Did you know that despite having an area of over 1,000,000 square kilometers, Venezuela has only 15 million inhabitants? Well, now you do. And where all of those people are not, is where we have spent the last few days - we´ve just arrived back in Merida following a beautiful and eventful adventure into the los llanos national park. Our exuberant Venezuelan guide Carlos and his subdued but smiling sidekick Adolfo drove us around in a van seeing some of the sights, along with Alex and Christina, our new Spanish friends. We climbed a mountain, saw a miniture replica of a chapel (bit weird), got rained on from time to time (quite refreshing), drank lots of little shots of aniseed rum stuff, did a bit of rafting with beautiful sunset mountain backdrop (I fell in and almost died, but was very brave and just about managed to survive) and ate LOTS of VERY NICE food. After that we headed out into the national park proper - miles away from everything, on a ranch kind of place, with horses and dogs and giant frogs. We hung out there for some time drinking rum, and went on a series of excursions to check out the wildlife. Of note were: caymans, vultures, LOADS of other birds of all shapes, sizes and colours, an anaconda (sweet), an anteater (who invented them?? mental), pirhanas (caught a few of them for dinner whilst retaining full complement of fingers), fresh-water dolphins, capuburras (see anteater comment), turtles, a bird that looks EXACTLY like a tree and a number of other fascinating creatures. Lush. Also we rode the horses (I got mine into mode 2), lay in hammocks quite a lot and went on a night safari. Since everyone else there was speaking Spanish the whole time, the trip also presented an ideal opportunity to learn a bit of that. This went quite well, and we can now drop into conversation such useful words as mantequilla (butter), hambre (hungry) and repollo (cabbage).
All in all the trip was extremely good - lovely to be away from it all in wonderful surroundings with no worries except how to open the beers and which way round in the hammock to lie. We think we´re almost in proper holiday mode :)
The plan now is to stay in Merida for another day and then head up to Marracaida, from where we can get a bus into Columbia, where we plan to head for the Carribean coast and take in some beach action. Woop!
Lots of love to all
xxx
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you lucky sods, nighttime safaris are the best, surely second only to nighttime safaris fuelled by rum. Glad you're having fun and i'm intrigued to know what pirannah tastes like? Did you catch them with a net or a bucket or did you just stick your arm in and pluck off everything that came up attached to it.
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