here we are – safe and sound in venezuela!
wednesday was an early morning after a late night of visiting with mr. babuik and re-packing our ridiculous amount of things. we’re looking forward to sending stuff home with our parents!
first thing, we boarded the c-prowler ferry for the 4.5 hour sail to venezuela. we were excited about the next phase of our travels, and feeling confident that things would fare better than our past week. when we got off the ferry, i don’t think we could have looked any more like 2 deer in the headlights. spanish speaking people were asking us questions, trying to get us into their taxis, and who knows what else they were trying to say. we were frozen until we were rescued by an awesome norweigan couple who offered to share a cab with us. they have been travelling for a few months now and are fluent in spanish, so they negotiated cab fares and led the way as we made our way to the closest city to the port.
from there, robO and i figured out how to change some money, caught a bus to the next big city, and arranged for a taxi to take us to the guesthouse we had booked. though we’re pretty proud that we made it, i have to admit that most of the time we were standing with blank looks, reading spanish phrases straight off of my ‘spanish for travellers’ pamphlet, or pointing and gesturing.
so we stayed at a guesthouse (owned by a french canadian! oui oui oui!) in a very small town called playa colorada. thursday we spent the day hanging out at the beach, swimming, paddleboating, and trying some of the local street vendor foods.
just a few interesting things about venezuela:
– i guess the president has set the exchange rate artificially low, so there’s actually a black market for american dollars. it’s very strange that it’s all out in the open too. we ended up scoring a really great rate at a hotel yesterday.
– the music here is amazing. i guess we’re used to top 40 crap, but here every time i walk past a speaker i feel like putting on a long skirt and shaking some maracas.
– there is a government subsidy on gas, so we hear that the prices are really cheap. therefore, most of the cars are big, gas-guzzling boats. last night i felt like we should be climbing in and out of the window like we were in the general lee.
today we caught the ferry to margarita island, and we´ll be meeting our parents here tomorrow! we’re looking forward to trying more local food and practising our hopeless spanish as we maneover around.
on tuesday we took a bus to the equator, just north of the city. there´s a big monument and a bright yellow line on the pavement. the funniest thing is that it´s actually not the right spot – i guess the french screwed up when they built the monument! we went to a small museum next door and they gave us a GPS to use to find the real equator. turns out it´s right on the highway!
