Heavy tailwinds blew us straight towards the bottom of the andes, to El Tocuyo, where we found a cheap posada with a/c and had a good another wonderful pizza in the evening. Seems we’re appreciating the gift Italy has made to the world with pizza and pasta much more than the often very high-fat diet and high-meat diet of the Venezuelan cuisine. We also wondered about the presence of armed police in the street and it seemed as if the group of four police men, one or two armed with a full automatic machine gun, didn’t really know what they should do their either.Â
We then had our first really high climb to an altitude of 2700m, as high as the highest pass we had in a tour from Oberstdorf to Riva del Garda in the European Alps in 2002 or 2003. All day long we pedaled our way up. I once picked a couple of green and round fruits from a tree and while cycling I chewed the white flesh around the big kernel - almost like a lichee fruit. They had a fresh, sweet and a bit sour taste like some artificial bonbons, but I guess they are a lot healthier than the latter ones. And dad also got addicted, so every now and then I saw a shell or kernel fly away from the recumbent bike in front of me.Â
We arrived in a small town in a narrow side valley. The atmosphere was similar to a highly frequented truck stop in TIbet, only with a few more people and a lot more green. We didn’t bother stopping in town and continued cycling. We had water, pasta and fuel enough to cook our own lunch and so we did. In the nice built garden of a wonderful orange finca we had a photo shooting session in the early afternoon and only started after 2 or 3 hours of cooking, chilling out and shooting. The people we met were supposedly employees of the owner and didn’t bother us staying in this little paradise.Â
And as we cycled uphill a father with his 12 year old son overtook us on their mountain bikes and stopped a few minutes later to let us catch up. They then joined us for half to three quarters an hour, all up to the top of the pass and a little further, till they had to return and we said “hasta luego”. Biscucuy stood on the list for the next morning. Arriving in town we bought a big loaf of bread, much too sweet and expensive and afterwards changed the remaining 100 USD I had kept in a safe place in one of my bags. I therefore went to a small optometrist and told him I wanted 300 Bolivares for the dollars and I got them. We then had to leave town the same way we got in to get to Bocoyo - it’s a pity that we didn’t have a proper map; that could have saved us 100 altimeters and at least 6 to 8 kilometers detour!Â
We had to pass a village on the main road that was way too steep for the recumbent to ride up and I was only able to do so because of the smaller weight - these streets are designed for cars and trucks only! On and on we continued cycling and eventually made it over a pass in with the last light of the sun. And a friendly keeper of a reading and writing school for parents finally let us sleep in the garden of the school - the ground was extremely wet, the water was even standing, but there hadn’t been much choice and so we took what we got.Â
We didn’t have a particularly good feeling about the people in this region and we’ve been warned several times by locals themselves. This feeling got even worse when we arrived in Bocono the next noon: First some people begged for money in a very intrusive and unfriendly way and when I came back from the internet cafe and Elmar left me back for half an hour they behaved even worse and almost screamed at me. A friendly woman, Silvia, also told us that we should be careful and always keep an eye on our bikes and personal belongings. She was in town only to visit her father but usually lives in Caracas. We invited her for lunch before we left this unfriendly and unwelcoming place.Â
Happy we were after we had left the city. But even the car drivers in the region were not particularly friendly to say the least: at several occasions they just turned a blind eye to us and didn’t give us information on which way to take when we stood aside the road waving at them to stop. In the evening after an nightmarish hour of asking for the right way to a town on the way to Merida in Tostos we managed to get on the right road again and pitched our tent in the garden of a window-less casa with a lot of POLAR beer advertisement all over.Â
