Caracas - A Slap in the Face One Day, Beautiful the Next!

View from our room
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The Lonely Planet was not kidding when it said that Caracas could greet travellers with a slap in the face rather than a warm hug. After reading numerous scary warnings about this city, it was with great trepidation that we arrived in Caracas at 11.30pm. We immediately broke two of our rules – we changed our US dollars into Bolivars on the black market when offered to do so by a random man (dressed like an official) at the exit to the airport, then accepted his offer to organise a taxi for us. All the way to the city we kept thinking the driver, constantly texting on his mobile, was organising his accomplices to ambush and rob us. But he took us safely to our hotel, and then we felt bad for casting aspersions on his character.

Colonia Tovar
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The next day we decided to explore the 'sights' of this city. The city of Caracas itself is a strange mix of partly built, partly demolished buildings which gives the city its own unique character (don't ask me to describe what it is but it definitely has one!)

On the metro on the way back to our hotel I was the victim of an attempted pickpocket attack, but fortunately some very nice caraquenos alerted me to what was happening and the pickpocketer was scared off and hopped off at the next station.

Venezuala mist
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After spending a day in and around Caracas we decided to escape the hustle and bustle of the city and head to Colonia Tovar which is a small town nestled in the Venezualan mountains about 3 hours by bus (add an extra 3 hours for actually finding where the bus leaves from) from Caracas. The town was first settled by the Germans in the 19th century. It wasn't till the 1940s that Spanish was introduced as the official lanquage and the ban on marrying outside the community was officially abondoned (hmmmmm...).

Colonia Tovar was a great little town, filled with black forest architecture and lots of good German food. Although we ended up having pizza both nights for dinner!!

Our final adventure in Venezuala was getting back to the airport for our flight to Cuba. There was a very nice English speaking girl at the hotel in Colonia Tovar who arranged for a taxi to pick us up as she thought we might have a bit of trouble getting a bus back to the airport. This sounded like a great idea until the taxi driver decided to take a shortcut through the mountain ranges of Venezuala, by-passing villagers with machetes on the side of the road (admittedly they were just using them to cut weeds) and stopping every 20 minutes to take a toilet break.

We got there in the end though which is the main thing and all in all we had a great couple of days in Venezuala. Unfortunately we didn't have too much time here as we were only passing through. We have heard some great things about the beaches etc and maybe next time we will get a chance to check them out ourselves!