so we could dump our backpacks and have somewhere as a base instead of wandering around the slightly dodgy looking town. A sign in reception kindly informed us “Yes we have condoms!” It was that sort of cheap hotel…God knows what they thought about the five of us wanting a room together! After a fourteen hour bus ride we were in Ciudad Bolívar which is situated in the south east of Venezuela on the Orinoco River. We stayed in a beautiful hostel which was actually a recently converted colonial mansion in the old quarter with a courtyard, high vaulted ceilings and an excellent little antique bar with cold Brazilian beers.

We managed to book a tour with the hostel to Angel Falls. We left on Christmas Eve and took a small prop jet to Canaima which is an indigenous, air-access-only village, situated next to a lagoon and three stunning waterfalls. From there we joined up with some other tourists and hopped in a long canoe boat for a four hour ride up the river to the Angel Falls base camp. The river trip was amazing; the most incredible landscape I have ever seen. Tepuis are flat topped mountains that rise up hundreds of meters from the earth, one of them; Auyuntepui has a plateau of over 700 metres square. It was this mysterious and overpowering landscape that inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to write The Lost World. It’s so strikingly desolate and wild that you really can imagine dinosaurs creeping around in the rainforest! Luckily the sun was shining and the sky was clear so as we rounded a final bend in the river we saw Angel Falls, the tallest waterfall in the world at 979 m, it was truly impressive; it seems to makes everything man has achieved pale in comparison when you see what nature has created.Luckily there wasn’t a T-Rex in sight. We hiked about an hour to the lookout point and by this time the clouds had closed in which made the Falls seem even more impressive and we were still able to get a glimpse of the top. Even though we were over a kilometre from the Falls (we couldn’t get closer due to the sheer amount of water as it is wet season), we were being constantly sprayed with the mist and water that it felt like it was raining on us all the time! On the descent it started to get dark and then pour with rain, hence the path we had used to ascend now became a river in the space of about ten minutes. Our “guide” had no torch but somehow we managed to find our way back to the river, it was a bit sketchy though, to say the least. Our camp across the river was a hut with no walls and our hammocks strung up inside. Christmas Eve dinner was already roasting over the fire. We were quite an international crowd so everyone shared their native festive songs and then there was a group jolly to Jingle Bells! We woke up on Christmas morning with an incredible view of Angel Falls, descending from the clouds that were nestled on top of it. Some other people wandered down from another camp and there we were, in the middle of the Venezuelan rainforest yet we still managed to meet a mother and daughter from Essex! After breakfast we took the boat back to Canaima where we visited the lagoon and its waterfalls. We were even able to walk behind one, which was the most exhilarating experience ever. Due to the immense amount of rain overnight the water level extremely high. Sometimes we couldn’t even see where we were going and it felt like we were going to drown standing up! When we got back to the little hostel we finally got to have some Christmas drinks…Venezuelan beer and Spag Bol for Christmas dinner, with two Germans and a Swedish bloke – different, but memorable!

Our next adventure was a five day trip along the Caura River, a tributary of the Orinoco. We headed up the river in the direction of the Brazilian border, stopping along the way to visit indigenous communities based along the banks. We stayed two nights over New Year at El Playón, another Indian village located next to a small lagoon by two waterfalls with a gorgeous river beach, surrounded by rainforest; it was paradise.

From there we hiked to Salto Para, a series of five enormous waterfalls, at the top of which we went swimming! We visited a community of the Sanema people and found a group of boys all crouched around a hole in which they had trapped a lizard and were attempting to kill it by throwing stones and wooden spears. Who needs TV when you have a lizard in a hole? They then became fascinated with our cameras and we spent the next half an hour swinging them around and lifting them up. They were so adorable, although playing with them is probably how we ended up ill! Our guide Miguel was born in Santa María de Erebato on the Brazilian border and he had some amazing stories. He said that before Chávez came to power the indigenous people, anticipating a new President, spent two years working on a proposal and plan, with the aid of international NGO’s, to define their territories, protect their communities and most importantly to ensure that the beautiful virgin forest along the Caura River cannot be exploited by the government or foreign investors for its mineral and gold reserves. Chavez told them ten years ago that he would recognise these rights…they are still waiting.

Getting back to Coro was a challenge. Due to the holiday period the buses companies were in a mess. When we were back in Ciudad Bolivar on Saturday we went to the bus station to get tickets, we needed to go via Caracas as you can’t get to Coro directly. After queuing for almost two hours the ticket office finally opened. Of all the companies in the terminal only one seemed to have any buses going to Caracas before Tuesday. The “queue” became a free-for-all and I, being English, was indignant that the sacred queue system should be respected so off I went to the front and told all the people who were pushing in that there was in fact a line and hence started organising rowdy Venezuelans into lines for various destinations. After all that it turned out they were only releasing ten tickets to Caracas, we were about twelfth in line. Much swearing. Luckily a man saw our peril and told us his company had some. We arrived in Caracas at about four am in a rather unpleasant area that certainly didn’t seem to be a bus station. We made a quick judgement of taxi drivers and chose the one who looked least likely to mug and kill us and off we went to the terminal. At first it seemed that no buses were going to Coro at all but somehow we managed to find tickets, find the gate, avoid corrupt police asking to check our passports and then make us pay to get them back and get to Coro by night fall!

It was hard to say goodbye to Matt and it has taken me a week to get back into the swing of things here –this particular educational institution certainly doesn’t make it easy, mostly because there doesn’t appear to be any swing to get back into! No one seems to know semester dates or timetables. Yesterday, over three months since my arrival, someone thought it might be a good idea to give me a username and password to access the online teacher’s forum that apparently they all use and which I didn’t even know existed! I was also “welcomed” and introduced to the director…three months late. But fingers crossed it will improve and maybe by Easter things will have settled down, just as we’re about to have another break! Every day I am more and more amazed at how this country is still on its feet. Despite that, Matt and I were incredibly lucky to have seen so many of Venezuela’s beautiful attractions and it was a Christmas that I will remember forever.