Merida

Wow, this is definitely my highlight of the tour so far.

The town is nestled between the first range of the Andes (One of the numerous ranges called Sierra Nevada, i.e. Sawtooth with Snow on it) and its possible to go from 1600m where the town is up to 4900m on the worlds longest and highest cable car within the day. Its also a jump off spot for paragliding, canyoning, hiking, climbing, riding and so on.... I absolutely loved the place.

We arrived on New Years Eve and quickly booked ourselves in for a Venezuelan theme night at the local restaurant. That went down well and after a good dinner and a couple of bottles of wine we decided to move on to what had been descibed in the guide book as Venezuelas "most happening" nightclub.

  Of course they would have a massive countdown party...... err of course not! All we saw were deserted streets, houses with their lights off and tumbleweed blowing past. Plan B quickly came out the back pocket and we decided to follow whatever noise we could and see if we could get into a crazy Venezuelan party... no joy with that after 30 mins and eventually we walked past a hotel bar and admitted defeat and went in with 15 mins to spare before 12. We saw the new year in with 2 other dutch guys and proceeded to relieve the barman of a number of bottles of rum before retiring to bed for 18 hours.

Up bright and early on the 2nd and off to paragliding which was fantastic. On the 3rd we started our trek to climb Pan du Asucar (Sugar Bread) mountain.

It was a tough climb up to the summit somewhere over 4600m, especially after the bitterly cold night camping out at 3800m. But the view from the top was breathtaking, its possible to see the 5 highest mountains in Venezuela, all of which are in the region 5000m. We didnt climb them because it was a bit above our level.

Next trek was to a beautiful old mountain town called Los Nevados. The drive there was specatular, dirt track along the side of the huge Andean mountains. Madame had her eyes closed in terror most of the way! We spent the night there and the next morning walked and mule rode over the mountains back to the cable car station to get the ride down. My favourite day of the tour so far and I think Lindy preferred the less steep hike as well, so it was a better option from the relationship point of view!

Finished off with a trip to the world biggest ice cream shop, 900 flavours and counting. We had the trout pate, mushroom, onion, beer, rum and raisin and pumpkin flavours.