Merida: climbing mountain and such like

Brig and I have finally escaped Coro and traveled further west by overnight bus to Merida, the adventure sports capital of Venezuela. The Climate is much cooler, not surprising seeing as the city is nestled in the mountains at 1600m. Anyway it makes a nice break from the coastal heat. You can see why someone arrived here and decided to start a town, the setting is beautiful, in the andean mountains which make Imo look up whistfully and say "I want to climb up there" and I agree but know I would probs die of exhaustion along the way....

Laguna Coromoto

The hostel is really nice, as are the people in it. At breakfast on the 1st morning, Imo and I got chatting with this old german man who describes himself as a "professional vagabond" (which obvs makes him a hero), and has apparently been "vagabonding all over the world since ´95" (his words!). Best of all, his name is Ruddolf.

Wise man tree

We have decided we want to do some kind of treck while we are here, but I´m quite worried about altitude sickness, as word on the street is, its not cool, so yesterday we did a sort of aclimatisation climb, which I will let Brig tell you about. It was amazing though, even if I did almnost die on the way up of exhaustion. Imo was very patient with me though even when I was climbing up at about the pace of a crippled baby. But in my defence: anyone reading this who was at PG: remember the hill climb up from the tunnel to PG? Imaging that, but very rough terain, streams, lots of shrubbery, steeper and 9k with a 1000 meter climb! Anyhoo it was all worth it, especially when we got back to the hostel and were talking to the trecking guide and he said tourists normally either dont make it to the top or take around 6 hours to do it (we were under 4!). But enough bragging.

Very happy at the lake

In other news, I think my hair is going a little ginger. I could call it "auburn" but thats just like "strawberry blonde", isn´t i? (denial). The first step to recovery is acceptance.

Anyhoo, i´v waffled enough. Mmmmm Waffles would be nice right now. Maybe they will have them at the 900 flavour icecream bar where we are going for lunch. thats night, 900 flavours!

lots and lots of love.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

We love Merida.  It is much bigger, more bustling, friendly and exciting than Coro and is in really beautiful surroundings, nestled is the only word for it, huge jungly, cloud topped mountains on one side and big hills covered in little houses and farm land on the other, with a pretty river running through the middle (though when we arrived at the hostel, the man there put red dots all along the river on our map meaning that we´re not allowed to go there as its dangerous).  The mountains around do look amazing but some of them are well over 4000m high and even I am prepared to admit that it would be foolish to think we could set of straight away to climb to that height, and even if we don´t do it here there will be lots more trekking opportunities i´m sure.

The cloud forrest

The 'acclimatisation' walk we did yesterday was amazing though.  We got a bus and a jeep to the entrance of the national park where you have to sign in and when we told the men there that we planned to walk to Lake Coromoto and back in one day I don´t think they thought we would make it.  But they underestimated the powerhouse that is Barbara and Briget... whatever Barbs might say I reckon we set off at a healthy pace, though when we thought we should be half way we met a man who told us we still had at least 2hrs30 to go.  We decided that whatever happened we would turn around after 4 hours, at 12.30 in order to have time to make it back to the bottom and possibly have time to visit the hot springs before it got dark.  I absolutely loved the walk through jungle, slightly creepy but very beautiful cloud forest and thick bamboo before eventually arriving at the lake at 12.20 (yup yup).  The lake was also incredibly beaufiful in an impressive/slighly sinister way (reminded us a little of Scotland (!) and we could imagine a scary old castle on one of the rocky mountains around).  We had lunch at the top and then walked down, arriving at the bottom at 4.00 where there were about 7 Venezuelan men waiting who wanted a photo taken with us, after much pestering we gave in. Very strange.  Unfortunately we didn´t have time to go to the hot springs but might do that this afternoon.

More cloud forrest

Really loving Merida but the opposite problem to in Coro in that there is so much choice that we can´t decide how to use our time and money!

hope everyone is well.

missing you all lots and lots.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Briget and Barbara near the end of the walk