Our Journal

August 12, Santa Elena, Venezuela

We had done our homework. We had asked everyone we could about good stopping points on route to the Gran Savana and all voices gave the same advice… Stay at kilometer 88 where they have hotels for tourists and it serves as the springboard for trips into the Gran Savana.  Wanting to shorten our riding day I even asked about another pueblo, El Dorado, but got the same response, “Nothing to see there, go to Km 88.”  So we set out wondering what tourism in Venezuela would look like.  Unlike the road along the Orinoco, this highway was the only vein to the Gran Savana and Brazil.  It was a great day for riding, sun out, light traffic and the pueblos looked happier than what we had seen.  At a roadside stop families were out for Sunday lunch, a kid explained how far everything would be along our route, and also advised kilometer 88.  Now I was kind of excited, a relaxing night before driving on into the savanna.  We hit more great road cutting through forest growth overhead.  Having started a little late, we had just enough daylight to get there.  Rain started so we suited up and pushed on counting the kilometers to what in my mind had become a tourist resort with cabins in the woods far enough off the highway to sleep well.  I was even looking forward to a morning hike through the forest.  Kilometer 85, 86, 87…

Oh, shit!  It was a mining town, rough looking, chaotic, mud streets, guys with eyes drooling over the bikes, rainy, cold… no morning hikes.  We rolled through looking for a hotel with an enclosed area for the bikes away from all the congestion.  It was really two little towns together and the second part looked a little better.  A group of women eating on the street held their hands up and screamed at us as we rolled past.  We stopped at the end of the pueblo at a gas station.  The 12 year old kid pumping gas said, “Our Chavez doesn’t like you gringos too much.”  I replied, “No, but he likes selling us oil.”  He pointed us over to the hotel across the street which had no vacancies and no smiles.  Another hotel down the street had music blaring at illegal decibels by North American standards.  I asked the old woman at the office for a room and she looked at me bewildered and asked, “This music doesn’t bother you?”  She slowly convinced us not to stay so we moved on to Chalet Raymond.  Having never stayed in a chalet my curiosity was piqued.  We seemed to have pissed off the guy in the office by walking in but he agreed to let us stay in his chalet.  He didn’t have the 10,000 bs. change so we drank all the beers and Gatorades in the fridge and called it even. 

Showered and dry we walked into the congestion looking for chicken.  Pringles, Duracell, Gatorade and Gillette razors line the walls of the shop, but a clean looking decent meal seemed hard to come by.  We found one restaurant where two gold metal lions stood in the entrance, probably harkening back to a past gold boom.  We ordered chicken and had just sat down when a drunk Indian walked up to Matt and started speaking broken English and asked if we were German.  “Naturlich,” I said, “Deine Mutter ist grosser als ein Flugzeug,” and continued babbling nonsense until he seemed to get that we weren’t going to let him sit down with us and wandered off to another table.  We evaded the drunk but then had to eat in silence muttering “gut” and “ja” every few minutes.  Back at the Chalet, wondering what we had done wrong we referenced the Lonely Planet and read “…a particularly dirty and busy ramshackle town supporting what is today one of Venezuela’s gold-rush areas… with prospectors much in evidence and noisy bars crammed with tipsy miners.”  You want tourist information, I guess you don’t ask the Venezuelans.

The next morning we were out early and the road immediately began winding upwards.  We had our first tourist sighting, a van of Germermans taking pictures of a giant rock.  Snaking further up the road my bike died when I put it in gear.  Luckily the same thing had happened in Caracas once and Ramiro (the box maker) had shown me it was a faulty wire connected to the battery.  Rain started and I suddenly realized my bottom was soaked from a hole in the crotch of my rain pants.  The climb continued and the temperature dropped.  By the highest point we were getting numb hands and crouched around the engine for warmth.  Unfortunately any views were cloud covered.  At the highest point there was a police check point.  We were averaging five a day at this point.  Colombia with all its civil war doesn't have this much police presence.  But other than occasionally asking us to open our bags and one guy putting my helmet on, they just make conversation and let us go.  After 30 minutes the road began a downward slope into the Gran Savana, big country that put Matt back in Wyoming where someone had said, “There’s a beauty to the roughness.”  This area is all part of Canaima Park and one could spend some time exploring all the lookouts and waterfalls, but since the rain continued we drove on gawking at the tepuis, big mesa-looking formations, and the waterfalls that appear down their sides in the rain. 

When the rain let up we stopped at a waterfall lookout where tour groups collect.  Rocks allowed us to walk right up behind the top of the waterfall.  Rain started again so we went in the café to try and get lunch.  Ordering was complicated, not because of the selection, chicken only, but that you had to chase the young kid around who would take bits and parts of your order and then run away without ever looking at you.  Rain poured and a couple of tour groups entered bringing the noise level up as everyone had to scream to compete with the pounding on the tin roof.  We wondered if waiting around for lunch was worth it and decided that if one tour got served before us we would exit.  We did get fed first and the rain let up right as we paid.  The rest of our day was in motorcycle heaven through amazing landscape and good empty roads that allowed us to open up the bikes a little before arriving in
Santa Elena. 

