Monday May 12, 2008
I guess having no electricity in a place that gets dark around 6 pm can be a good thing. Then you can get up at 4:30 am and start riding before the heat gets you. On my way out from Puypuy I took a small detour to see the beautiful day-use beach of Playa Medina - it too was totally vacant. Wish I had more time to spend here.
When you're on the highway all day and only quickly passing through small towns, sometimes it's hard to find something good to eat. Dirty restaurants, strange food, dodgy looking places and people, or sometimes just a rushed schedule would keep me from stopping for meals. I always carried peanuts, granola bars, cookies, fruit cake or whatever would pack well and water with me to get me through, but occasionally, on those really long days when I needed to get somewhere, often one meal a day was all there was time for.
I continued west along the coast until my day ended with a glorious sunset at a little surf town named Mochima. As with most of the hotels I found in Venezuela, the prices here were often too high for me and the pickings were slim in this small town. But as I was reluctantly leaving to search for another place, I spotted a guy cleaning up around a nice looking building at the edge of town that I thought was possibly a tourist office. When I stopped and talked to the fellow I found out it was actually the town's police station made from three joined shipping containers, and he was the cop. Officer Remy not only loved motos, but he invited me to stay in one of the air-conditioned containers for the night. And that wasn't all: After a short trip to the grocery store where all I had to do was buy the ingredients, he also made me a delicious pasta dinner while we talked about his family and country, and of course motos.
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En route along the coast to the Caracas airport the next day I saw an overturned truck that was being rapidly unloaded of its oil and grease cargo by people that just appeared from out of the woods. Of course a police officer was there watching, but he didn't do anything. The traffic jam caused by impatient drivers almost pushed a few other vehicles off the road and oil spill made me leery.
Later I passed a burned out truck that was abandoned on the highway after hitting a concrete abutment, and disappointed to see many areas of shoreline that were dumping grounds for all kinds of garbage. This was the ugly side of Venezuela that most people never see and are obviously not important enough for Chavez's oil profits to be spent on.
I spent the night in a city on the coast large enough to have a Wendys where a frosty cost $2.15 US. So even with incredibly cheap labor it was the same or more as it would have cost in the US, but here nobody smiled and there were no supplies in the bathroom. The average person I met in the street was not friendly, and I could feel the nervous tension. And once again the power went out for the entire night, throughout the whole city.
The next day after exhausting my searches for reasonable shipping from Caracas to Miami at the airport (thankfully without having to go into the city) I continued west past the city along the coast until the only road on my GPS that would take me to Valencia turned southward towards the jungle covered mountains.
The further I got away from the city the smaller and worse the road got. There were points when it was so steep and narrow that I didn't want to even think what would happen if I fell. I hadn't seen another person for hours. I was up on the footpegs and riding Buzz like an overgrown dirtbike through some rough areas, often getting airborne or having to lean over the windshield just to keep the front wheel down while climbing a hill. There was so little traffic on this road that when I went across a river crossing, the slimy algae made the concrete so slippery that buzz shot out from under me as if he were on ice. After scrubbing the concrete clean under the wheels so he didn't slide anymore, I managed to pick him up and keep going.
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After an extremely long afternoon the road finally started to improve and I eventually ended up coming out on the top of a mountain range into this beautiful little German town named Colonia Tovar. But I didn't stay because I had a friend expecting me in Valencia that evening.
Down the other side of the mountain from Tovar the roads were nice asphalt twisties until I reached the main highway from Caracas to Valencia where I had to weave my way through bumper-to-bumper traffic for hours.
It was late and I was completely knackered, but my new friends, the Joves family were absolutely wonderful. Heck, they weren't even motorcyclists! And even though we'd never met in person before (I was the friend of a friend), they completely opened up their home and lives to me without hesitation for the next thirteen nights. There wasn't much space in their humble home, they had one of Giselle's friends staying with them while attending university, Minerva was starting a new job and Douglas was working out of town, but that didn't stop them from being the most sincere and friendly people I have ever met. They have shown me what a beautiful family truly is and taught me the meaning of the word 'pana'.
It was here that I realized Buzz's very expensive Works Suspension rear shock was blown. There wasn't any oil leakage, but there was absolutely no dampening left and it would simply bounce up and down freely. My guess was that it wasn't able to handle our combined weight of about 400 kg (880 lb) for such a long time through the extremely rough riding from the coast up to Tovar the previous day.
The power went our for another couple of nights (four power-less nights in the first seven that I was in Venezuela) and I couldn't understand how a country could operate with so many outages. Douglas said it was because Chavez had recently nationalized the electric company, fired all the executives and then replaced them with 'pro-Chavez' staff that didn't know what they were doing. I also learned that Chavez is on every public TV channel every Sunday talking non-stop for between 4-8 hours, and so only people who can afford satellite TV can watch anything else. Even when he wasn't talking, all the content on the public channels was government censored, so it was like he was trying to brainwash the population with all the billboards and other media about himself. It seemed to me that only the better-educated people really knew what was going on in their country because they had a more world-wide perspective.
Valencia was a nice city with beautiful flowers and modern conveniences, but to me it felt fairly pricey compared to cities in other South American countries I had visited. Douglas' apartment used to have a beautiful view of low mountains not far behind it, but that has been replaced with the view of another building now under multi-year construction. Sadly, as is common in most places I have visited, it didn't sound like there were any regulations that would protect Douglas' original panorama, or even a quiet morning's rest as the workers started making noise early.
After becoming part of the Joves family it was hard to say goodbye. But since shipping from here turned out to be ridiculously difficult and overpriced it was time for me to move on.
It felt good to be back on the road again, even if it was now on a very bouncy Buzz. I rode towards the small tourist city of Merida via the main highway, but it slowly weaved and twisted through small mountain villages for hours.
I was looking forward to Merida because it was supposedly famous for two things: An ice cream store and a cable car. I love ice cream. The store held the Guinness World Record for the most flavors, and the Merida Cable Car was the world's highest with its base in the city at an altitude of 1,640 m (5,400 ft), and its terminus on Pico Espejo at 4,765 m (15,630 ft).
But to my disappointment I learned when I arrived late Sunday that both attractions were closed on Mondays. So the next day it was off to cross the border back into Colombia in search of shipping options to Miami.
I intended this website as a way to force me to keep a personal journal so that I didn't forget all of these incredible memories, but also as a source of information for friends and family to be able to partly experience what I've seen and felt. And although I've been told it's a good site and many more people are reading it than I ever expected, I was still surprised to receive an email from a website named TravelHacker saying that it had just been listed under an article named "100 Best Travel Journal Blogs". Look for number 61 under 'Alternate Transportation'. I would have loved to read through some of the many incredible sites listed here had I known they existed.
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