Adventures in Venezuela - Maracaibo, Venezuela
Where is Chavez?! A country presently divided in two - Los Chavistas and those against the infamous Hugo Chavez. We were honestly reconsidering coming to Venezuela, due to all the unrest from a pretty important referendum scheduled to take place. We finally decided to go ahead and visit it before things got even crazier. And of course, the results from the referendum helped make our decision easier! I think that if the people would've voted "Yes" to the suggested constitutional reforms, we may not have come this way. Who knows what might have happened?
In any case, Bienvenidos a Venezuela!! After taking nearly 2 days to get to the border, we finally step foot on Chavezlandia! Hitching a ride out of Colombia ended up being IMPOSSIBLE! So we had to take the bus to the border. We went from one pretty hectic place to an even crazier place! Venezuela is LOCO! People were yelling left and right, and for no reason .
Out of all the border crossings we've done 'til now, I expected this one to be the most difficult. Don't know why, but no, we passed through hassle-free. We even managed to find a place to stay in Maracaibo, where we'd be travelling to later on that night! As we waited in line to get our passports stamped, Arnaud struck up a conversation with a couple of ladies, who were also continuing on to the same destination as us. And, of course, he was bold enough to pop the question . . . "Can we stay with you tonight?!" . . . No shame!!! At first they just smiled, in shock, because they'd probably never heard such a request, but then funny enough, later on when we saw them again, they came up to us and agreed to open up their home to us!! Magico!!
Now with the housing bit out of the way, we then had to find an appropriate way of getting to Maracaibo.
The next day, our new friend and host, Eileen was kind enough to show us the town and all! Maracaibo was a really nice surprise for us because we hadn't planned on coming here at all! Visiting the sights was nice, not very relaxing, but fun. The town is actually quite hectic with all the people and markets all around, but hey gotta love it.
On etait un peu hesitant pour aller au Venezuela, pour le referendum, et vu que le NON est passe nous voila parti pour Caracas. Les circontances ont faites qu il a fallu aller d abord a Maracaibo, j explique a la frontiere, il faut faire la queue comme tout le monde pour le tempon, et la, un groupe de femmes nous conseillent de changer l argent au guichet en face, les billets que les gens changent dans la rue sont faux, et je reponds merci pour le conseil et on peut dormir chez vous? (en plein milieu de la frontiere entre la colombie et le venezuela, il est 9h30 du soir, il est tant de connaitre un endroit ou dormir).
