After spending some time in Caracas we decided to rent a car on thursday 21st of july and do a roadtrip to the west of the country. After bussing through Venezuela we had long since realized that the police and military checkpoints are everywhere, and being white "gringos" we assumed that they were going to stop us quite frequently. Also having heard all the stories of the crooked police here we must admit that we were concerned. Wednesday night we had been down in the Caracas center to watch the semifinals between Venezuela and Paraguay in the copa america on a bigscreen TV together with thousands of local fans. Unfortunately the "Vino Tintos" lost on penalties after an intense game and the enormous crowd went home without cheering. Afterwards we met Enrique and went out clubbing the rest of the night. So obviously we were tired when we packed our backpacks and took the metro down to the city center where the car rental company, Hertz, are located. After a lot of paperworking we finally sat down in our Ford Fiesta 1.6 in the middle of Caracas center at around 2pm, without a good map. Our destination were to be Puerto Colombia on the northern coast of the Henry Pittier national park. "Take a right, a left, a right and a left again unto the highway and keep on that highway until you´re out of the city" was the directions we had from the Hertz office.

Our Ford Fiesta 1.6

We did exactly that and without many problems Eirik manouvered us out of the city heading westwards. Close to Maracay we got seriously stuck in traffic and so our plans of sleeping on a beach in a tent was threatened by the incoming dark. Decided to drop that plan and just go upwards along the coast northwestwards as long as we could. Passed a lot of checkpoints on the way but didn´t get stopped one single time. We stopped at some shady gas stations along the way and didn´t spend too much time in those, obviously being gringos. But we did fill gas. 30 liter of gasoline cost us 2 BsF, which is $0.25 or 1,4 NOK: In Venezuela, they give away gas. That explains all the old big american fords, dodges, etc that drives around here and uses insane amounts of gas: It doesn´t cost anything to use them! Anyways, happy that the cost of fuel wouldn´t give us any problems we drove on and around 11pm we passed the sanddunes of the desert outside of Coro and onto Peninsula Paraguana.

Our plan was to find a deserted beach and sleep in the car. On the way there we passed many big animals. Wild donkeys. Funniest thing, donkeys walking around everywhere out there. The peninsula is all but beautiful and the eastcoast of it is pure beaches filled with litter, with desert surrounding. The everlasting wind from the east makes this a perfect place for windsurf and kitesurf, but we don´t have the money for those activities so this place wasn´t really anything for us. We found a sandy road leading to the beach from the highway in the pitch black night. some hundred meters from the road, this place was ugly and scarylooking but we crawled up -Eirik in the backseat and I across the two frontseats fighting the shift stick- and fell sound asleep there on the windy beach. Where we slept.
Next day the sun woke us up with light and heat inside the Fiesta and we got up and got a better view of the place we had been sleeping. Full of garbage everywhere. Well, hadn´t any time to loose so we drove back through the donkeyroad to the main city of the peninsula to see how was the shopping. Being a taxfree zone, we had our hopes up to catch some really good deals out there. But we got disappointed and ended up only buying a hair clipping machine, before driving back to the city of Coro on the mainland. There we stopped to eat some lunch and the little town was oozing of colonial architecture. Very southamerican and beautiful, but we were headed up to the mountains so didn´t spend much time there. Drove up to the mountainrange south of the city, on small roads filled by holes made for destroying a car like the ford we were driving. We dodged them all though and as we were looking for a place to buy some food we saw a sign that said something like "camping 3kms" and we decided that was a good idea so we drove off the mainroad and up an even smaller and uglier road. 3kms up through the mountain jungle we found a pearl of a posada. A huge beautiful garden filled with fountains, small houses and even a chapel! No doubt, we had to spend the night there. Being a tranquil paradise in the forrest there wasn´t much to do, but we visited small cave in walking distance and enjoyed that tranquility.

The 3rd day we woke up to birdsinging, got a creole breakfast and were off again. One night in bed was fantastic after that night out in caracas and the other in the car on the beach. Not having been stopped a single time by the police we felt confident, but half an hour after start we got stopped. And we were missing an important paper for the car, so we were in trouble. Despite all the stories of the bad police in Venezuela we got away without even a fine: He told us that since we were tourists, and he liked tourists, we could drive on. At the next checkpoint we got stopped again, and we thought that this time we weren´t going to be that lucky. The police asked us to open the trunk and show them our papers. We showed him our passports, he asked us some questions, made some jokes and told us to have a safe journey! Ten minutes later we got stopped again. Same thing happened again, they were pleasant and not hostile at all when they saw our passports and we told them we were travellers. Our impression of Venezuela and it´s police have certaintly improved, even though we know there are some rotten eggs out there. We had postponed our plans to go to Puerto Colombia, and this was the day we were going to drive there to get a proper night on a beach in a tent. However, one wrong turn in Puerto Cabello and a map with a road that doesn´t exist and we were in Patanemo. Asked around with the locals, but the road stopped here, not according to the map, so all we could do was to turn back. That turned out to be impossible though, because halfway up the nearby hill we got stuck in traffic. A small bus had rolled off the hill some 50 meters down. A terrible accident with lots of injured -we don´t know if there was deaths but looking at the crash we imagine there must have been- and an awful sight so we turned back down to the beach of Patanemo. The beach is picture perfect and just amazing but with too many people, so we got a fisherman to take us out with his boat to a nearby beach without the crowds. Out there we were almost alone and after walking a littlebit we were alone by the coral reefed shore and there we lit a bonfire and put up our tent before the sun went down. All night we sat around the fire, smoking a sigar and heating up empanadas in between going for a swim to cool off; it was a warm night. Enrique had earlier that sent us a message that something had happened in Oslo and that there were about 7 deaths, so we were already concerned and couldn´t wait to get on the internet to check out what was this.
Having a bonfire.

At 6 am the fisherman came back and picked us up and we drove back to Caracas. Being used to the traffic down here we didn´t have any problems but we saw two accidents as we were driving into the city. One wrong turn due to a difficult map we were suddently somewhat lost, going out of the city again. Turned off the highway and suddently we were somewhere we didn´t feel comfortable but we followed our logic and took left three times and we were back on the highway, this time in the right direction. Found the Hertz office, delivered the car and our roadtrip was over. Back at Enriques house we checked the news and we were shocked by them! Never had I imagined a catastrophe of that scale and we were both stunned. Checked our mails and facebook and quickly made sure none of ours were directly involved and our hearts beated normal again. Went to a barbeque of the family of Enriques mom and it was lovely, lots of great food and very nice people with loads of hospitality. That night was spent reading news from back home.

Our roadtrip and car rental experience here in Venezuela has been fantastic. No problems. The people are so helpful everywhere giving directions and even the police treated us nice. Some roads in bad condition and some nasty accidents was the downside. Too many old cars, damaged roads and too much drunkdriving leads to that.

Beautiful scenery, ugle accident