National Park Henri Pettier

Trip Start Jan 01, 2001

127

299

Trip End Dec 28, 2010

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Flag of Venezuela National Park Henri Pettier, Andes, Venezuela
Wednesday, February 4, 2009

We set of first thing this morning to visit the Medanos de Coro National Park, a unique park supposed to be like a mini-Sahara with sand dunes rising up to 30 meters. That said nowadays it is a very green desert, it is very obvious it is on sand but there are lots and lots of green scrub trees in the area. Once having walked around we then continued on to Maracay where we are going to go to the National Park Henri Pittier. This Venezuela's oldest park and covers just over a 1,000 sq kms of very rugged coastal mountains that plunge down to the Caribbean beach. Once again it is a very windy and narrow road that climbs to a height of 4,000 ft before dropping back down to sea level. Today when we went through we could not see very much because we had quite thick fog on the road and so had to go even slower than usual. We ended up at the areas most famous beach Playa Cata and are now parked up in the very large car park for the night (N 10.29.38.74 W67.44.47.62).
5th - Today we are doing a walk around what is described as a picture perfect crescent bay of golden sand and palm trees. The description is fairly apt, but forgets to mention it is also a huge rubbish tip. One of the main problems we have found is that there is no waste disposal plan at all in Venezuela and everyone just throws their rubbish down where they are. This means that on the beach the people arrive, push the rubbish to one side and then sit down and when they leave they also leave their rubbish. The locals are just not aware of the mess.

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