Our Travel Blog
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.
Our trip to Tobago just didn’t seem to go our way from the very start. Everyday we would get up and try to track down our luggage. It would always end with disappointment. We would then try to cheer ourselves up by trying some activity, sometimes it would work, a lot of the time it didn’t. Just when we’d hit a high, like our accomodation in Charlotteville, we’d reach a new low, like discovering we were missing $100USD. By the end of it DawnO was deaf in one ear (due to snorkling) and sobbing daily. I looked about 30 years older and my underwear was beggining to eat itself. We needed a vacation from our vacation.
On our last day in Tobago, I was heading to the pay phone to make one of our many calls to the travel agent, when a local guy asked me how I was enjoying my vacation so far. I was honest and told him that it wasn’t going very well. He introduced himself as Jeff and told me he wanted to give me something for luck. It was a carving he made on a piece of husk. He carved Dawn’s name into it and then decided he was going to make me once from scratch. I watched as he took a small piece of metal and carved a turtle into my piece of husk. I gave him a dollar because I felt it was a really nice thing for him to do. He then asked for more money and I had to remind him I didn’t ask for the charms in the first place… I’m ruining the story. Anyway, the point is, since we got our carvings we have had no more troubles. We got on the first flight out of Tobago, and this morning our luggage arrived at the Trinidad International Airport. I decided to name my turtle ‘Lucky Jeff’.
We are currently staying with Harold Babuik in Port of Spain and we’re making good use of his washing machine (and dryer!) His place is absolutely fantastic and he has been more than accomodating.
Tomorrow morning will make our way to Venezuela. We learned a few lessons in Tobago that will help us in our future travels. For instance, if you turn your underwear inside out, you can get 4 days wear out of them… Just kidding. You can get 5.
Here are some pictures from Tobago.
Hello everyone… We didn’t think we would have a chance to blog this early in our travels, but a lot has happened in the first 2 days so here we go.
It seems Guyana wasn’t going to let us go without a fight. On Thursday morning DawnO and I gathered up all of our belongings and strategically packed everything so that we could take our big bulky travel backpacks on the plane as carry-on luggage. When we arrived at the airport we soon found out that we could check our huge backpacks so we decided to tear them apart and use our day packs as our carry-on luggage.
Break to 3 hours later, our plane is an hour late from leaving the gate. Nevertheless, we taxi to the runway and immediately turn around and go back to the airport. The captian informed us that we had a weight issue so we had to return to the gate and resolve the issue. Here’s how they resolved it. They took our bags off the plane. That’s right, they removed the luggage of the people that were flying from Georgetown to Port of Spain, and left on the luggage of the people continuing on to New York City. They didn’t even tell us they were doing it, but we had this thing called a window, so we could see exactly what was going on. One man got so irrate he was standing up and yelling. They talked him down and away we went to Trinidad.
Here’s a list of what we had when we got to Port of Spain:
2 day-Backpacks
1 laptop computer
1 Digital Camera
2 rain coats
The clothes we were and are still wearing
A ridiculously large bag of almonds (props to meg)
A half eaten bag of Beef Jerky (props to nick)
Our going away CD’s (which really cheered us up that night… thanks VSO’s)
My murse (man purse which contains our money and passports)
3 Books
Trinidad and Tobago maps and information (props to Rachel)
1 empty Nalgene bottle (no fluids are allowed on the plane)
2 brush-ups (those finger condom tooth wipes – so minty fresh)
5 26oz bottles of rum (I can’t feel my face)
As you can see, it’s quite a sad list, but it could have been worse. At least we have the capability to write about our misadventures and include pictures of our luggage… And the rum ain’t too shabby either.
So far we have no idea when we’re going to see our bags again. So on day 2, we each bought a swim suit, some toiletries and sandals for DawnO. We also got our man Blake on the case back in Georgetown. We have concerns that we won’t get our crap before we leave for Venezuela on Wednesday, but hey, we’ll deal with it.
We’ve been trying our best to enjoy our stay in Tobago despite the situation that’s consuming our lives at the moment. We rented a scooter and have been exploring the island.
