Category: Venezuela

Hello all,
We have come to the end of our time here in Venezuela and tonight we take the night bus to Caracas where we will catch our flight to Lima, Peru. We´ve really come to appreciate Venezuela after we learned some key Spanish phrases.

We´re really excited for the next part of our journey and I hope to get a lot more amazing photos. Time seems to be flying so we´ll be home before we know it.

Be sure to check out our last blog. We finally got to post some pictures.

today we completed our hike up Mount Roraima (the highest of the tepuis mountains – it lies on the border of venezuela, guyana, and brazil). what an adventure!

days 1 and 2 we spent hiking to the base camp. throughout most of this time, roraima was covered with clouds, keeping us in suspense.

on day 3 we summitted the mountain after hiking up the steep face in the rain and clouds. the top was a bit unexciting at this point because we couldn´t see more than 5 feet in front of us. in the afternoon the sky cleared, and we got our first glimpse of the view. wow. it was worth it, even with the freezing cold and rain!

we spent day 4 exploring around the top. it was rainy/misty on and off, but we were able to spend time looking over the edge and all the way back to the small town that we started from.

days 5 and 6 (today) were amazing weather. we did our descent in the sunshine, looking back at the marvelous mountain. our legs can feel the burn.

tonight – a dreaded night bus to ciudad bolivar, then another night bus to caracas on saturday for our flight to peru on sunday! good thing we´re so tired – hopefully it will help us sleep in the freezing cold bus!
keep the emails and comments coming – it´s great to hear news from home!

we finally got a handle on the picture situation so enjoy.

Hola,
We are in Santa Elena hoy, ready to start our Roraima Trek mañana. We have been trying to improve our Español, so we decided to blog in Spanglish.

The rest of our time at the Dunes resort on Isla de Margarita was muy bien – lots of relaxing, siestas, and a couple more trips to town. I´ve decided that the bad luck travelling must be genetic – mi padres seem to have the same problemas.

Jueves, after a short vuelo, we took a diez hora bus trip to get here. We stopped at this restaurante where they were spit roasting carne and serving is with yuca. I thought RobO was in heaven!

Sorry, but we´ll have to add our pictures luego. Unfortunately it´s taking too mucho tiempo to upload them.

Hello everyone. We’ve made our way to Margarita Island and have met up with our parents so we’re feeling a bit spoiled right now. We’re staying at an all-inclusive resort which hasn’t been helping our culture shock or our waist lines. Check out our new beach bodies:

We’re halfway through our time here which means MomO and DadO are heading back to Canada in the morning. We’ll be spending another week here with DawnO’s parents until we head back to the mainland.

What’s next? On Thursday we begin our journey to Mt. Roraima. We’ll have 6 days to hike our new asses back into shape. After that we make our way to Peru and finally Ecuador. We’re hoping to blog as much as we can. We’ll be without our laptop as of tomorrow morning so our blogs might be quite short from now on.

Here are some photos… enjoy!

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.