Merry Christmas!

Trip Start Jul 21, 2009

147

Trip End Apr 28, 2010

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Camping

Flag of Venezuela Barinas, Barinas, Venezuela
Friday, December 25, 2009

Several people have asked what we`ll be doing to celebrate Christmas, and I`ve answered that we`ll be at the beach. Well... as it turns out... almost. We started our day in a beach town, then drove many hours to a campground in the middle of Venezuela. The length of the drive changed repeatedly -- it would be 13 hours, then it was supposed to be only 8. Once we got on the road, traffic jams and an amazing number of police checkpoints made it more like 11, so we arrived at our campsite quite a bit later than planned. Amazingly, our trip leaders were able to negotiate cabins rather than campsites, so we spent our Christmas in a bit of unexpected luxury -- a prepared Christmas dinner (fabulous) and an actual bed to sleep in (lovely).

We hope everyone reading this had a happy holiday, lots of (safe) fluffy white snow and family all around.

Merry Christmas, Everyone!

As a sidenote and postscript, a few observations about Venzuela. First, there are amazing amounts of trash and graffiti around the country. While these are typical in many Latin American countries, the quantities in Venzuela have been surprising all the same. Second, the police! Before we arrived in Venzuela, we were warned that there were police checkpoints along the roads "every five minutes." Naturally, we took this to be an exageration, but as it turns out it really isn`t. Each road trip has taken us through countless checkpoints. Between the beach town and our Christmas day destination, for example, we must have passed through a few dozen checkpoints. The procedure is different at each one. Many times, you just drive through while a bored officer watches the traffic pass, but many times, we (in the large orange truck clearly full of tourists) got pulled over. This occasionally resulted in the tour leaders getting out to present all of their paperwork, and that for the truck, but several times (3 or 4 times in a single drive) resulted in the police boarding the truck and demanding to see passports and entry stamps for each person on board. Why? I may never quite know....