The Glorious Republic of Chavezstan - a month in South America

This is an edited version of the article Queenie submitted to Frank's Apa. Queenie has told herself she cannot leave the house until she has posted at least two more instalments of NARRATOR, two more of the Hero Top 10, and written half of her Frank's article due at the end of the month. Hence the trawling through the c-drive, commenting on blogcritics, reading all her emails a zillion times.

GET ON WITH IT GIRL!

Day 1

I arrive in Caracas, tired, wired and four hours late for my meet with the group due to hitting the city centre at 5pm. Downtown Caracas is like downtown Dublin in one respect anyway. The taxi driver had ripped me off for the fare, nothing I could do, so I was quite happy to sit in his air-conditioned Taurus for three hours while he fumed.

My first night was managed by the group dynamic, so instead of enormous South American steaks and a trendy Caraceno salsa bar, which was what I hoped for, we end up going to a pizzeria in a shopping mall that had giant screens showing a baseball match and a soundtrack that included The Cranberries. Never mind the world being a village, the world, or the urban bit of it as far as I can see is an American shopping mall and we are all little mall rats. Truly depressing. Safe though. Thank God for that. The last thing you want when you travel six and a half thousand miles in a small tube beside a man that stinks of garlic is a bit of adventure. Nah! You want American cultural imperialism and Dolores Fuckin’ O’Riordan squawking her head off like she’s had her kidney stolen in a piazza made of tubular steel.


Day 2

First day on the truck. I pass the time reading Frank’s Apa. LOLOLOLOLOL at 10,000 Games of Cotillion.

Arrived in Puerto Colombia. Nice hotel. Lovely beach. Cocktail bars. Shops. Aaah. The trip is the wrong way round. That happens sometimes on these loop trips. If you get on a reverse loop, you have a reverse experience, where you have all the rewards stuff for the endurance stuff before you endure. So when you endure, everyone spends the whole time wishing they were back in the reward part of the trip. If you get my drift.

We lounge around in God’s own playground - greeny blue sea, white sand, a cute guy to climb up a palm tree I’m sitting under and get me a coconut whenever I want to look at his ass from that angle. Terrible really. Fuck the Med.

Overland trucking

We’re on a Dragoman Mercedes flatbed with 24 coach seats, eight of which face each other across small tables, which are for cards, Scrabble, writing your journal and playing drinking games.

Deep in the bowels of the truck are all the essential items for life in the developing world. Beer coolers, little chairs for sitting around drinking beer. Some cooking equipment. Tents. Disinfectant. A shovel to dig a little poo hole if you need one. Actually it’s attached to the door of the truck in case you have the runs on a driving day. Okay I’ll shut up now.

Day 5

On the road again. Most of the incidental music in Chavezstan is salsa, although you hear a lot of reggae as well. There are various types of salsa - the traditional, or Daniel O’Donnell salsa. You hear this in shops and crappy restaurants. Then there is the Miami type beat, which I think is called merengue or something like that, I can’t find anyone who speaks English and knows this shit to explain it to me. This is the Gloria Estefan type stuff you are used to hearing. The DO’D style is much slower. Then there is a kind of salsa/tinny-rap love child, ear splitting noise (gosh I am getting old) that dominates the charts and therefore the good bars. Like Alfredo’s in Merida. The cheapest beer in South America they claim. 10 cent for a bottle of import Heineken. I kid you not. In addition, Ven. traditional music is called joropo and is SHITE. Do not buy the World music CD. Ever.

We have to stay in Guanares, which is the Knock of Ven. Apparently, the Virgin appeared to an Indian tribal leader and his wife and told them to be nice to the Spaniards and adopt Christianity. And they worship this woman!! Guanares is a shithole. But I have a room of my own and a tv so I don’t care. We go to Papa Boris for dinner and have the usual Ven. food - an ENORMOUS steak, with rice, potatoes and plantains, a salad and the ubiquitous coleslaw. Dr. Atkins hasn’t made it here yet, thank goodness. I always wondered where coleslaw came from.