Here are some pics, notice how the water is blue. I still can’t get over it.
well, we’re into our last few hours of our time in Guyana.
the past week has been great. we officially finished work last thursday, and have had a week to hang around and say our goodbyes. friday robO went camping with most of our close friends here (i was minorly sick and so didn’t want to risk the travelling), so i’ll let him share pics and stories about that.
monday we went to a world cup cricket game! though the score was pretty lopsided (we saw the cinderella team ireland vs. the powerhouse new zealand), it was a great day and an exciting atmosphere. i didn’t realize before coming here how long cricket matches are – we were there ALL DAY!
tuesday night we had a going away dessert and coffee with another Canadian couple who are leaving on sunday (Mick and Jacky from Kelowna). it was a nice chance to say goodbye to the other volunteers and give away all of the extra stuff that we’ve accummulated over the past 6 months.
tonight we’re saying our final goodbyes to our closest friends here. i’ve been avoiding accepting that we are actually leaving, so tonight it might hit hard.
as a farewell to Guyana, i thought it would be appropriate to write a list of some of the things we’re really going to miss:
1. the weather. we love the heat.
2. the food. nothing beats the fresh fruits and veggies from the market, the indian food is amazing, and cassava has been a gluten free dream.
3. our amazing VSO friends. they’ve been inspiring, supportive, and a lot of fun.
4. weekend getaways to black water creeks, the rainforest, smaller towns
5. boat rides – i had to take a boat to get to work sometimes!
6. the residents at Uncle Eddie’s Geriatric Home
7. cool new animals, plants, birds
8. suddenly being a morning person, and loving it!
9. permanent bronze skin (rob always looks like he’s wearing a white t-shirt, even when he’s topless!)
10. problem solving our way through a new culture
11. dvds for ridiculously cheap. we even watch movies that are still in theatre at home.
12. picking fruit off the trees in our backyard (bananas and mangoes)
13. cows, goats, chickens just walking down the streets
14. learning how to relax and chill out in caribbean south america
15. being able to cycle or walk essentially everywhere we need to go in Georgetown
i’m sure i’ll come up with many more, but i’ll start with this for now…
the next time you hear from us we’ll be in part two of our big adventure so stay tuned!
We don’t have much else to say about our trip to Kaieteur Falls, but we do have a pant-load of pictures and video that we’d like to share with everyone. Consider this the ‘Special Features’ blog. Enjoy…
This bird is called ‘The Cock-of-the-rock’. It is only found in Kaieteur National Park and wasn’t too keen on getting his picture taken. The other shot is of me taking the picture of the COTR with DawnO acting as my tripod.
This frog was living in a bromelaid plant. I consider this picture to be one of the best from our trip.
Our tour guide called this an ‘American Spider’ because of the red, white, and blue stripes it has on it’s body. We caught him in the middle of his lunch.
This tree frog called ‘The Golden Frog’ is a poisonous frog that lives in the bromeliad plant.
We took a series of pictures of DawnO doing yoga poses. They will look great on a brochure when she opens her own Yoga studio.
This was the most frightening shower I have ever taken. DawnO wasn’t there and says she’s glad she wasn’t. Sorry mom, but I couldn’t resist. Click on the image of the waterfall to get a better perspective.
Here’s a video of Dave and I taking a bath at the top of the falls. We call it ‘Brokeback Fountain’. Hi | Lo
On day 3 we encountered the most difficult part of our journey. Because of all the rain, the creeks swelled into rivers, and the amount of hiking that we were able to do was cut short. At first we were disappointed but we soon realized that the rise in water levels would lead to the biggest adrenaline rush we would encounter. Tony, our guide, cautioned us to not bring our cameras or even our raincoats for the hike. We were skeptical, but complied. Am I ever glad. (Moms – if you choose to read further, remember that we are now safe and sound!)
Watch RobO’s creek crossing Hi | Lo
We got down to bare feet for better grip as we pulled ourselves along a rope to cross a creek. After a brief hike on the other side, we were rewarded with a great waterfall. Just at that moment, it was like the heavens opened up, and we were standing in the heaviest rain shower I have ever been in. Our journey continued, through waist deep creeks, slippery rocks, muddy ground, until we arrived at camp – tired and hungry.
The next morning we awoke with great anticipation. After a hike up the mountain we would be at Kaieteur Falls!
There are numerous viewpoints from which to see the falls (watch one here Hi | Lo). We spent a full day exploring, bathing in the river above the falls, watching thousands of swifts fly into their nests behind the falls, and getting the full experience of the beauty of Guyana and the power of nature. One of the most amazing things was the natural environment – there are no guard rails, ropes, fences, and our group were the only people there for the majority of the time (we met the english world cup cricket team for a few minutes!).
The next day, we reluctantly boarded the 9 seater plane for the one hour flight back to Georgetown. From the air, we had an amazing glimpse of Guyana from above, including the immense rivers, flat top ‘tepuis’ mountains, miles of unexplored rainforest, and the brand new cricket stadium.
