Puerto Ayacucho

Ok, I will try and write some posts on what I`ve been doing in the past couple of weeks; I`m trying not to spend most of my time in internet cafès, which is why I haven`t always kept this thing up to date, and so I apologise if I don`t always get around to replying to anyones emails that promptly.

Puerto Ayacucho

After leaving Mèrida in the Andes in the west of Venezuela, I made my way east across the south of the country. After about 20 hours of bus journeys through the middle of nowhere (this country is really big), I ended up in a town called Puerto Ayacucho, which is kind of situated on the edge of the rainforest. And this place really was in the middle of nowhere, like you can travel for hundreds of miles in this country across flat, featureless terrain and not see a soul or a house, and Puerto Ayacucho seemed to be, well, it actually was at the end of a very long road, which just stopped when no one could be bothered to live any further into the middle of nowhere (kind of like Truro, but with good weather).

20 hours driving through this

It was sooo hot there, I was sweating like.. well, like a Cornishman in the Amazon, and apparently it gets up to 50 degrees in April. I wasn`t planning on staying long there, but I ended up staying for a few days and had an interesting time. There was a company offering tours into the Amazon, although unfortunately there seemed to be only two tourists in town - not enough to make a tour. And in meeting the other tourist, I think I met my opposite. He was an unemployed German philosopher, which is beside the point really, but worth mentioning. Anyway, he had 3 guide books and photocopies of pages of a fourth, and he had a note book where he had planned each part of his trip down to the last detail, including special hand drawn maps of everything. He had a backup plan for each part of the trip in case things didn`t work out, and then, he had backup plan for his backup plan. He couldn`t quite understand how I managed by deciding what I do from day to day.

Anyway, I spent my time there talking with some of the locals, drinking ice cold orange juice, sweating, and visiting some of the sites. One of these included some big rocks (I would call them hills) just outside of town.


There was like a forest park office nearby, where 5 park officers worked. After climbing the rocks I spent the rest of the day hanging out with these guys, talking about politics and Venezuelan women. They had such an easy job; it consisted of either lying or sitting on a bench in the shade whilst chatting and sleeping. Alot of people are poor here, but for most of them, its not as if they work that hard. After we had all had a siesta, we headed into town for what turned out to be a pub crawl. The bars they have here are different to Europe. There is a brand of lager called Polar Beer (which is actually quite a clever name when thinking in English), and there is a type of Polar Beer called Polar light, and alot of the bars in Venezuela, especially in Puerto Ayacucho, ONLY sell bottles of Polar light (which has a taste close to water, but is served so cold it has bits of ice in it), this makes everything rather simple, for the customer and for the bar staff - these bars are just rooms with a couple of big fridges and some picnic tables.

It turned out one of the guys was actually from an indigenous comunity situated about 20 minutes out of town, and he asked me if I was interested to visit his village. Of course I jumped at the chance; I was expecting some jungle tribe with spikes through their noses and ears, and only leaves covering the essentials. Sadly this wasn`t the case; the indiginous community was just an incredibly poor version of the suburbs of Puerto Ayacucho, the people lived in one room concrete houses, wearing old tatered western clothes and had little else. It seemed they had lost a lot of their traditions, although their native language was still strong - most could speak both Spanish and their native language.