Posada Neya Merida

... Humboldt, its sparkling glacier, and green, glacial-fed lake. The altitude made me feel like I was hit in the chest by a baseball bat and I was nauseated, so we simply hiked up 200m higher the following morning before we descended 1km in elevation to Laguna Coromoto. The next day (Day 4) we completed our hike and headed back to Merida for a good dinner. We then rested for a couple of days before taking off on a tour to Los Llanos, but I'll talk ...

... job of keeping control of the skidding car as we ended up on the grass. Turns out that the lorry driver had swerved to avoid a donkey just standing in the middle of the road. A pretty lucky escape as we could have quite easily flipped at the speeds we were going. The journey to Venezuela afterwards was without further drama. I'm not gonna give Venezuela the satisfaction of the typical entry. I was very disappointed with people in Merida (apparently the city ...

... in a rhythm that makes me think of gell-o. It is clear that sports are not as popular as fried food round here. I wonder how many people expire prematurely because of tradition and home cooking. I mean, everybody knows that saturated fat and deep fried foods are bad for you. No mother would insist on their child having a cigarette after lunch, but serving Empanadas for breakfast every day - that's a whole different story. I don´t want to sound ...

... another 30 min - still nothing. So I went to police station - too tired to cry. Low and behold who is there, but Mr taxi driver - been arrested for parking illegally at the airport. Unlucky for me he still took me to the hostel, but I made full use of my limited spanish vocabulary of all the bad names I could muster. At the pousade, luckily the owner was Swiss and could speak Eng, I explained my cash problem and he paid for the taxi who now turned out to be 10x the original ...

Canyoning probably has to be the scariest but most thrilling adventure sport I have done before. It basically involved walking, sliding, rolling and abseiling (rappelling) down 3 waterfalls...all along the canyon Santa Carolina. I went along with the tour agency of the posada I was staying with...I got slightly nervous in the jeep on the way there when I found out that out of the 3 other tourists to do it, one was a an experienced abseiler and climber and the ...

... way it works is strangely predictable. In the evenings, at around 7pm lightning often starts in an arc between the west and north west. This lightning tends to be reddish and it was the night we were there too. There were no bolts of lightning but there would be a pulse lighting the sky orange. The regularity of this lightning is such that it became known as the Catatumbo lighthouse and the Spanish apparently navigated by it. Its regularity is ...

... to slide down the rock face on her bum. Kev follows the guide, Carlos and jumps.. ! about 3 hours later, exhausted and throughly wet through but exhilerated we arrive at the bottom and to change and warm up. Day 1 complete! After arriving back from Pico Humbolt we are throughly knackered and the thought of 2 days rafting is not appealing. After a good nights sleep we head back to Arassari and see if we can cancel our rafting and do something ...

... Crocodile Hunter, Steve Irwin, personally. Midway through the long van ride (we upgraded from a jeep), we stop for lunch. And as Cesar takes our orders, I wonder where else on earth would a respected frog expert and environmental conservationist be taking my lunch order. ¨Hey frog boy, I wanted a Coke, not a Pepsi, hop back there and get it right this time!¨ The situation´s absurd, but then again, we´re on our way to a stilted ...

... told us was that they bought a van in Brazil and drove around in it for a couple of months. At the mention of her mobile travels my eyes began to light up and even though her story of it included how it broke down and buggered up their plans to travel further I could already picture myself in denim dungarees with a generously sized monkey wrench in my hand, some artfully placed grease stains about my bronzed Adonis like body, like those 80's Athena posters of random mechanics (and like ...

... 4 hours in total including travel time instead of the whole day as we had anticipated. It was all very nice but incredibly small. I´m thoroughly enjoying the fact that I have nothing bizarre or any unlucky incidents to report. We´re off to restock on booze and settle into the hammocks for the evening whilst eating our now not so fresh food from last night. I´m not even sure if it is possible to eat dinner whilst in a hammock but I´m sure going to try...