Land of Chavez Day 1

Immigration was a breeze, its nice being on the last flight of the day and having border patrol who just want to get the hell out of there.

Waiting for me after customs was Louis, Nelson's driver, he was right there waiting, well not exactly, he was expecting immigration to gake approx 30 minutes and was wandering around, but no biggie, i just spotted the guy with the sign wiht my name on it and bada bing we were out. Suprisingly though, only 7 of the probably 50 touts approached me, i think saying nyet really really loud made them back off.

The first impression of Caracas, garbage....it hits you like a ton of bricks when you get out of the airport, it seems as though chavez in his infinite wisdom instead of having garbage collected on routes on specific days has decreed there will be drop points for garbage, so now all throughout the city there are dumpsters overflowing with all kinds of trash that is sitting for a week at a time in some cases, and of course it has to be 80 degrees here year round so heaven forbid the trash doesn't start to stink, and boy does it ever.

the ride into caracas took about 30 minutes, maybe less, i wasn't counting i was too busy learning that 34 litres of gas (8.5 gallons) costs a dollar!, yeah a dollar, and a litre of water cost, you guessed it a dollar. With the amount of tinting on the window, the lights of the barrio's in the mountains had a really neat glow, almost like a greenish moss covering the hillside and glowing, obviously it was much different once i rolled down the window and in the day...

Once arriving at nelson's place, yeah thats the name of where i stayed, its a guy named nelson who basically has a rental apartment, as well as a couple bedrooms in his place that he rents to weary travelers, nice room, clean, and he's a super swell guy. When i got to nelson's we did the obligatory hello's, he showed me to my room, handed me a set of keys (more keys than i care back in the states), exchanged a 100 bucks (which he gave me to the tourist rate for), and we talked for damn near close to an hour about politics, venezuela, his life back in Kansas city, did i forget to mention he speaks better english than me, and was raised in the bread basket of america.

I took advantage of the late hour getting to bed and the comfortable arrangements and slept in till 9 am. once i got up it was the mission to continue the search for the ticket to Guyana, after finding that it was getting extremely difficult, this is with both Nelson and I searching, i took nelson's advice and turned it over to his travel agent, now the waiting begins, but on the plus side, i can now use his "tourist" discount to get a cheaper rate on the ticket. I'm certainly crossing my finders to see what happens. Of course if this works out to my liking, i'll have a 10 hour layover in trinidad and tobago, which will be so hard having to wait on the beach for 8 hours......sucks to be me doesn't it!