Well I have finally arrived in South America. Can't say its the best start as i'm full of a cold and suffering a little with a bad knee. Still things could certainly be a LOT worse. I arrived safely in Venezuela after 15 hours travelling time and decided not to head into Caracas itself - far too much trouble there at the moment and by all accounts not very much to see either. So given that it didn't have a lot going for it I decided to give it a miss.

I have instead made my way directly to the coast to a small place called Catia La Mar. Once again there's not really very much going on here, but its generally safer than Caracas and its a reasonable place to rest for a couple of days (try and get rid of this cold) before I start the journey westwards towards Coro and then on to Merida.

Its looking like I will have EVERY opportunity to work on my Spanish as i've yet to meet anyone who speaks any English. This is definately a good thing as it doesn't give me any chance to be lazy in trying to learn the language. Learning Spanish had been one of the key objectives of the trip to Spain last month. However, during the month in Palafrugell I spent a total of 1 hour working on my Spanish and a total of 'every day' drinking beer! A lot of fun but didn't really do very much for my language development. I'm hoping that being able to order 'Dos Cervezas' will be enough to get me through the first few weeks until I can expand my vocabulary :-)

Posted by Russ Jones at 4:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Well so soon into the trip and i've already changed plans! Plan 'A' was to head along the coast up to Coro stopping at various places along the way. However, given that i'm still full of a cold and would want to dive at these places (not a good idea with a continual cough!) ive decided to run to the hills. I was having a bit of trouble getting out of Catia La Mar for any reasonable price if I wanted to head west along the coast - lots of mountains in the way.

So what i've done is caught a flight out to Merida up in the Andes. Seems to be a very chilled place to hang out and a VERY different feel than Catia La Mar (read: it feels safe). First thing that caught my eye was the number of VW Beetles knocking around the places (can't be all bad then - check out the Car Photo Gallery for completed pictures of mine! ) and the large number of huge gas-guzzlers that look like a cross between 'Pimp My Ride' and 'Scrapheap Challenge'.

Not made any firm plans here yet, but i'm thinking that quite a bit of work on my Spanish wouldn't go amiss and Paragliding is pretty popular here so i'll probably give that a go too.

Its only day 1 in Merida but its made a favourable impression so far, might just hole up here for a while. I'll probably head back to the coast later in the trip when i'm fit to dive.

Posted by Russ Jones at 11:32 PM | Permalink