Merida is positioned at the begining of the Andes below the 5007m Pico Bolivar (highest in Venezuela). It attracts the outdoor enthusiast with a vast array of things you can do with mountains. However for the less energetic it also has the longest and highest cable car in the world (when it is finished being repaired). For us Merida is a safer cleaner place to relax after some long bus journeys. We have a nice clean room with an amazing view of the mountains (bl...

We packed a lot of warm clothes for the bus but it wasn't enough. For some reason they want to freeze us to death with the A/C. All the locals were feeling the cold going by the coats, blankets and woolly hats - why? The route took us into the Andes via lots of long tunnels. The road was littered with lots of little road side shrines similar to the ones that you see in Greece to mark the places that people died. The shrines were heaviest near deep steep cuttings...

Water; not a swimming pool is one of the basic things to get right when staying in a hotel. It took two trips to reception yesterday to get water to both the taps and shower. When I got up there was no water - again. I went out and saw another local woman complain. This complain resulted in a trickle of a few seconds and then nothing. I will let them deal with the contents of the toilet - let's get out of here. We were no longer in the mood for another beach ho...

We got dropped off at the bus station in Morocoy where we hoped we could get a bus to Puerto Columbia. After extensive research this was one of the few places that had both a gorgeous beach and somewhere pleasant to stay near the beach. Asking the locals about the bus got 'not possible' answers. Eventually we figured out with the aid of a newspaper (that they were pointing to) that there had been a landslide in the mountains cutting off the place. The locals sug...

Spent most of the day in the hammock waiting to get a night bus to Morocoy at 8pm. This however was useful time sorting through 700 pictures I took of Angel Falls. Down at the bus station we dumped into Liz and partner. They are a couple of Americans that we met on the flight to Canaima. They told us that the Caribean coast that we were heading to was badly flooded. There was not a lot we could do at this stage without losing our ticket money so we hoped that th...