For once a bus actually took less than what it should have and we arrived in Santa Elena de Uairen on the border with Brazil at a silly time in the morning on Friday. This didn't help my mood as my chair on the bus was broken and so I pretty much got no sleep at all. We got taxis with Tom, a guy who we had met in Caracas and then again in Ciudad Bolivar, to a hostel but had to wait outside for around an hour until it actually opened because it was so early. At 6...

We arrived belatedly into hot as hell Ciudad Bolivar on Sunday morning and checked into a really cool converted old mansion for our hostel. We really needed to get a few bits and bobs done (the most important of which was definately to wash my entire bag!), but the guy at the hostel just laughed at us expecting to get anything at all achieved, since it was a Sunday, and also a public holiday (yet again!) celebrating the fact that the river was reaching it'...

On Thursday we headed out of Colombia on a freezing cold bus to Venezuela, which probably more than any other country so far really was a bit if an unknown. It is far less visited than the other major countries in South America, and coupled with what we knew about there being a parallel market for exchanging US dollars we kinda got the feeling that it wasn't gonna be easy travelling through.We arrived in Caracas around 6am, having strangely only passed through a...