There are no bars to be found in Guanares. I don’t spend much time looking. It’s that horrible SA dump of a place, loads of rubbish, loads of skinny dogs and mean looking young guys eyeing your shoes (because you have brought nothing else of value out). I go back to my room to watch tv. I tell everyone I’m going to watch The West Wing. Some of them mock me. They should know better. Channel 32 - Warner Bros International. Every Tuesday at 10pm - they never imagined I’d have checked on the interweb. Puny humans!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And it’s the new series.

Day 6

Up over 5,000 metres and back down through the cloud forest to Merida. I am going to die. I don’t care how nice the fucking trees are. Nobody else feels a thing. A curse on mountain sickness, I’ll never see Ecuador at this rate. Merida is a lovely little Andean city nestling in a valley - the clouds come in by eleven every morning so it’s really cool and not too humid.

We go to Alfredo’s (see earlier entry). I get some salsa lessons from the bar men. Then we go clubbing with them after closing time. Eight of us in a taxi going God knows where, this is more like it. It was 10,000 bolivars ($4) in for the guys, free for ladyeeez, but you get EIGHT free beers with your entrance ticket. We traded them in for rum neat in a cup of crushed ice and get to it in earnest. Then we get invited into the upstairs bit, which is full of impossibly handsome young things grooving away in couples to salsa. When it becomes obvious that we are so drunk that we can’t do it the DJ takes pity on us and plays a Chemical Brothers set. Everyone is gob smacked at my unique freestyle.

On and on and on and on and on and on it went. We drank and drank and kept getting more sober as the dancing pumped the booze out of us as fast as we could pour it in. In desperation I take the bottle of rum out onto the dance floor. Serena from Isla de la Margerita takes pity on me and lends me her boyfriend. Did you know that it is actually possible to be leant back over a bloke’s knee until your head touches the floor while he does extremely strange (but nice) things to your lower back and still drink rum bedeneck. Bedehokey it is!!

Day 9

After a fantastic few days in Merida, with lots of EXTREME sports which I mostly participate in as a spectator, preferring to leave the death-defying stunts to others, we head to Lago Maracaibo, which is bigger than Switzerland, to watch the Catatambo lightening. This is a bizarre phenomenon whereby lightening flashes for about six hours a night, without the accompanying thunderclaps. It lights up the riverbanks in an eerie silver sheen. I see my first owl, sitting on a branch of a dead tree like a prop from Sleepy Hollow.

We stay in a stilted hut in the lake and Carmello our guide treats us to an evening of Joropo music. Hurrah. Then we leave civilisation forever, and drive to Los Llanos, which is the back arse of Chavezstan, a huge savannah that spreads from the Andes in the west all the way across the country to the Gran Sabana and the delta in the east. It takes us five days to drive across it. In the middle we spend three days in a flop house on the banks of the Rio Arupe which is the most maggoty, snake-infested, mosquito-ridden hole in which I have ever drawn breath. I endure (see earlier entry). I sleep in a hammock for 11 nights straight. Well crooked.

Sleeping in a Hammock

1 Hammocks generally live in groups, which means that Tim and Pedro will be sleeping on either side of you so wear ear plugs to shut out the unbelievably loud snoring. Pedro assures me it goes with his voice, so I am devastated (see earlier entry). Don’t put them in too far as they affect your balance and you won’t be able to get into the thing.

2 Bring EVERYTHING you need for the night so you don’t have to clamber out again.

3 Have a pee for the same reason.

4 Fight your way under the mossie net. If you are very drunk, ensure that Tim or Pedro put you under your mossie net. If they are very drunk you are screwed.

5 Sit sideways into the MIDDLE of the hammock, pulling the sides of it apart as you do so your bum falls neatly into the centre of gravity. You will descend suddenly as if you have broken the hammock. Don’t panic, you haven’t. Unless you hit the floor in which case you have. Repair hammock and start again.

