Costs pp: bus from Choroni to Maracay 15vef, bus to Valencia 7vef. Telephone call at kiosk .70/min, taxi fare 20vef. Almuerzo (soup and main) 20vef.
Back over the great road through the forest to Maracay where we found a food kiosk at the terminal and had a great almuerzo like the ones we have been used to in all our travels from Mexico down to Bolivia. Carol was in heaven as we have missed being able to easily get these cheap, good meals. The bus to Valencia was a strange affair, we had to wait in a long line and they brought small buses and filled them up then rolled the next one in. To enter the bus you had to be scanned and frisked by the bus guys, they said they were scanning for guns, they didn't bother with us. The scanner was beeping all the time but they took no notice of it.
The journey was less than an hour on a good road and at the terminal in Valencia we found a call shop and Carol called Freddyfelipe our 'couch'. He wasn't expecting us until tomorrow but was happy to hear from us and told us how to get to his place. Carol got muddled and thought she was paying 7vefs/min for the call so all but cut him off at the end of the call then realised after she had the point in the wrong place and the call was only .7/min which is about 10c... duh
Freddyfelipe, who was diagnosed HIV+ 12 years ago, is a charismatic, feet on the ground, practical, artist. Ok, somehow those things don't usually go together but in Ff they do. He and Carol spent lots of time talking about life in Venezuela and in general and she was really impressed with him as a person and felt she gained a lot from his example. Things are not good here as you can imagine. Every second day in the country the cities have about 3 hours without power, Chaves keeps interferring in the operation of a lot of Venezuelas companies, including the electricity company. In Valencia which is known not to support Chaves the electricity is cut daily. Fed up with this a few days before we arrived Ff went to visit the electric co. with a baseball bat, when it came time for him to go to the counter he started to swing the bat like a baseball player at the plate and asked why were the cuts happening daily. Of course the police were called but when they came to arrest him 4 old people who were there stood up for him. One woman told the police he was not being threatening but was only practising his swing. An old man told them that if they touched Ff he would kill them because Ff was asking the question they all wanted to. Ff said it was because of these people that he didn't get arrested. It's an extreme thing to do but who of us would have the courage in this kind of environment to do such a thing. The second day we were there the power stayed on all day, coincidence maybe...
Freddyfelipe spent the day with us taking us for brunch to have cachapas which are a sandwich made of corn pancakes with cheese in the middle and very tasty. Then we explored the city centre and a small museum that was a home donated to the city and has original paintings of the war of independance on the inside external walls, it is a lovely place, very restful. The last of the afternoon we spent walking through a relatively new park, in a stream in the park we chanced upon an aligator sunning itself on the bank.
