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 half hour time zone, and chose the best of a very bad bunch for a place to stay; we wanted to avoid all the 'love hotels' which most of the budget places are! Because of how early it was we were cast out into the street, unable to check in until 4pm and with no gurantee that even then Mr Unfriendly on reception would even be able to give us a room!

Even at so early in the day, we got a feeling for the edge that Caracas has to it, and since they isn't really any tourist sites to see we sought out the solace of a McDonalds and spent a good while sorting out dates for the upcoming weeks as well as getting in touch with Joan, a local guy who we had been put in touch with through someone from work.

After finally coming around a bit, we set off on the slightly daunting task of sourcing out the black market to change some dollars on. The official exchange rate runs at about 4.3 but thankfully we had been stockpilling dollars since Ecuador so that we could exhange them on the parallel market for anything between 7 and 9 - meaning that although illegal we would effectively be be getting around double our money!

We asked around a bit and eventually settled on a rate of 7.7 from this hotel and a dodgy little guy who first huddled us out of sight and then took off for what was a good half hour - leaving us sat in the hotel thinking allsorts; surely it shouldn't take this long? Had we been stung and he's gone to get the cops? Has he just done a runner with our dollars? Thankfully he eventually came back and we left feeling quite relieved overall!

The rest of the afternoon was spent sweltering in the sun and looking in some of the shops, though to be honest the whole area we were in wasn't the nicest (despite supposingly being one of the better ones!) and so we were really just killing time until we could check in.

After thinking Joan had got cold feet on meeting up we ended up ringing him to check the details for what he had in store for us that night, despite us already being pretty drunk from the cheap, strange tasting vodka we had in the room! We got a cab from right outside the hostel, after another guy staying there had just told us that he had had a drunkard pull a knife out on him a matter of meters up the road, only for the coppers to c*** their guns at him!!

We got to Joans really nice and modern apartment around 930pm and were introduced to his flatmate David and his girlfriend Kelly, and they served us up a gorgeous meal of octopus, Spanish omelette, chorizo, potato and salmon!!

Considering none of us had ever even met before, we all got on really well and they were dead nice. The 7 of us piled into Joans car and he took us to a cool bar where we bought rum by the bottle, not the glass (apparently it's the way the locals do it!).

At around 530am and after a top night that made the stopover in Caracas totally worthwhile, we rocked back to the hostel and I set my alarm so I could get up to watch United in the morning, only to realise when I did actually wake up later with my stinking hangover that I had set it for UK time and not my local time!

We tried to put the day to good use by walking to the bus station to book our tickets out for later that night, and were a bit worried when we got told there was none left as we really didn't wanna have to spend another night in Caracas. So we took a chance and headed to the main terminal with our bags just hoping that we would be able to get on a different bus, which mercifully at the second time of asking, we were!

An 8 hour bus journey to Ciudad Bolivar then somehow took us 14 hours (again in the freezing cold!) and involved us driving for the last few with one wheel less than a full compliment after a stop in the early hours of the morning to take one off ended without it actually being replaced - the mind boggles!!!