Mérida

So I made it to Mérida, my first stop in Venezuela. Mérida is situated near the northern tip of the Andes at an altitude of 1600m, and the cool of the mountains was a welcome relief from the heat and humidity of the Caribbean coast, which I found unbearable. Mérida is also the adventure sports capital of Venezuela, and it's a good place to try such activities as canyoning, paragliding and white-water rafting.

After the exhausting journey from Colombia I decided that Friday should be a rest day, so pretty much all I did in the afternoon was have a quick look around town and book a paragliding trip for the following day. I also had a look at Mérida's famous teleférico, which is the highest cable car system in the world (it peaks at a height of 4675m). It also happens to be the highest cable car system in the world that doesn't work, because it hasn't worked for over two years.

Another thing I did was discover how the currency exchange system works here in Venezuela. The Venezuelan government enforces currency controls that mean that the Venezuelan bolívar is currently pegged at a rate of 2.60 to the US dollar, so for any official currency exchange transaction such as withdrawing bolívares from an ATM, paying by credit card or changing money in a bank, 2.60 is the exchange rate you'll get. That rate might have been realistic a decade ago, but Venezuela's economy has gone down the tubes since then, and today a more appropriate rate would be between 7 and 8 bolívares to the US dollar. Fortunately there exists an active (although illegal) black market in which it's possible to exchange US dollars or euros for bolívares at a fairer rate.

I knew about this situation before I arrived in Venezuela, so I brought a large supply of US dollars with me from Colombia (which obviously isn't ideal for security reasons, but I didn't have a lot of choice). I wasn't sure how the black market operated, but I soon found out, because the guy working at the paragliding agency offered me a good rate if I exchanged a large number of dollars. He didn't have enough bolívares on him, so after making a couple of discreet phone calls we went round to a nearby bathroom store that was owned by a friend of his, and he was able to sort me out with the necessary cash. An added bonus from this transaction was that I was able to fix the broken shoulder strap on my small rucksack, which had been bothering me for weeks, using the elastic band that was wrapped around the large wad of notes.

If you're like me (which you're probably not), you may be wondering why you can't exchange US dollars for bolívares at the black market rate, then change them back to US dollars at the official rate, thus making a guaranteed profit of about 200% (e.g. $100 buys about 750Bs at the black market rate, which buys about $300 at the official rate). Well the answer to that is that no bank or 'casa de cambio' will buy back bolívares, which I suppose is a public admission that the official exchange rate is nonsense.

Another oddity about Venezuela is that petrol is almost free - I'm told that you can fill your car's entire tank for less than 50p. A consequence of this is that most people couldn't care less about fuel efficiency, so they tend to buy huge, gas-guzzling, American cars, and drive like maniacs. Below is a picture of a typical Venezuelan car.

Saturday was my birthday, so for the sake of doing something a bit special I went paragliding in the afternoon. The starting point for the flight was the top of a hill called Las González, which is about an hour's drive from Mérida. It was raining when we left Mérida, and the rain got even heavier as we approached Las González, so I was expecting the paragliding to be cancelled. However, just a few minutes before we arrived, the rain stopped and blue sky appeared, so in the end the conditions were pretty good.

Having never done paragliding before, I obviously did a tandem flight. My pilot didn't seem to be much more than 18 years old, but he appeared to know what he was doing, so that was OK. Here is where we set off from, and in my July 2010 album there are several more photos that I took while airborne, starting with the one below. I think we were in the air for about 25 minutes, after which we had a soft landing.

I'd hoped to do a two-day white-water rafting trip starting on Sunday, but even though it's supposedly the high season for tourism in Venezuela, none of the tour agencies had a trip leaving until Tuesday, and I didn't want to hang around in Mérida that long. Instead I enquired about renting a mountain bike and going for a ride in the mountains, but then I had an attack of laziness when I woke up on Sunday morning, and I decided I didn't really feel like doing that. So I put plan C into action, which was to go on a long walk around town (even though there's not really a lot to see in the town itself).

One of the places I went to was the bus station, where I discovered that there was no direct bus to Ciudad Bolívar today (Monday), which was when I'd planned to leave. Having read a few people's accounts on the web about what a nightmare it is to get from Mérida to Ciudad Bolívar if you have to change buses, I decided that the best option was to catch the direct bus on Sunday evening at 7pm. It meant that I left Mérida a bit earlier than planned, but that's how I find myself now Ciudad Bolívar on Monday evening after a 24-hour bus journey, which wasn't a lot of fun. I plan to spend tomorrow trying to find a place on a tour to Angel Falls.