After all the hassle getting the tickets and our money back it was a relief to finally leave Cuidad Bolivar in search of pastures new. Myself Katie and Martin got on the bus to find that Mike from the tour was also on there after his tour company had cocked up his transport to Caracas so the four off us settled in and relaxed for the 5 hour journey.

We arrived at Puerto La Cruz at 11.30pm and left the bus. Mike decided that he was going to go off with the first person that he saw that claimed they could show him to accommodation but the three off us decided to search around for a budget hotel for our one nights accommodation. We walked into town down some long dark streets to arrive on the beachfront. Unwittingly we had arrived in mid Carnival and our endless searching for a room turned out to be fruitless. We started to get desperate and tried all the large expensive looking hotels and even they didn't have any rooms. As we were just about to walk up another side street to find another possada one of the hotel security guards rushed up to me shouting PELIGRO! Luckily my limited knowledge of Spanish does stretch this far and I know this means danger. We were about to stumble blindly into one of the dangerous parts of the city with our backpacks on. We might as well have had a sign on our heads saying MUG ME I´M A TOURIST!... At this point we decided to get a cab back to the bus station to see where we could head off to next.

After finding there were no buses running we decided to camp on the floor of the bus station waiting room and see what happened in the morning. As the sun rose we were all still alive (which was nice) and we walked back into town to find that there was still no accommodation and wouldn´t be until the end of carnival (two days away). This would be the same all along the coast. So after a breakfast and a discussion we decided to forget the Caribbean coast and head off on another bus.

At this point we bid Martin a fond farewell as he was going to go to Caracas in the hope of getting to the islands to do some diving after a couple of days. We decided to go further afield and head to Merida on an overnight bus.

As we were killing time before our bus arrived we bumped into Mike. You remember Mike... The one who disappeared to get accommodation as soon as we got to Puerto La Cruz. Well, it turned out that the promised accommodation did not materialize and he ended up getting his rucksack stolen by a taxi driver whilst driving around looking for a hotel. He was quite philosophical about the whole thing though. Nice guy, very positive.