Merida is a strangely enchanting city, with beatifull Andean mountains surrounding it 

and a student population of 45.000 out a total of 300.000. Johan and I ended up being stuck in this place for about two weeks, a record for me while traveling, but nothing compared our German guide Stefan who has been stuck here for 17 years.

We are now offical graduates of la Universidad de los Andes here in Merida, after completing 10 hours of classes with a brilliant teacher called Blanca.

Unfortunately, it turned out that Spanish was not magically gonna just pop in to my head after a few weeks of traveling as I thought, its got insanely complicated grammar, with verbs coming in 24 different versions depending on tense and the person you are talking to. Ive therefore abandoned my dream of becoming fluent in Spanish while Im here, and will settle for my now very broken but quite functional travel Spanish which is getting better by the day.

Venezuela is a country in turmoil at the moment, the people now daily exercising the popular South American pastime of rioting and demonstrating. The road to our University has been blocked by police every day, while the students have been burning tires in the street and rioting.

It also turns out that all the undeserving negative press normally attributed to Colombia, regarding safety, is probably more accurate for describing Venezuela. The cities are really quite unsafe, and the local muggers here in Merida – arguabely the safest city in the country – succeded on their second attempt and got a hold of my Dutch travel companions credit cards one night.

While in the city, we organized a 4 day trip to Los Llanos through our "home" Posada Alemania – a friendly establishment with a great host family, a wonderfull court yard and lots of interesting people who are stuck here in the city for various amounts of time.

Los Llanos is a vast savanna and wetlands area compromising about a third of Venezuela and containing some of the most diverse wildlife in the world.

Our first activity on the trip would be either rafting or tubing depending on the state of the river. Our guide had to make a choice between a boring rafting trip or a near fatal tubing trip, and chose the latter. I had done tubing once before, in Laos. A pleasant experience where you drifted slowly down the river getting more and more drunk. Well, the only similarity with what experience was the tube, and half the time I would end up not even beeing able to hold on to that. It started out well, but after about 5 minutes our guide Stefan – a rum-loving german with more than a few Steve Irwin similarities – told us that a rapid was coming up.

It would turn out to be damn near a waterfall with a 3,5 out of 5 rating on the rapids scale and lasting for about 30 painfull seconds. I lost my tube instantly and ended up slamming my "pelvic region" into some big rocks. After the rapids were traversed I counted that everything was still in place and said a little prair of thanks that the pain I was feeling was not 3 centimeters lower and that there was still a chance that more branches might some day be added to the Moekkelgjerd family tree. 3 out of 6 of our group couldnt finish the 10 km, and about half way our guide – who slammed his face on a rock and was bleeding from his chin – led us through a huge grassy field I was later told contained one of the wolrds most poisonous snakes!

The next day we arrived in Los Llanos at a tiny finca in the middle of nowhere. The garden contained a strange mixture of animal species including two 4 month old caipiberas (the worlds biggest rodent at 60 kiloes),

wild turkey, cows, horses, dogs, cats, parots, geese, ducks, chickens and the biggest cockroach ive ever seen at around 15 cm!

We went on a safari, a night safari and an amazing river trip

and saw countless species of birds, the worlds biggest otter, turtles, hundreds of kaimans,

iguanas,

lots of caipaberas, anaconda,

piranha, dear and pink-bellied dolphins.

Our guide was jumping into the river and chasing kaimans but never succeded in catching one. He did however catch a 3 meter long anaconda!

And in the same area we had the pleasure of standing in knee deep leech infested waters fishing for piranhas, who were swimming in these same waters. I caught one  

and can now add piranha to my odd assortment of fish caught traveling that already counted an 8 cm long blow fish and a 2 meter + sailfish.

The trip also included horse back riding, something Ive never been really enthusiastic about. Wow, was that a mistake. I got the Zorro Blanca – the white fox – and to my surpirse horse riding was not difficult at all and at the end of 4 hours we were gallopping across fields chasing cows feeling like cowboys.

On our last night in the Llanos there was a huge party at our finca. A girl was turning 15 which in Venezuela is a huge social event where she is introduced to society. A cow was slaughetered before our eyes

and the whole animal stuck in a grill. More than a hundred people turned up dancing to joropo music – a local latin style of music played with a harp. A ten year old girl was the star of the dance floor and in turn invited several of us to join her, and amaizingly she led us so it looked like we had some idea about what we were doing.

On our way back to Merida

we visited a stone curch built entirely by a man in his eighties

and a condor station where we saw these enormous birds that are now extinct in the Venezuelan Andes.

Merida also boasts the Heladeria with the most flavours of ice cream in the world – a Guiness entry. I enjoyed a cheese flavoured one,

but passed on the meat and spaghetti flavours.

My last day in Merida I went on a mountainbiking trip in the surrounding mountains. Quite possibly the most exhausting day in my life.

Our goal was a hot springs located on a mountain top at the end of a road with an elevation of more than 50 degrees!

Lying in 37 degree waters with an ice cold beer was amazing.

Little did I know that we still had another mountain to climb and this time we even had to carry our bikes! We also encountered some local thugs on our way driving on scooters, and at the "suggestion" of our guide we had to escape off road to escape a mugging or worse.

So my time in Venezuela was over. It was an interesting time to see it, and it will be even more interesting to see how the country will develop in the future under the largely unpopular president. I am not a big fan myself really, as he has chosen to fix the exchange rate at nearly half the real value of what you can get on the black market IF you have cash dollars, which I didnt and subsequently this made Venezuela nearly twice as expensive as it should have been. On to Colombia…

Tips oss hvis dette innlegget er upassende