Santa Elena is clean for a border town and livelier than everything else since Caracas.  The main road goes right past the only two gas stations where cars were lined up for blocks.  Brazilians pay three times as much and wait in a separate line.  We found a hotel with protected parking, a rank smelling bathroom, but clean and safe enough.  We decided on a Chinese food restaurant where the Brazilian waitress’ eyes rolled and darted around the room as she took our order.  As she was bringing us drinks she literally stopped mid-step and paused to watch TV for a few moments before remembering what she had been doing.  I had forgotten that eating Chinese food was against my travel rules, something I contemplated for some time in “The Thinker” position the next day.  We debated crossing the border or detouring to Pauji, a hippie pueblo that had been recommended to us, but went to sleep undecided.  Next morning I set out for a jog at dawn, the only time to find tranquility in a latin town.  I found a trail leading up to a ridge and got a bird’s eye view of the town with cloud mists still covering parts of it.  Back in town the line for gas was starting.  We decided to give Pauji a chance since it was supposedly “the most beautiful drive in Venezuela”.  We left the boxes with the hotel and drove over to see about getting gas. 

No one seems to consider Motorcycles as real vehicles and we are allowed to break all kinds of rules.  We went straight to an attendant and he pointed us over to a certain pump and told us to cut the line.  Then someone noticed we had Venezuelan plates and moved us to the cheaper Venezuelan pump right behind a VW van with anti-gringo propaganda written on the back.  The military blocked up everything by cutting in front of everyone to fill up some giant tubs.  We got yelled at a couple of times by soldiers to get out of the Venezuelan line but they all backed off when they saw the Venezuelan plates.  A guard ended up telling us to cut right behind them in front of anti-gringo van and the driver gave us the thumbs up.  They’re only motorcycles after all.  After a moment of guilt about only waiting only 40 minutes for gas compared to the hours cars have to wait,  we were driving out to the Pauji turnoff. 

We had asked about the road and everyone said that it was only 80 kilometers down a part asphalt, part dirt road.  The first 30 km was perfect and then we hit the dirt.  We had no idea that we would spend the next four hours, much of it in first gear balancing through road and the absence of.  Many parts of the road had washed away or giant ditches had developed from the drain off.  I began wondering if it was all some giant joke on the gringos.  Look up “Pauji” in Pemon and it probably says “sucker gringo”.  On a smaller bike this road would have been a dream.  On a 750, it is stress and concentration wondering if you might get to a part impossible to pass.  At one steep incline Matt took a spill, mainly due to miscommunication when I cut him off.  Slanted bridges seemed to come from the wacky house at a theme park and we had to stop at most and walk them before riding the bikes over.

We came to a café run by an Israeli family who made fresh juices, homemade honey, and some weird hot sauce with a yucca base.  Nearby was a waterfall, a short hike into some forest where I couldn’t believe the temperature drop, a natural cooling system.  We stood there in silence watching the waterfall mist and vegetation everywhere and I was just about to go for a swim in my underwear until another group of tourists arrived.  We hiked back out into the heat and the contrast of the full focus concentration of managing the bike through the  puzzle of rocks, mud, and washout.  We only had 10 km more over a couple of slanted bridges and then there we were in Pauji.  A little store, a woman asleep in a hammock at an information hut, and a few closed tourist hotels.  Apparently, tourism has been greatly challenged by the bad economy, the world tourism threat, and a president lambasting gringos daily.  There was one hotel where we found the owner eating in the kitchen, giant smile showing her several missing teeth.  She exploded in laughs and told us to sit down where we stayed for the next hour happy with our destination.  This is what most backpackers seek, an isolated hippie/indian pueblo with hiking, waterfalls, camping, hotels, etc...  Expecting a short ride we had not eaten breakfast or lunch and were famished but no one seemed too ready to prepare food so we waited until night.

Mid-morning we took the advice of the owner to hike out to the Abyss.  Without water and Matt in flip flops we again had no idea what we were getting into.  The hike went to a ridge overlooking untouched forest and mountains that extend into Brazil, through dense forest and up to straight drop offs.  To get to the furthest lookout and back took us five hours including getting off the trail a couple of times.  Back at the hotel we had missed lunch and taking a nap proved impossible as a tour group right outside our cabin blared bad 80’s music.  We escaped into town to see the school (out for vacation), inclined dirt soccer field, and the local store where the locals had gathered to watch TV.  The owner had posted a giant “NO!” indicating that even here they were consumed by the referendum debate.  The agenda for the upcoming town meeting was also posted and “road condition” was last on the list, probably always that way.  Back at the hotel we asked for dinner and sat for an hour before any preparations got started.  The entire tour group got served before we saw anything on our table.  Our meat was inedible it was so tough so it went they way of the skin and bones dog under the table who seemed to swallow it whole.

At dawn the next morning we packed and got out of there and stifled the urge to do doughnuts around the cabins in revenge for all the Chicago and Foreigner from the day before.  We had breakfast at the Israeli hippie café and made it back to Santa Elena in only three hours.  The road on the return was surprisingly easy the second time.  Santa Elena was popping, boiling over with a Chavista caravan through town.  In any other country I may have felt threatened but this seemed more like a lot of uneducated folk in a parade making as much noise as possible.  Chavez is no poster boy for democracy and he has driven the economy into the ground but he has a lot of the poor mesmerized.  He’s on TV daily for hours at a time rambling on in a Chavez stream of consciousness.  You can catch a Chavez history lesson in the morning and him telling a tale about his life in the evening.  He’ll break into song.  He’ll tirade against the U.S. and calls George Bush the armpit of the world.  He glorifies Castro and imports Cuban doctors and teachers giving them Venezuelan citizenship.  Hundreds of thousands of Colombians were nationalized probably to help in the voting.  12 years ago he was involved in a military coup, but he is now a legally elected president wreaking havoc.  Most ironic is that most Venezuelans voted for him.  He definitely connects with a large segment of the population.  Anyway, this parade was just one more reminder to get across the border before August 15, just in case.

Thanks for all the email and messages on the guestbook.  The encouraging words definitely help us along.

Un abrazo, Chris

contact us:  chris@isabm.com   matt@isabm.com