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We didn't really get off to the best start. We arrived in Caracas at about midnight with vague Spanish at best. There was a worker at the airport who spoke English and was more than happy to help us find a place to stay. He gave us a ride in his own car through the worst neighborhood I had ever seen to a real dive of a hotel. It only cost us 70 dollars for the cab and the room. We knew we were getting ripped off but we didn't really know how much. We didn't really have too much of a choice. The actual city of Caracas was 30 miles away and there were no buses. That, and we were dead tired from the 35 hour bus ride from Columbus to Miami. We got our much needed sleep and went to Caracas in the morning. We stayed in Sabana Grande, a commercial area in the city. We walked around for a day and tried to figure out what we wanted to do. There were almost no people who spoke English and it was just a big huge dirty city so we decided to leave and go to La Paz. There was a big festival that was happening in a week there. We couldn't go by bus because below us was the part of the Amazon with the worst Malaria concentration, and to the west was Colombia. Our only source of info was our Lonely Planet book and it said that night buses get frequently stopped and robbed. Of course, we were carrying junk that was way to expensive to travel through safely, so we opted for a flight. The student travel agency closed early on friday so we had to wait out the weekend to leave. We walked around the city a lot and went to a little German town in the mountains about 100 miles away. We had to sit on a bus in the sweltering heat for about 5 hours on the one tiny little road. It was interesting but not enough to deserve the bus ride. We left monday morning to Lima, left from Lima to to Puno, and took a bus from Puno to La Paz the next day. 
The view from our hotel over Sabana Grande
Colonial Tovar
The incredible pollution on the tunnel between Caracas and the airport
Caracas |