With a small interruption of 200m the next day consisted of only uphill cycling! There was a small village in between but we were not particularly hungry when we found a small restaurant in the village center and decided to go on. All the way up to a 3000m pass the road was pretty good and we only had to stop in a small “tienda”, a small shop a few kilometers before the top to buy some food for the evening and next morning. The sunset we then had this evening camping on 3000m was wonderful, absolutely dreamlike: Blue clouds below us in the valley near Timotes and red and orange ones above. And what a stunning light! The only drawback was the weather: Showers all through the night and there was no time window longer than 30 minutes without showers the next day, when Elmar decided that we should start despite the bad weather. Packed into the waterproof clothes we started out towards a pass of unknown altitude. And because of the grey clouds we couldn’t even guess properly how high it was. In cold showers we pedaled one s-turn after the other … 3300 m … 3400 m … 3500 m … and then finally it got less steep and the altimeter stopped at 3560m on a muddy grey, brown and black dirt road with at least as many pot holes as we had meters in altitude! And as if we hadn’t had enough rain by that time and as if we were not yet wet enough the rain got even worse the further we descended. We were as wet as one could get when we arrived in a small mountain village on 2000m and I decided to get a room in the first posada I could find. Cold from the rain we first warmed up under the fat blankets in our tiny 40 Bolivares room before we left the posada for a pizza grande with a lot of cheese.Â
We also spent the next day in town; not because we liked the posada so much or because of the beauty of the village - no way! The reason was that just as we wanted to leave, as we had already packed the bikes the rain started to fall again! Then finally the weather let us go: LIke an excuse for the bad weather the day before we got wonderful sunny weather this morning and started as early as we could after a horrible night when the locals started celebrating in front of our room and played pool in a big hall behind the wall of our room. Elmar didn’t have the two beer from the night before and reportedly only slept two or three hours this night. We really couldn’t wait to leave and he woke me up before 6 am!Â
Only 15 minutes of ultra fast downhill cycling on a winding road later we turned right into a side valley. For the rest of the day we should cycle up this valley, first through a town called Santo Domingo, on 2000m again, then further and further up. On 3000m a 4 wheel drive stopped and Anette, a German woman living with her children and friend close to Merida, jumped out. We talked for a while on the road and then continued towards the pass on 3400m where we had a short stop to revive.Â
But we didn’t stay long and quickly descended 300 altimeters in a fast downhill and turned right towards a observatory on 3400m again. There we pitched the tent and watched the exciting play of the clouds that came up the valley. Sometimes we were within the clouds and a few seconds later we could see the blue sky again! Like a giant match clouds against the invisibles and we were right at the front!Â
Inside the observatory they let cows graze and the area was open for visitors, but the visitor center was still closed. And they also didn’t open any of the telescopes this night, unfortunately. So we observed the stars ourselves as much as we could 
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Then within 2 hours the next morning we descended on often very serpentine rich roads to Merida: 1900 altimeters gone in almost no time, that really got our adrenalin going, believe me!Â
Inside Merida we first had to search an ATM to get money and we could easily find some that didn’t give us money or asked for an additional two numbers (initials or so) just before the actual transaction and hand out of the money - grrrr. Finally I figured out how to get the money and we went to a posada pretty close to the city center, the Plaza Bolivar as it is called in Venezuela.Â
In Merida we had to do a lot of things including the replacement of my defect Manitour Sliver front suspension. I went to a shop called EcoBike and told them about my problem. We figured out a way to replace the suspension fork for a cheaper one without air suspension. Probably that wouldn’t have been possible in Germany as you almost can’t sell old stuff in a bicycle shop but here the new parts from the west are extremely hard to get and therefore very expensive (this somehow relates to the fixed Bolivares - Dollar course and the high inflation inside the country). We also got rid of a few heavy other things, including a book and a second heavy bicycle lock.Â
