Centro Turistico El Encanto Merida

... get to fly. For me though (luckily), it was fantastic! Amazing weightlessness, and not as scary as expected (once you`d got past the running off a cliff part...)<br><br>Tonight we start a 16 hour truck ride across Venezuela, via some of the most technically demanding roads in the country, to the coast. Can`t wait to see the Caribbean for the first time...and shortly after, I hit Colombia :) <br>

... rallied up the only biligual guy in the airport and he organised us a cab to Merida. Another interesting tid-bit of information was that the timezone is 30 minutes ahead of what it should be according to the rest of the world clocks. The president decided he would change the timezone as well as set the currency at a ridculous exchange rate to make life so easy for the tourists. Having done a bit of reading ...

Im up at 5.30am, showered and packed and ready for brakfast at 6am but no one is in the kitchen, no Juan, or Juanito."Oh, slept in". What are the odds that 4 people sleep in? We watched the sun rise. Breakfast eventually at 6.50am. Im starving by now! At 7.30am we leave and suprise suprise no strike at the bridge at 9.15am! We have to stop to return the beer bottles and Birgitte stops to feed a dog. We head off again and ...

... of nowhere! On a not-so-cool note, my credit card info was stolen by someone on Isla de Margarita, and I'm missing about 3000 dollars on my account... Thanks God the bank will reimburse me the whole amount and Visa is going to send me a new credit card - which is the reason we have to stay here for longer than originally planned. I think everything is going to be OK at the end, but it's just really frustrating when it happens... and really time and energy-consuming as well! Besos a todos!

... many stops along the way for taking pictures and seeing everything from mountain towns to jungle and all things imaginable in between. After a lot of hassle with tour agencies, calling to our banks at home to see if they could help us with money issues, talking with our parents, and struggling to even find an atm that would accept our debit cards, Maura and I finally found a good tour at a fair price. So tomorrow we leave for the tour, should be a great adventure!

... and equipment away. A few theories are flying around; one being that he found some hallucenagenic plants and went off into cuckoo land, prancing about the mountains in his shorts. Another more realistic theory is that he was so far gone from lack of food and the cold that he went abit mental. The fella is only 23 and now has just one or two toes left and God knows what other illnesses because of it. (sigh) What a doughnut! Jan 7th Cucuta to San Cristobal I was thinking about the ...

Merida is a fantastic city! It is one of the largest cities in Venezuela, but the kindness of it´s residnts makes it feel like a small town. In the city center there are 2 beautiful universities, both of which house students both national and international students. The city is surrounded on all sides by mountains.

... dollar on the black market. So, we had to go cheap. We turned down a pricier trip from Arassari Trekking, where we´d visit the stilted village of El Congo, apparently the best spot to witness the lightning. Arassari´s tour sounder better, but so what, we saved 260,000 bolivares ($72 US black market). Besides, while in Peru, we already saw a tribe that lives on a lake. They used buoyant plants to construct these floating ...

... as it is cheap by Venezuelan standards, although I am once again plagued with the super slow Internet connections syndrome, which the friendly man here tells me is affecting all of Merida at the moment (what else is he going to say), so no photos as of yet, and even the text is a stone drag!!!! Well cannot say much beyond this, as just got here, and it is raining, so I ducked into the first Internet place I could find to wait it out... More to follow... A

... to see the photo (scoll down on the left and we are photo 14) My Chocobanana tasted great but after my massive "burgeur" the milk shake settled in my stomach like a stone and ruined me for the rest of the night. We made our way back to Alfredo´s where another guy from another website was also taking photos this time we had no hesitation in calling him over and lifting our bottles for the photo. Click on Alfredos then click on 14/10/05 The Canadian girls went ...