In 1984, Andrea and I travelled to Venezuela. We landed north of Caracas and stayed at a Melia hotel near the coast and not far from the city centre. We booked it through a travel agent as a package tour since this country was fairly new to tourism.
The hotel was quite new and in a small town outside of Caracas the capital city. A lady had her necklace pulled from her neck at the corner store the first night. The next day we had our tour group orientation and they reminded us not to wear jewellery, to watch our wallets and just be aware of our surroundings.
We went to the beach, walked around town and had some local food. We ate in the hotel mostly and the food was very good. They also had some musical entertainment some nights. The Cafe au Lait was amazing, with hot milk and strong coffee. When we went to cash some traveller’s cheques (it was 1984!!) at the local bank, they served us espresso while we waited!
We also took a day trip to visit a traditional German village in the mountains around Caracas. Many years ago a ship carrying German immigrants arrived and they all trekked into the mountains, which apparently reminded them of the Black Forest back home. It was odd to find these blue-eyed blondes and German village architecture up in the hills of Venezuela. We also toured part of the main city and were glad to be part of the group tour as we passed many military-style police, carrying machine guns. There was clears a large wealth disparity in this city, as in many. The slums were all very visible on the hillsides since those areas often had landslides int he rainy season.
As we went through airport security, a guard carrying one of these weapons asked for the four-stringed instrument I had bought as a souvenir. I play ukulele so I had switched two strings around to tune it like I was used to. This was causing the guard some confusion as he tried to play it traditionally. I tried to explain it to him but he just shook his head. He was still working away at it at the first security checkpoint when I was about to move out of the area. I was thinking he was going to keep it but in the last minute he gave it back to me, still shaking his head!
The other adventure was the flight itself. First of all, we heard an announcement that our flight was boarding, at least 30 minutes earlier than expected. Since we had all experienced “South American” relaxed time with long daily siestas this was surprising. Sure enough we even pulled away from the gate early. Then we stopped and they refuelled us while we were all on board. This seemed odd and the smell of jet fuel in the cabin was off-setting. When we got to Toronto, we had almost landed but then we took off again. This had happened to me once before with Air Canada so I knew what was going on. The AC pilot had immediately announced that the plane ahead of us had not cleared the runway so he had to abort and we would land again in about 30 minutes. In the case of Air Viasa (the main Venezuelan airline), there was no announcement made at all, so some passengers were quite nervous until we finally landed safely. We had been over the runway quite awhile the first time so I imagine he was running out of runway? We all clapped when we landed safely the second time.
Years later on our cruise to the Panama Canal, our ship stopped at Cartenega, Columbia. We did a bus tour of the city and saw some interesting sites.