Merida

The night bus/mobile hotel arrived 2 hours late into Merida, at 11am. The trips to Maracaibo Lake leave from here and is a major tourist destination in this area. The lake is between 2 mountains and at night the cold air from the mountains descends over the warm lake and creates huge, statically charged clouds where lightning strikes up to 180 times a minute. We had been looking forward to this overnight trip but this wasn't the most active time of year and the price had almost doubled to US$200, so instead we decided to do paragliding the following day for US$85. That afternoon we visited the ice cream shop that has the world record for most flavours ever created - over 1000. Some of the flavours available included: beer, onion, garlic, tuna, eggs, Bacardi lemon and the conspicuous 'meat' ice cream (she couldn't tell me which meat in particular). I had coca-cola, sangria and ham & cheese flavours. Surprisingly, despite advice from my brain telling me otherwise, ham & cheese was the nicest of the 3, but mostly because the other 2 were a bit disgusting. I also had a taster of chipichipi, which wasn't some kind of tasty chocolate chip ice cream, it was actually some kind of fish ice cream which tasted like normal ice cream with some kind of fish in it. Yuck. Other flavours in the past have included Viagra and salmon. Mmm mmm.

The next day, I dragged myself out of bed at 6am to ride the longest and highest cable car in the world. Dee wasn't as enthusiastic as me so she grumpily informed me that she wanted to stay in bed. It gets cloudy later on in the day, so we were told to to get there early at 7am. Unfortunately, we weren't told that it only opens at 8am off season. I had to make the decision whether to go back to the hotel and bed, or hang about for an hour. Some other similarly confused people also arrived early so we went for breakfast together, to return at 8.

The cable car is in 4 sections totalling 4765m high and 7.77 miles long. There weren't many people there so we didn't queue long. Each section took about 15 minutes to ascend to the next level and the flora changed dramatically as we increased altitude, cruising up the side of the mountain. City and farms at the bottom, then humid jungle then cold sparse bush land and, at the end of the third chairlift, the weather worsened and the cable car started swaying violently in the sleet rain. The second to last platform was freezing cold and the storm winds blew through the station, and through our ill-prepared clothes. We hurried to the café for a warming, overpriced hot chocolate as the windows and doors howled as they were bombarded by the weather outside. The thermometer on the wall outside read 2 °C. We tried to get into the final, oxygen mask equipped cable car, but we were told to move away from the doors in case they were blown in by the gale. There was no way we were going to be able to travel the last leg and we were cold and feeling dizzy and headachey from the altitude, so we travelled back down to the bottom and the warmth. We managed to get a part refund, but it was disappointing not to be able to get to the top of the world's highest cable car.

I returned to a more awake and cheerier Dee and we were picked up to be taken to our paragliding trip. Neither of us had done paragliding before so we were quite excited as we were driven higher and higher up the side of the valley. Conditions weren't perfect - there was very little wind and the sun wasn't beating down on the valley as hard as usual. In fact, there was even a little rain when we got to our jump off/suicide point. The pilots got out the jeep and deliberated whether to cancel the jump or not, as the clouds had now formed a thick fog so it would be hard to navigate the first few seconds. Every now and again there was a slight break in the clouds, so the head pilot said we will give it a shot. Ronak, one of the new guys, jumped first. We were told to run as hard as possible into the fog and lift our legs at the last minute when the pilot screamed 'pull!'. Ronak didn't run as hard as he could and just clipped the top of a tree as he lifted his legs. Dee was up next and she wasn't looking too confident as she was jumping off over an area covered in cactus. She jumped over the tops of the cacti into the cloud and silently faded into the grey mist. I was up next and me and the pilot ran as hard as possible towards the edge, one minute I was running but not moving anywhere until I looked down and I was running on air. I pulled my legs up and we were engulfed by the fog. For a few seconds visibility was minimal then, almost as if someone turned on the light, we came out of the cloud and we were looking over the bright valley below. The feeling was so serene as we silently glided over the cacti and goats and the pilot pointed out the towns spread around the valley below. It felt like we were weightless as we traversed the side of the valley. I was strange looking down from my seat and seeing my unsupported legs dangling over the landscape shooting past below. The pilot took us into a final 360 and we landed perfectly on the disused land behind a petrol station. The whole flight took a maximum of 20 minutes, but I would have been happy to have stayed up there all day. Apparently Rio has good paragliding over the city, which we are both wanting to try when we return there in a months time at the end of our trip.