Chaguaramas Trinidad. It was a little boat they use for party
cruises, so we listened to soca and reggaeton on the way over.
Decided not to sail because it would have been three weeks or more at
sea that I wanted to spend here.
Landed in Guiria Venezuela, a pretty chill reception for a pretty
chill place. Bussed out of there that afternoon, passing through
places like Santo Piritu, San Felix before getting to the border town
Santa Helena. Venezuela is the land of muscle cars and ridiculously
cheap gas.
A quick talk with a nurse at the bus station near San Felix and a few
chance vibes left me with a pretty negative initial impression of the
Chavez thing. Her take was that he was doing some good stuff but
nothing spectacular, and meanwhile stuffing every institution in the
country with friendlies. I´m 80% sure one of the bus passengers had
to show a piece of paper to some soldiers at a checkpoint about a
professional video camera they were carrying.
The huge tourbusses are over air conditioned and coup you up in a box.
If I go back to Venezuela I want a car or motorcycle-- gas is so
cheap. Something like 30-40 cents a gallon depending on the exchange
rate you get (another silly thing about Venezuela is that Chavez is
fucking around with the exchange rate so you need to exchange dollars
on the blackmarket at rates that very wildly from dealer to dealer and
across regions).
The busride through Venezuela went like: standard caribbean lushness,
massive ascent into a cloud forest, and then a subtle descent into
high, mostly treeless plains that stretched for ever under spectacular
skies.
I crossed the border that night-- nobody checked my passport on either
the Brazil or Venezuela side and I had to walk back in the morning
when the bus ticket lady spotted this and wouldn´t sell me a ticket.
It was my fault and makes total sense... folks from either country
just need a yellow fever vaccination certificate to cross from one to
the other.
I camped the night at the bus station in Paracaima (sp?), the border
town. A man named Manoel paid for my dinner just to be nice. In the
morning after the passport stamping silliness I took a shared taxi to
Boa Vista... so much nicer just to be able to feel the outside
temperature and the breeze in your face. Boa Vista is a small city on
the river. Tonight I´ll go to Manaus on a bus and arrive in the
morning. Then it´s probably a riverboat down the Amazon to Belem (in
keeping with the "use as many different types of transportation as
possible" maxim) and a bus to Fortaleza, but I might head straight to
Rio, I´m not sure.
My Portuguese is laughably bad.