6 Lie back DIAGONALLY

7 Swing your legs up and push the hammock fully open with your toes.

8 Put pillow against the side of your head and relax head against it. Do not try to put the pillow under your head

9 Put ‘Floating in Space’ on the iPod, it sounds kind of muffled with the ear plugs and all but that kind of adds to the ambience.

10 Close your eyes and enjoy the feeling of weightlessness that lasts about SIX seconds before you realise you forgot to wash your teeth.

Despite the enduring, Los Llanos is great. Loads of wildlife. I get up close to an anaconda. Like, it’s wrapped around my arms and chest. I have a very strange thought when I’m sitting there feeling it pulsate against my skin which I won’t share. Dolphins, snakes, alligators, iguanas, butterflies, howler monkeys (they sound like the wind coming over the Atlantic into Keel Strand on a January night on Achill Island. They do), sting rays, 12 types of piranhas, including a vegetarian type. It takes all kinds. Apparently Venezuelan women eat them if they’re trying to conceive. They taste okay, a bit bony. Fireflies, termites, vultures, owls, ospreys, egrets, annis which make a sound like boiling water, woodpeckers, toucans, parrots, pelicans all sitting in a row like the Supreme Court in session, terns, herons, kites, cormorants. I am in NG heaven. Our guide Alan is from Barbados. He’s hilarious.

Typical conversation with Alan

Alan: shows picture of stunning looking woman. “That’s my wife, she doesn’t understand me because (goes on for forty minutes).

Lorraine: “Oh that’s terrible. Why don’t you give up your job that entails leaving her on her own to develop these terrible suspicions about you and the Dutch tour guide you end up having to share a room with on trips but with whom nothing has ever happened (apart from in your HEAD)."

Alan: snuggles up a bit closer, a bit scarey in a flat-bottomed boat in a piranha infested river. “Oh, I can’t do that, what else could I do.”

Lorraine: “Get a job, aaaaarh.” Pirhana fish have a really nasty habit of jumping out of the water and hitting you on the side of the face when you’re edging away from a sex-starved Barbadian tour guide.

Alan: snuggles up a bit more to save me from the dying pirhana fish in the bottom of the boat. “I hope you don’t think I’m one of those blokes who tries to chat up single women by telling them their wife doesn’t understand them”

Lorraine: “God no.” Ignores the sniggering coming from everyone else on the boat who is thanking their lucky stars that they are a) not single, b) male, or c) blessed with superhuman diplomatic skills that enable them to look at the passing wildlife while imagining Alan being swallowed by his own anaconda.

He’s a great guide though. Days are spent on the river looking at wildlife and fishing. Evenings are spent on the river drinking rum and looking at the stars. I start to get that lovely feeling I get when I am away from cities and I can see the stars and everything is calm and balanced and the voices in my head have stayed in the city to catch up on a bit of shopping!

Day 17

Finally make it to Ciudad Bolivar in the east, which is the drop off point for Angel Falls and where we will spend Christmas. We cross the Orinocco. It a mighty big river. Bigger than the Mississippi. Bigger than the Rhine. There is only one bridge across it. Imagine that. And not a toll booth in sight.

We go to Posada La Casita. Pieter and Joakin run it. Joakin looks like a German version of Ed Norton in American History X, so I reckon he is a neo-Nazi on the run and Pieter was his Obsterfurher (this is a makey up word btw) in a previous life. The reason I think this is because Pieter got really drunk one night and said something anti-semitic which I was amazed at, as I have never experienced it before.

Along with Pieter and Joakin, and Pieter’s wife, there are about twenty kids and young women who seem to live here and all do bits of jobs and hang out generally and have a good time with the guests. There are cabins and a hammock room and space for our tents. There are three trucks here for Christmas, us, another Drago truck and 30 Dutch frat boys. Eeeeew. What’s the Dutch for pig ignorant jock?

