Traveling Adventures Hi! Welcome to my travel journal. I created this so friends and family can keep track of me on my adventures. I'll update this when I can.

As you may have guessed from the title of this entry, I saw river dolphins.  It was incredible and seriously one of the coolest things I've ever seen.  I talk about this more later...  Also, this is a really long entry.  Sorry if you get discouraged.

I arrived in Merida on Saturday morning after the coldest bus ride ever.  They use so much air-conditioning that I actually didn't sleep at all (it was an overnight bus so that is bad).  There was a really nice old man sitting next to me that brought a towel as a blanket and he felt sorry for me and after some broken Spanish and gesturing, I figured out he was trying to share the towel with me.  What a nice guy, although I was still too cold to sleep.  A French guy from the hostel in Coro was also traveling to Merida and he spoke fluent Spanish so he helped me out alot.  When I got to the bus station, I got off the bus, looked up and saw Pico Bolivar with a glacier on it peeking out above the foothills surrounding the city.  Yeah mountains!!!!!  Merida is very beautiful and is bordered by the Sierra Nevada on one side and the Sierra de la Culata on the other and has two rivers flowing through it, it is also really high, about 5000 ft in elevation!  It is much cooler here and very green.  There is a really big unviersity here so the population is very young and much more active than the rest of Venezuela I've seen.  Montana Nick's friend Victor picked me up at the station and he lives right across the street. 

After eating some breakfast, Victor drove me around town and showed me where he has classes, etc.  We went to a little store that sold a snack/dessert called Tizana which is a million different fruits chopped into little pieces and then covered in fruit punch.  It was so good!  Really cheap and really good fruit. We also went to a three-leveled craft market close to Victor's apartment and had a really tasty Venezuelan style trout lunch.  A little later Victor's nephew Alfredo (it is weird, Victor and Alfredo are close enough in age to be brothers so I get confused easily) and I walked around downtown and went to an ice cream place that has over 900 different flavors, although not all of them are always available.  Some of the flavors were really gross such as salmon or onion, garlic, blackbean and beef.  Eew.  I got peach and banana and it was delicious.

On Sunday morning I left with Guamanchi Expeditions for Los Llanos which is a savana area with big ranches, cowboys (Llaneros) and lots and lots of wildlife.  There was a Belgian couple (Tom and Vi), a Spanish couple (Loli and Paolo), a Venezuelan (Richard), a Argentinian (Martin), and two guides Jorge and Carlos.  This is totally random and really weird, but Jorge lived in Portland for about a year and climbed at the same climbing gyms I climb at when I'm visiting and knew all the cool places we hike and knew all about Portland.  Such a small world (Victor's nephew's friend who also lives here is going to Reed College in Portland in August, so I think Meridians like that part of the country!).  Out of Merida, we drove along the Carretera Transandia up into the Andes.  The foothills were gorgeous with green terraced hills, bright little villages and trees draped in some really cool looking moss.  In the bottom of the valley, the incredibly clear Rio Chama flowed through huge white boulders.  At the top of the pass we stopped at Lake Mucubaji to walk around the highlands a bit and take some pictures.  Most of the higher peaks were shrouded in fog and mist so we couldn't see them, but the lake was really pretty and you could see across the valley to the peaks of the Sierra de la Culata where it was clear.  It was so crazy though because the lake and the pass were at 11,300 something feet in elevation!  I had to walk up a little hill back to the jeep and got really tired. 

After the lake, we headed over the pass to the wet side of the mountains to the south.  The foot hills were the brightest spring green you could imagine and every little draw and canyon had a waterfall, some of which where really really long.  This side of the mountains was really jungley so there were lots of birds and tropical trees and flowers too. 

