Into Venezuela

This has got to be the most exciting entry this blog has had to date. Prepare yourselves.

It was sadly time to leave Colombia and head to the greenery of northern Venezuela and the luxury of our truck. We left Cartegena at 4.30am to get an internal flight back to Bogota, Columbia's capital. We then got an international flight and another stamp in our passport as we arrived in Venezuela s capital Caracas at noon the same day. Not a bad days traveling, except Caracas was a stopover, the truck was sat in Meridia waiting for us, another 12hr bus journey away. We were using local transport so it was decided to avoid the crushed daytime coach that arrives at 3 in the morning and get the comfy overnight coach. Great idea in theory just meant we had 9.5hours to kill in a bus station in the outskirts of Caracas. Traffic is too temperamental in the city to risk going into town in case you can't get back in time (petrol’s cheap, everyone drives, everywhere, always) so we sat in the bus station. This consisted of toilets, a few hard plastic seats and a shop that ran out of all food except empanadas that looked 3 days old. The same ones were there when we arrived and when we left, 3 days is an accurate guess.

We played poker for 5 hours, I won. I people watched and guarded the bags. Ollie walked around and found takeaway pizza for the price of a restaurant meal in England - rip off!! We all got sore arses from sitting on a hard floor for so long.

I've never been more excited to get on a coach. We were upstairs at the back, it had a toilet, curtains, fully reclining seats that were wide enough to lie horizontal in and played a movie in English (Spanish subtitles)! Intermittently the crazy Venezuelan driving would wake me as he swerved on the road and I'd find myself head butting the window, but tucked up in my sleeping bag I slept like a baby - even in the minus 10 degrees air con.

So that's the tale of our 30hr journey from Cartegena to Meridia. Enthralled, weren't you?