One of the owners of EcoBike, Daniel, is a competition mountain biker with many successes from all over Latin America. He’s cycled the Pyrenees and the Alps and a lot of other places. EcoBike-Daniel tried to ride the recumbent and Elmar was totally impressed when he made it the first time and cycled around the block without falling down. Then we had to find a proper map for the way ahead and as there was a university in town we could easily imagine to be lucky this time, so we set out for a adventurous search covering two days and at least 8 hours! First from one shop to the other, then I came up with the idea to visit the uni-library, and so we did. They sent us to the “bibliotheca central” where again we got sent to a “mapoteca” in the faculty for forestry located a few kilometers outside of town. And the lather one had closed! So we had to come back the next morning and finally indeed found some topographical maps … of the closer area and in pretty bad quality! But the people there were extremely helpful and opened a mapoteca for us again when officially it was closed at 10 am already again!Â
We also spent a lot of time on the internet, at least one day (open internet cafe) per person to upload a lot of pictures to flickr and to find acceptable maps for the ongoing part of the journey towards the capital of Columbia, Bogota, as the results from the mapoteca were not pleasing to say the least. During our time on the internet we had several black outs throughout the whole city and had to come back later on and additionally the connection speed was not what one would call a blistering pace! On the day we left I went to the EcoBike guys, Daniel and Enrico, again and sold them my one person tent as we couldn’t make use of it any longer and sending it back to Germany would probably have cost quite a part of its actual value. We were really lucky that Enrico plans a bike tour somewhere in Patagonia later this year and gave me a pretty good price for the tent and additionally we got a tasty cyclists’ meal: Pasta with tomato sauce from chef cook Daniel - “mui bien”!Â
In the Casa Sol posada, run and partly owned by the friendly Swiss Kathrin, we got free internet, even though we didn’t have a habitacion there - really kind! While I was getting discouraged with the slow speed of primarily my 600MHz iBook, that took half a minute to just load a 12 mega pixel image from my camera, my father went out on a photo shooting session through the whole Casa Sol that’s wonderfully decorated - unique in whole Venezuela!Â
Leaving Merida southward is pretty easy on the main road as you just have to follow the valley downwards. We cycled for 1,5 hours or so and found a new building to sleep in - just like in the old days cycling through Europe and parts of the middle east!Â
But there was still a fair way to go to the Venezuela - Columbia border. Whenever we looked up to the sky during day time we could see dark big birds from now on and at one occasion they were sitting just next to the road - the locals called them samurros. We cycled down to 600m above sea level into a muggy and hot climate and from there we had to climb up to 2900m, descend to La Grita and climb up to almost 3000m again to reach San Cristobal, a big town 50km from the Columbian border.Â
And that very last day of cycling in Venezuela was scary, really scary! Similar to the first impressions we had cycling during the night in the capital Caracas we now had to ride on a heavy traffic road on a Sunday when everybody with a car went for a drive through the hills and countryside! There was no shoulder whatsoever and even though it must have been most of the drivers leisure time they behaved like they had no time at all to lose and overtook in the worst situations imaginable. Two or three times we almost observed a frontal crash when idiotic drivers went way too far into the lane of the traffic coming our direction and couldn’t return in time causing the cars on the opposite lane to sudden emergency break maneuvers.Â
Somehow we managed to survive this murderous stage and arrived in San Antonio the Tachira, the border town to Columbia, about 4 weeks after we had entered Venezuela. Two car drivers with bikes mounted on the back of their pick-up stopped us on the road and we took the chance to ask them for directions to a cheap hotel or posada. At 7:30pm, after we had taken a shower with cold and extremely dirty water coming from the shower head and tap, we met the hobby cyclists for a drive around town. I sat at the back of Franco’s pick-up together with bikeshop owner Edgar and Dad and Franco sat at the front.Â
First we went for two “pizzas vejetariano sin carne!” (yes, you should tell them that you want a vegetarian pizza WITHOUT MEAT) and had to answer a lot of questions about our tour. The ESPANOL - ALEMAN & DEUTSCH - SPANISCH dictionary we had bought in Merida happened to be our best friend this evening. Afterwards they took us to Francos wood workshop where he creates all kinds of furniture - but Franco was definitely too drunk after only 2 beer and a glass of wine and the evening got extremely long when they started to dance to salsa music fromt the blurring radio. I had to explain Franco how to use his new digital camera - he hadn’t even figured out how to charge the battery by that time and I guess the manual was in English only.Â
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