Along with Pieter and Joakin and Pieter’s wife who is Venezuelan and her entire extended family and Joakin’s girlfriend who is over from Austria and the staff and all of us, there are the eight dogs. Led by Paco. Who is the BIGGEST rottweiler I have ever seen. I tell Pieter my father is a vet and he asks me to wash Paco as he smells a bit and he’s unabashedly anti-water. It takes three hours, on and off, but we are great friends after it, which is handy for when I want to get the Dutch jocks out of the pool so we can play volleyball. Have you ever seen a 65 kilo rottweiler clear a swimming pool? It’s hilarious. RUFF GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!! SPLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASH! AAAAAAAHHHHH SPLASH SPLASH SPLASH…….. SILENCE….

As well as the dogs, there are monkeys and deer and loads of parrots and a bar with a pool table and the internet and laundry and lovely food all day and a dvd collection and loads of cds and a dance floor and AN HONESTY SYSTEM which means you have to ‘fess up to what you eat, drink and interweb. Definitely too rich for most people’s blood.

Angel Falls

After an incredibly early start we end up spending four hours waiting for our Cessna in Cuidad Bolivar airport, which I knew we would, and eventually get off the ground by 10am. Once we were in the air, the pilot played a game on his mobile phone and we all stared out the window and pretended not to notice. There was plenty to see anyways. We cross vast scrublands, pitted with huge tepui (table mountains, think Table Mountain). Around the base of each is dense jungle, so tightly packed it looks like the florets on a head of broccoli. The tepuis are brown, flaring out slightly at the top with a completely different eco-system on the summit to that in the broccoli-base.

At Canaima (more anon) we disembark and board an even smaller Cessna for the over flight to Salto Angel. We follow the river up, through a canyon of tepui, with strange rock pillars, that look as if they’ve been placed there as sentries by some ancient civilisation. Then the clouds break and there it is, a slender sliver of silver against the brown of the rock. It is not so impressive by itself, but in its context, high above a hazy, green-brown landscape cut with mirrors of water and guarded by the tepui, it is very beautiful and I feel suitably small and insignificant.

It is even more crazy as you crane your neck to see it from below.

Back in Canaima, Miguel our guide takes us to the four salto/ waterfalls that pour millions of gallons of water into Canaima lake every day. This landscape provided the setting for films such as The Mission, Last of the Mohicans and Jurassic Park (var.), so it looks a little familiar. We board a native dug out and head over to Salto Sappo (frog waterfall), which we are going to climb. After a hot, slippery climb through an ant-infested forest (I have an ant thing, I’m not going into it here. Those who care were informed by email.), we arrive at a beach near the base. I swim out to the ferocious cascade. The water is a deep brown, dyed by the tannin in the leaves that are blown into the lake every autumn. My pale skin takes on an eerie orange glow under the water.

Up the rocks and then in behind the falls. It is like being in an enormous orange car wash. Exhilirating. A Dutch couple in our group ask me to take photos of them. Their poses are increasingly erotic. Our guide looks on, bemused. He is an Indian. He tells me his parents don’t speak Spanish. I ask him how they knew to call him Miguel then. Turns out his real name is Marida, his guide name is Miguel. Turns out that Indians aren’t allowed speak their own language in school. They have to speak Spanish. Hmmmmmmmmm.

Day 21

Back up to the beach to another resort that was so boring I have absolutely no record of it in my journal and cannot now remember what it was called. We kayaked around an island shaped like a cat that smelt of seagull guano. Then we went to a cave that stank of other type of bird guano. During our three hour tour of the cave, I mention to the guide that I am scared of rats. He spends most of the time trying to get them to run over my bare feet by scaring them with his torch. I am WELL ANNOYED. I don’t care that the cave looks like the Mines of Moria.


Back in La Casita, we have the HONESTY system for Christmas. Three days of drunken mayhem ensue. Eventually, the trucks leave for Brazil and I am left on my own with Pieter et al for a week. A bit of peace. A lot of iPod. ‘Twas a great trip.

(see guys, I left out all the 'interesting' bits - aren't I good!)