Going home(s)

San Francisco

Well after over one year in Caracas - a city of chaos and music, traffic and street food, marches and protests, poverty and excess, hard times and great times, and meeting so many amazing inspiring people - I am making the long journey home to the UK.

It feels very strange. A big part of me wants to stay but a big part of me wants to go. Life is about change, and it is time for change again. I'm ready to embrace it!

In order to make the most of air miles and various cheap flights (and to see lots of people), my meandering journey home looks like this:

Tuesday 14 August
Leaving party / Risho's birthday party / Packing party in Caracas

Wednesday 15 August - Caracas to Mexico City to Miami
One night in Miami!

Thursday 16 August - Miami to LA to Oakland
Five days & nights in San Francisco!

Tuesday 21 August - Oakland to LA to Las Vegas
One night in Las Vegas!

Wednesday 22 August - Las Vegas to London
Two nights in London!

Friday 24 August - London to Edinburgh
...and to Haddington where I look forward most of all to relaxing at home with my family who I really do miss lots

That's almost 30 hours on planes spread between 8 flights in a single week. If anything, there should be lots of free mediocre-quality in-flight lunches at silly times of day.

The idea of this quite epic and ridiculous journey is to see as many people as possible.

In San Francisco, there's already quite a reunion planned featuring my good friend Declan, two excellent friends from California who never quite made it to visit me in Venezuela - Helen and Laura, the legendry sea-god Aaron (first person I ever met in AIESEC), Karthik and Tina from the current generation of AIESEC San Jose and various other people who I knew from my year in the Bay Area.

Needless to say I'm excited about being with all these folks in this other city where I also spent a great - in a very different way - year of my life.

All sorts of goodness is being planned - yummy eateries, dreaming about silly expensive champagne in Bubble lounge, some kind of paintballing adventure, and BBQing at the (cold) beach. If you can get to the Bay Area for any of that (especially the meal on Saturday 18th) I would love to see you there!

Equally I'm looking for people to see and things to do in London and I'm looking forward to kicking up Edinburgh during the final days of festival time.

Mark your calendars!

A fuego lento

In Venezuela almost anything passes for a taxi.

It was a very bad decision to get into this one.

Drew and I felt we needed to make a slightly comical video to document what happened, then I added a slideshow of my year in Venezuela.



Here is the sequence of events:

1. We cram 6 people into the worst-looking vehicle in Caracas (me, Drew and Steve from Scotland, Risho from Slovakia and Branko from Maracaibo / Serbia).

2. The very dodgily wired-up radio starts to make strange crackling sounds and generally fail

3. The driver pulls off the freeway as the car begins to fill with smoke

4. We discover that none of the doors except the drivers can be opened from the inside

This is the fucking scary I'm moments from death moment.

5. Steve (in the front) manages to open his door and him and Branko escape, Drew climbs out the window and the driver opens my door to start putting the fire under his seat in front of me out.

6. Risho and I push past him as he's taking his t-shirt off to put out the fire.

All this time there's a fucking police man standing across the road by his car talking on his mobile phone to his girlfriend or something. Risho and I shout that the car's on fire and we need help. He doesn't seem at all concerned. Then the taxi driver - quite nastily burned by now - runs over to get his help.

But by now the car is fully on fire and it's too late. We stay and watch as liquid burning oil drips under the car, the windows shatter and the gas tank explodes. All minutes after we'd escaped.

It is extremely sobering to realise just how easy it is to die.

As you can see, I was very happy to be alive!

And from now on, I'm checking the doors of EVERY car I even think about getting in. And I am only using taxis built in the last ten years.

What an end to Steve and Drew's trip, and my year in Venezuela.

Gran Sabana and Angel Falls

Steve, Drew and Lina (Drew's girlfriend from Sweden) just left yesterday after two very eventful and mostly enjoyable weeks touring around Venezuela.

After almost two days of general chaos in Caracas, it was Friday morning and we were stuck getting eaten by mozzies and waiting for Lina's bag to possibly be delivered by American airlines. The rest of us were all packed for a long holiday beach weekend, complete with mosquito nets that had been bought by Steve and Drew amongst much amusement and confusion in a small shop in the biggest mall in South America.

Canaima Lagoon (photo by Arnoldo)

It was now getting a bit late in the day for the beach, so we decided
- heck with it lets just go for the best first. What's on the cover of
Lonely Planet? Canaima and Angel Falls. OK.

Malaria Pills with lunch, quick internet research, some Spanish phone calls, a few black market international currency exchanges and by 9pm we're on an executive bus direct to the Gran Sabana!

The journey was great. After the bus we caught a TINY plane - just 6 seats. Apparently though the instruments don't work above the clouds and a back-up silver briefcase needs to be brought out to scare tourists :-) That was fun.

Then spectacular views of table mountains, waterfalls, planes, palms, forest and small thatched native settlements as we landed in the inaccessible town of Canaima, from where we were led by a native indian up river in a bumpy wooden canoe along with a misfit group of tourists from Norway, Denmark, Sweden, USA, Germany and the Netherlands.

Steve by this time was in full sun and mosquito protection mode with several layers of sunblock and quite a percentage of DEET in his blood. Drew wasn't as successful having put his possibly illegal 80% DEET insect repellant in a blue plastic bag. This subsequently turned most of Drew into something looking like he should be in a Vegas show.

We enjoyed barbequed chicken and slept in hammocks on an inland in the forest, with all sorts of animal sounds around us and a really useful praying mantis that couldn't seem to catch anything.

Angel Falls from Isla Raton

We got a great view of the falls as the early morning sun beamed onto the table mountain. Roughly like the photo, but in real life :-)

After crossing the river, we hiked through the forest to Angel Falls, looking out for giant spiders and "24-hour ants" on the way. The spiders trap and eat birds and if one of those ants gets you you'll have about 24-hours to live. Disappointingly we saw neither of those things!

I was somehow expecting a nice neat stream of water landing in a calm pool at the bottom where we could lie in looking up at the falls.

Well, after about 900m of falling (about the height of the biggest mountains in Scotland (Munros), or two Empire State buildings - in one go) the water is pretty much just mist! It's a very mesmerising sight.

We did swim in the plunge pool a bit further down, which is freezing cold and very very turbulent. Refreshing to say the least.

Sapo Falls (photo by One Off Man Mental)

Day 3 we enjoyed getting soaked walking under Sapo Falls - another huge waterfall at Canaima Lagoon. Wet season (Mar-Sep) is the time to go! We encountered a bright yellow and black frog (very poisonous) then we climbed up to the top. We sat on rocks in the river for a good long time just admiring the stunning scene before us - a beautiful lake - luscious green savannah as far as the eye could see - native huts dotted around in the foreground and huge table mountains in the background.

This was one of the most tranquil, beautiful scenes I have ever seen in my life. I genuinely could have stayed there for hours just relaxing in the sun with this incredible vista before me.

This region of the Venezuela has to be one of the most spectacular sights on this beautiful planet.

If you are in Venezuela and you have not been, make it happen!