From the foothills we drove to the city of Barinas and then farther south to the Apure river near the Colombian border.  On the way to our camp we saw Howler monkeys in the trees alongside the road and stopped to watch them for a bit.  Unfortunately, they weren't howling just then, but they were running around on the branches and jumping and doing other monkey things.  Once we entered the Llanos (means plains) we saw hundreds of caiman (little crocodiles) sunning on the banks of little ponds along the road and capybara (bascially oversized marmots that swim and weigh up to 150lbs) grazing in families of up to 40.  We got to camp around dark and met the camp dogs, Scott, a chihuahua something mix, and Corbata.  There were also a number of ducks and chickens running around and a really fat pig that would push the gate open every so often to raid the garden.  We all stayed in a cabin and slept in hammocks- they are so comfortable!  After dinner the guide Jorge needed to take guide Carlos to his house (he is from Los Llanos and his wife and daughter live there) and they asked me to come with them for some reason, but it was really cool.  Carlos' wife was at her family's house and they were having a huge party.  Her family weaves hammocks for a living and there was a huge loom set up out in the front yard with the beginnings of a beautiful hammock.  Carlos' 1 year old daughter Andrea immediately took a liking to me and would cry if anyone else tried to hold her.  She was a really cute little girl and understood English.  On the drive back to the camp, Jorge pulled the jeep over and turned the headlights off and we saw hundreds and hundreds of fireflies!  I have never seen them before and they were everywhere in the fields.  It was gorgeous and Andrea loved them.  She just sat in the back of the jeep and giggled the whole time.  Carlos ended up spending most of the time with his family, so Jorge was out main guide really.

Monday morning I got up bright and early at 5:30 to go for a run at sunrise.  It was really beautiful to watch the sun come up over the plains.  There were flocks of white egrets flying to their feeding ponds and caimans flopping into the water as I ran by.  There were so many little birds singing too.  Scott the chihuahua decided to run with me, although I tried to make him go home.  I probably ran 5-6 miles and he stayed with me the whole time, although he dropped farther and farther back towards the end.  After breakfast we went horseback riding and it was already about 80 degrees by 9 so it was very hot in the full sun.  Martin and Richard took off galloping right away and it looked like fun, so I followed.  I have near ridden at a gallop before and it was really fun.  The three of us had races and galloped all over the place all morning.  There was one section with a lot of water in it so we ended up looking like we went for a swim, but it was really fun.  Loli's horse thought all that looked fun too so it took off after us much to Loli's dismay and all morning we heard her shouting "PARE PARE PARE PARE"  (stop in Spanish) to her horse.  After a bit we came to a little stand of trees and got off our horses to look for some animals sleeping in the shade.  One of our local guides spotted something furry in a palm tree, but we couldn't tell what it was so Tom and I climbed the tree next to it and discovered a pygmy anteater with a baby taking a mid-day nap.  COOL!  They were really fuzzy and the baby was so tiny. 

We came back to camp for lunch and as we were walking to the dining area we saw a huge iguana hanging out a really low branch.  At first there were only 3 of us looking at it and then the rest of the group came up.  The iguana got scared and bailed out of the tree, but the dogs had come to say hello to us so they took off after it and caught.  I ran after them to see what was going to happen and Corbata had the iguana by the throat and Scott had it by the tail and they were playing the most violent game of tug-of-war I've ever seen.  It was actually really brutal.  After awhile the dogs lost interest and dropped the iguana.   We felt really bad because we basically caused its death, but then one of the local guides came up with a rake and nudged it and up it jumped into the nearest tree.  It was just playing dead and ended up being fine.

After lunch a huge thunderstorm rolled in from the east.  The dark clouds looked really pretty against the grass of the llanos.  When the first gusts of the storm reached our camp, mangoes started falling out the of the trees above us like bombs and we had to run for cover.  The storm didn't last for long, but it was really cool.  In the afternoon we went for a jeep ride and anaconda hunt.  To hunt anacondas you basically walk around the edge of a swamp poking at the water lillies with a sharp stick until you feel a snake.  The first one we found was probably about 12-15ft long and you could see it lifting up the lilly pads and it swam away.  Our local guides and Jorge threw themselves in the water, but it got away.  Finally after about 2 hours of poking lillies in the really hot sun, the local guides found a male about 6 feet long.  These things are one solid piece of muscle.  You squeeze their body and it's just all muscle.  They also emit a compound onto their skin when they are captured that seriously smells like a decaying carcass.  It was enough to make most of us gag, but still were touching an anaconda so we didn't really complain a whole lot.

