You might ask what are they doing in the most undesirable destination in South America with its crime rate and rampant inflation running at over 700% this year?
The answer is the tallest single drop waterfall in the world. If you Google it there is debate over the fact at this time but Angel falls has been the list top for all of my life and on my Bucket List.
It’s the sort of place I was never going to make a special trip to but as we were in the neighbourhood, so to speak. James and I decided to include it on route to Paramaribo, Suriname for the start of the Great Amazon Adventure.
James and I have be fortunate to visit Niagara Falls, Victoria Falls and Iguazu Falls together on previous trips so this is another dad-son bonding experience for us.
Disembarking the plane in Venezuela was a reminder that we are visiting the tropics and the heat and humidity was a bit of a shock.
The airport hall was filled with people trying to change money and wanting to drive you somewhere all just trying to make a living in a very tough economy. We had all our transfers arrange for the enter time here just to make it simple we hoped.
Things didn’t start that well we stood under the big screen as per the email waiting for Vicente our driver for 20 odd minutes wondering where he was. I pulled a print out of the voucher out to look for a contact detail and the local standing 3 feet from us says I’m Vicente from Flight and Trip the name on the letterhead. After he called his boss and we spoke on the phone it was confirmed that he was our man. To this day I still can’t work out why he was waiting in the airport for Max and James Stephenson holding a sign with the name Marion Stubbs on it and the logo from some random company.
All in all we got taken to a comfortable hotel with air-con to wait for our next flight.
Vicente arranged some local money for us, which he returned just before dinner. We changed $100 dollars never expecting a shopping bag full of it back. The street exchange is 800 to 1 and with the rampant inflation the largest note is a 50. 80,000 in 50’s is a big stack of money.
You can use international credit cards here as the office rate is 6.9 to 1 but things are priced on the street rate. Paying with a credit card would have mean we had a $5000 dinner.
