Crossing the pond (II)

One of the things that I learnt whilst travelling around Venezuela is the extent to which you get sick of taking planes to go from one side to another. Firstly, I had already endured 9 hours of flying to get to Caracas, including a two hour layover in Lisbon. At that point in time, I had taken two different planes to travel, but this was only the start.

What's more, these planes belonged to airlines which are more or less decent, what we would have to suffer after that point were then going to be airlines which are a lot more precarious than the ones which we had used so far.

The following days turned into a constant coming and going of plane journeys, although, of course it was to stay in spectacular places with dreamy landscapes which won't be leaving my memory anytime soon.

From Caracas to Isla Margarita (Margarita Island)

This journey was relatively short, I don't think that it lasted much longer than an hour. Margarita Island is an island in the Caribbean sea which isn't too far from the city of Caracas. Obviously, the best way to go to the island is by plane, by those planes which are considerably small. This plane, which I mentioned before, didn't look too good.

What was certain is that it was fairly surprising to see the plane on the inside, because to this day, it's still the most damaged plane which I've ever seen the inside of. The seats didn't seem to have been changed (or cleaned) in a long time, the air conditioning was dripping water on top of me and the cabin didn't seem to be too soundproof. In fact, almost everyone who was travelling ended the journey with considerable earache because we were sat just in the rear part, which was the closest to the motors in the cabin. Whatever the case, what was important was that it worked, so we were able to get to our destination without any problems.

It's one small island where it seems there is a lot of tourism. We arrived during the night and we took a taxi which drove us to the hotel where we were staying. On the journey, we could see the landscape of the island by night, which in reality was almost nothing since there is little to no street lights on the roads.

Whatever the case, the taxi driver turned out to be quite friendly, but it a kind of strange way as he answered our questions about how the districts of the island were laid out which was culturally shocking to us thanks to the exaltation with which he explained the answers.

Arriving at the Venezuelan hotel

As it got later, we arrived at the hotel with all our luggage which was taken into the hotel by the luggage handlers in the hotel. It turned out to be a very good hotel which didn't cost much thanks to the exchange rate between Bolívares and Euros.

However, there was a problem with the rooms which we had reserved, because we were in a large group of people who had booked to be there. So, we had to go to the reception and wait for them to resolve the issue. Reception was crowned by two oil paintings of Simón Bolívar and Hugo Chávez.

In the end, I don't know how, but the problem was resolved and we were able to go up to our rooms. The hotel turned out to be quite pretty, it was well equipped and it had a lot of pools - all of them with a view of the Caribbean sea. The bedroom was really big and very well equipped and of course, with some incredible views of the sea.

The only 'but' which I have about the stay in the hotel is that we were only able to move around freely from the hotel to the shopping centre which was 200 metres away from the hotel, because walking around any other part of the island was not safe. This was something that I thought was quite strange because I imagined that these restrictions would only be present in the city of Caracas, but in the end, it turned out to be something that was present for the whole time we were there.

The shopping centre also turned out to be quite shocking in regards to the difference of shopping centres that we have in Europe. The layout and the shape had a more "United States style" which is why it was shocking. But, without a doubt, the two most surprising things were, firstly, the presence of signs which indicated that it was prohibited to enter with any kind of firearm and, secondly, the extremely low temperature at which the air conditioning had been set inside the shopping centre. It was easily around 15ºC, it was almost necessary to bring a small jacket with you when going in if you're not used to those sort of air conditioning temperatures.

The beach which was in front of the hotel wasn't really too attractive. It had a fishing port on the side and the water seemed to be somewhat contaminated, maybe because of the fishing port or maybe because of the close proximity to the hotel on the coast. Whatever the reason, what matters were the views during the morning, because visiting paradisaical beaches were already others by other parts of the island.

The only thing I did on this beach was walk up and down it with my sister, more or less to the fishing zone, something which we were told later on, wasn't very safe, but to be honest, we just needed some sort of feeling of liberation.

On the beaches and visiting Isla de Coche (Car Island)

As I said before, the main attraction on the island is visiting each one of the beaches there. To get to them we had rented a car with which we were able to move around a bit more freely on the island. So, because of that, we could also see what the population of the island was like and the landscape of Margarita Island, which is really spectacular.

Just like I mentioned in the first part of this post about the trip, Venezuela was in the middle of an electoral campaign, so it was very normal to see lots of cars and people campaigning for whoever they wanted to be president. In this case, the majority were in favour of the then still president, Hugo Chávez.

Visiting the beaches was spectacular. They are just like you see in images advertising Caribbean beaches, with palm trees and intensely turquoise-blue waters. Here you could walk around the beach without any dangers, because here, the people are just hanging out or setting up their businesses. Although they are areas where people live in poor economic conditions, the likeliness of a robbery was somewhat less that in the rest of the places. It could be because the beach atmosphere invites you to relax and gives off good vibes.

Because of this, it's really simple to find travelling food stalls around a lot of the places on the beach. They sell fried foods of which, the majority are pretty tasty as well as cheap. Also, people usually pass by offering freshly picked fruits such as coconuts and bananas.

By chance, I have to say that one of the times that I went to buy food alone, I got myself into a mess with the Bolívares and Euros in a way which I had hoped to buy something that cost 1€ with a note which would have been approximately 10 cents. The person who sold me the food looked at me without really understanding what was going on and it was quite an awkward situation, but at last I gave him the right money.

But without a doubt, my best experience on the beaches of the Caribbean was the one we had gone to on Coche Island, a small island which belonged to Margarita Island and which was only a few kilometers away. We went in a small boat with a motor which could carry approximately 15 people. Up to then, I had never got on any type of boat and the experience was very fun. I discovered that I'm not one of those people who get seasick in boats, but I can understand why people do get seasick in boats.

The journey in the boat lasted half an hour, there were moments in which you couldn't see the coast from the boat, but we eventually arrived at Coche Island. Once there, we went directly to a hotel which offered us the option to spend the day using their facilities (swimming pool and everything else) and to be able to enjoy from the open cocktail bar. As expected, the cocktails were perfect, I have never tried such nice cocktails. A shame that I was only 16 years old and I couldn't drink so much alcohol. I would have been able to enjoy them a lot more now, without a doubt.

So this is how we spent the entire day on this small island, it was one of the days when I felt the most comfortable and relaxed. At the end of the evening, a bit before it got dark, we went back again to catch the boat to go back to our hotel. We got into quite a dangerous situation here because the boat that which we were in crossed paths with a jet-ski which was circling around an area which obviously it shouldn't have been in. It was dangerous because we could have crashed into them and the worse thing was that there was a mum and dad travelling with their son on the jet-ski.

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