When we arrived in Coro on Tuesday night, we had some trouble finding a room as the top recommended hostel was closed for good and the second recommended one was full. We ended up staying in a fairly expensive hotel, but it had air conditioning so we slept well. Wednesday morning I moved to a really nice hostel and my friends moved to a more expensive one down the street. My hostel is awesome, there are a bunch of young people staying there from all over the world. It is an old house with two palm-filled courtyards and hammocks everywhere. So relaxing and fun! The owners are really nice too and they both speak Spanish, English and French. Wednesday was really really hot. When I was saying that my hike in Caracas was hot, it was really no comparison to how hot it is here in Coro. It makes it a bit hard to do much during the day, but at least there is always a breeze and it is not humid. Wednesday morning, I just walked around the center of Coro for a bit, visiting the cathedral and the art museum. Coro was a Spanish colonial town and was the capital of Venezuela at one time. It is the prettiest town I have seen yet. The streets in the center are all cobblestone and the buildings are all painted sugary bright colors. The streets and squares are lined with trees and there is a shaded pedestrian boulevard connecting some of the squares and the cathedral. The cathedral is a perfect example of Spanish colonial architecture- white washed on the exterior with a red tile roof and with dark chadeliers and white washed pillars on the inside. The ceiling is open beams of some sort of dark wood. It looks like a church from Zorro or something. It also has the characterist enormous gold altar with spires and arches and what not.
On Wednesday evening, I met a really nice Canadian-Italian couple at the hostel and we talked and drank beers on the roof terrace of our hostel, swinging in hammocks and enjoying the evening breeze. They are really fun and friendly.
Yesterday morning the Canadian-Italian and Venezuelan-Austrian couples and myself hired a car to take us to the Sierra San Luis, some mountains outside of Coro. Ha this car we hired was incredible. It must have been from the 60s or 70s and had all the gauges on the side panel of the driver´s door. We discovered also that instead of pushing on the center of the steering wheel to honk his horn, the driver had to reach up by his head and push a button to honk. The dashboard was covered in red shag carpet and there was a fire extinguisher strapped to the rear right door. It got us to the mountains though. The area immediately around Coro is really dry, but as we went up it got greener and greener until it was a jungle. There were valleys and canyons and lakes and streams on the way up and huge parts of the road had slid down in places and just never replaced (you could also get one car through at a time in these sections though). Around one corner there was a sign that translated to "The asphalt stands up". I was really confused until we went around the corner and the asphalt was actually lifted about 5-6 feet on one side of the road. Apparently there is an underground river that shifter the soil. I loved tha sign though. We got out at the trail for a waterfall after about an hour ride from Coro. The waterfall was really pretty with some tiers and lots of jungle plants all around. It was probably 70 degrees in the shade too, which was such an improvement over Coro. We ran into a guy from our hostel up there and he went for a swim in the creek, which looked nice, but we had to keep walking. We had this idea that we could walk to the next town where the taxi driver would pick us up a few hours later. Well, the Venezuelan-Austrian couple are in really bad shape so that walking adventure lasted about 40 minutes. We did see a lot of bright green lizards and a little hummingbird though. Yra (Venezuelan) talked some guys into giving us a ride to Cabure, the town we needed to get to. There were two ways to Cabure and the guys only wanted to drop us off at the junction for the town from the highway. Well, she didn´t listen to us and had them drop us off at the farthest junction which meant we had to gain about 2000ft and walk about 6 miles. Not happening. We managed to hitch again and rode to Cabure in the bed of a guy´s truck. Luckily it was about the newest and nicest truck I have seen in all of Venezuela so far so it was a good ride. The road up to Cabure wound through the forest and to little villages of bright pink, blue and green houses with laundry out to dry on clothes lines and chickens pecking around the front yards. In Cabure we had a great lunch at a little restaurant. I had lamb stewed with tomatoes, spices and potatoes with black beans, cheese, rice and avocado on the side. They also had really good pineapple soda which tasted totally fake but was delicious. From Cabure, we were told we could walk 30 mins to some caves and so after our lunch, we started hiking. After 40 mins of hiking up enormous hills, we came to hostel and rested in the shade. After about 5 mins we heard a car or something coming up the trail/road and around the corner came an old man in a homemade extreme offroad dune buggy. He was the owner of the hostel and invited us in. He had an incredible garden with Hawaiian ginger, birds of paradise flowers, something called emperor´s cane, orchids, bougainvillea, yellow trumpet tree, etc. It was a jungle paradise. He also had a "special tree" which was HUGE. Ela (Italian) stood by it so we could get some scale for out pictures and she looks so tiny in comparison. He also showed us a spider house which was this horribly big tube a spider had carved out in the ground with a cap on it. It was big and luckily we didn´t see the spider. The old man also explained that we had to walk over a huge mountain ridge to get to the caves. We could see the ridge from his hostel and it was really high, so we just turned around.
Our driver picked us up in Cabure and we headed back to Coro. It started raining pretty hard on the way back we didn´t think the car had windshield wipers for awhile, until the driver reached down by his knee and turned a knob to manually work the windshield wipers. Every so often the knob would get stuck so the windshield wiper would stop in the middle of his vision and just sit there for a bit until he got the knob loose again. It was hilarious. Of course there were no wipers for the passenger side.
The driver dropped us off at another national park just on the outside of Coro called Mèdonos. This place is seriously weird. There are trees and houses and then you go up a hill and its all sand dunes as far as you can see to the north and east. The city is right there and then there are dunes. It is like a mini sahara. We stayed there until sunset and then caught a bus back to the center of Coro.
Today I am still in Coro, but am leaving for Merida tonight via night bus at 5:45 where I will probably meet Nick´s friend Victor and hopefully go on a safari to the plains of Los Llanos. Hope all is well at home. Love you. Also, the owner of the internet cafe I am at right now loves the Backstreet Boys and I have been listening to them for the last hour.
