Puerto Ordaz (August 8-9, 2006)

:: August 8 ::

We headed back to the bus station this morning and were happy we had bought our tickets the night before because there was a huge line of people waiting to buy tickets. We ate arepas at the bus station for breakfast and waited for our bus. It didn’t end up leaving until 10:45, and we settled in for the long drive to Puerto Ordaz (9 – 10 hours). Usually on long-distance bus rides, often overnight ones, I bring my sleeping bag on the bus with me because it gets cold at night. I thought that since we were travelling during the day, in such a hot place, that I wouldn’t need my sleeping bag. Boy was I wrong – the bus was absolutely freezing! Apparently this is a common occurrence here, because the locals brought winter jackets and toques on the bus with them. Someone should tell the bus driver that the A/C has a low or medium setting rather than just full-blast. When we got off the bus at our lunch stop my glasses fogged up completely, like coming inside from a winter day. Despite the discomfort, it was nice to do the trip during the day so we could see the Venezuelan countryside. Everywhere was green and lush, and we drove along the coastline for a little while with good views of the ocean. It is the rainy season here right now, so it was cloudy and rainy for most of the drive. We had one particularly bad downpour just after it got dark and a fantastic lightening storm off in the distance at dusk. We also passed quite a few oil refineries – the reason Venezuela is so well developed and rich is thanks to their large oil reserves.

Puerto Ordaz is a modern city, and as we drove into it we were greeted by a huge new shopping mall the likes of which we have not seen since we left North America. The city is mainly an industrial centre and is currently Venezuela’s fastest growing city. Our friends from home, John and Sussy, recommended that we come here to look for tours to Angel Falls. This is John’s home town, and we were looking forward to visiting it. We arrived late at night again (9:00pm) and again had trouble finding a place to stay. The taxi driver took us to four different places before we found one with a room available. It wasn’t a great room, and didn’t have any hot water, but it was better than nothing so we took it.

:: August 9 ::

This morning we discovered that the hotel did have a room available for tonight as well (last night they told us they only had a room for us for one night), and this was a bit of good news since it meant that we didn’t have to search for another hotel. We left the hotel in search of somewhere to eat breakfast, but all of the restaurants in our area were closed. We found some stalls that sold arepas, but after eating them for breakfast and lunch yesterday we didn’t feel like eating them again today. We did find an internet place so got caught up on some emails and looked online for tours to Angel Falls that left from Puerto Ordaz, as well as travel agents in the city. We got some addresses for some travel agents and set out in search of the. First we stopped at a bank machine to take out some money, but it wouldn’t work for some reason and kept cancelling our transactions. We walked for quite a ways to get to another bank that was the same as the one at the airport that had worked for us. We managed to get some money out, but not as much as we wanted because it told us we had insufficient funds. This worried us because there should have been enough money in the account.

By this time we were getting very hungry so we went in search of a restaurant that was in our guidebook. We found it but it was closed, so we went to a pizza place in a little mall. There was also an internet place in the mall so we checked our bank account to discover that around $450 had been withdrawn that we never received. We called the bank to see if they could find out where the money was taken from (perhaps Lincoln’s lost bank card in Quito, or was it from the cancelled bank machine transactions here in Puerto Ordaz), but they said they couldn’t tell where the money was withdrawn from, just a “shared ABM”. The lady said that if the money didn’t get put back in, we could ask for an official investigation to be done when we get back to Ottawa. That didn’t help us much now. I initiated a transfer to move some money from our savings account into the chequing account, but it would take two or three days to go through. We had enough money to get us through the day, but would definitely need more for tomorrow. Luckily we had a little bit of US cash left over from Ecuador that we could try to change.

This little mall with the pizza place also had a travel agency, but they were closed for the usual siesta between noon and 2:00. We killed time at the internet café until they opened again. We asked about tours to Canaima and Angel Falls, and the travel agent said she would look into it and we should come back in an hour to see what she found for us. We wandered around some more, went back to our hotel to relax for a few minutes, and when we went back to see her we were completely shocked at the prices she gave us. We were expecting in between $250 and $300 per person for a 3-day, 2-night tour that included airfare, meals, and accommodations. She told us the best she could do for us was over $2000. Yikes! We made a quick retreat and told her we couldn’t afford that! We decided that we would go to Ciudad Bolivar tomorrow, 1 ½ hrs away, to look into tours from there, which is what is recommended in our guide book.

Our next task for the day was to find some toothpaste and a large bottle of water. Normally there are pharmacies all over the place, but because we actually needed one at the moment, there were none to be found anywhere. We walked around for well over an hour (did we mention that it is really, really hot here?) until we finally found one, which incidentally turned out to be just a couple of blocks from our hotel. We still couldn’t find anywhere to buy a large bottle of water though. Small bottles, yes, but we needed a big one to get us through the night. Eventually we gave up and went back to our hotel. We asked at the front desk where we could buy a big bottle of water and they guy said – “at the liquor store on the corner, they sell everything there”. Of course! Why didn’t we think to look in the liquor stores?!

By this time it was around 6pm and we were tired from walking around in the heat all day. We stayed in our hotel room, had cold showers, watched tv and played cards for the rest of the night. Sorry John & Sussy, we feel bad that we didn’t get to see the beautiful parks in Puerto Ordaz, or the cool dam that you told us about. We were anxious to get on a tour to Canaima so we decided to head to Ciudad Bolivar tomorrow.