Tuesday morning I again got up early, but was too sore to run from the horseback riding so I just took a walk on the road and stopped and did a bit of yoga.  Scott and Corbata came with me and tried to help me with yoga, which really means they just licked my face alot when I was trying to concentrate.  After breakfast we headed out to the Rio Guaritico for a boat ride.  To get to the main part of the river we had to travel through channels of flooded forest with vines hanging down and sometimes the trees coming all the way together above us.  We saw lots of caiman and capybara up close and so many birds- kingfishers, egrets, herons, skimmers, vultures, osprey, eagles, cormorants, flycatchers, etc.  At one point, one of the local guides started shouting and here goes Jorge diving off the side of the boat into the water.  He comes up with this huge turtle called a mata mata.  It is a really old species and can't even retract its head into its shell.  It was enormous and its skin was suprising soft.  We also saw a bunch of little turtles and accidently ran over some in the boat- you could hear them clunking against the bottom of the boat as we went over, but our guides claimed they would be fine.  We also saw a huge scarlet macaw in a tree a little bit back from the river.  These birds are really big!  I didn't think they were so huge and they make a lot of really obnoxious noise.  Unfortunately, it was too far away to take a picture, but it was really beautiful.  Eventually we came to a wider part of the river and the guides started down a side channel that dead ended.  As we were coming back out of the side channel to the main river, there were a bunch of ripples around our boat all of the sudden and then there were river dolphins all around us.  RIVER DOLPHINS AAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!!!!!!!  It was so cool!  They are so graceful and curious and beautiful.  They are pinkish gray and have a really narrow nose compared to dolphins in the ocean.  They are about the same size as the spinner dolphins I saw in Hawaii, so they aren't small by any means.  The dolphins eat a lot of piranhas, so it is safe to swim around them, so in I went.  Only Tom and Martin and I wanted to swim with them.  Come on people!  Swimming with river dolphins!!!  One time they rose about 4-5 feet from us.  It was really really cool.  I will remember that forever.  After this excitement, we headed back to camp for lunch. 

In the afternoon we went piranha fishing.  The local guides felt really bad about not catching that first big anaconda on Monday so they decided they would catch a caiman.  One of the guys had fashioned a lasso out of old boat rope and as we were fishing we heard this commotion and out comes a lassoed caiman!  All the boys ran over to pull him out of the water and the local guide put a forked stick over his head.  Well Jorge decided he wanted to try to grab the caiman's mouth so as the other guide was holding the caiman down, Jorge sticks his hand out and the caiman freaks out, bites Jorge's finger, SNAPS the rope, lunges for Jorge's shins because he was accidently standing between the caiman and the water.  Jorge lays out in the opposite direction and the caiman retreats back to the water.  Jorge did not come out of the jeep for the rest of the afternoon after that incident.  We didn't catch any more caiman after that, but we did end up catching about 10 piranha, although I didn't catch any.  They would just bite the chicken off my hook and not bite on the hook so I gave up after awhile.  As the local guide was filleting them, he showed me their teeth and even just running my finger over them lightly, I got a cut.  They are literally razor sharp.    We ate the piranha for dinner and they were delicious!

This morning we all got up early, packed up and headed out for the Rio Acequia for rafting.  The river comes right out of the Andes and the river valley was surrounded by the foothills and even an occasional view of one of the Andean peaks.  My camera is having a lens cover error right now so I didn't take pictures...  Anywho, we rafted for about an hour and a half and the river- it was warm and clear and very pretty, the biggest rapid was a class IV.  Paolo fell out of the raft on one of the rapids, but othere than that, nothing really happened, and it was really fun.  We had a new guide for the rafting and Jorge followed us down the river in a whitewater kayak.  We got to swim and play in the water and I even found a few mayfly larvae even though it was a fairly warm river.  After rafting, we made the long drive back to Merida and got here at about 10pm.  I am tired so I need to go to bed.  Hope all is well at home!  Love you all!