Venezuela, July 1990 Travelogue

Airport at Baraquisimeto, Venezuela

Back in the summer of 1990, I traveled to Venezuela with some friends whose close friends lived there. These friends lived in a remote, sleepy province Southwest of Caracas.  There wasn’t much to do there so we traveled quite a bit to various spots from Merida to Caracas.  It’s all a bit of blur for me now and I don’t have many surviving pictures to remind me of the adventure, but I did stumble across a travel journal I kept on the trip.  Some of my notes are unintelligible, and some, silly and immature, but what the heck, I thought I would post a few of my musings of nearly 25 years ago, lightly edited.

• There is a town close to San Felipe called Moron.  I wonder if the locals are called Morons?
• Altura maxima permitida 3.9m – I’m not sure if that means duck, or no worries. I should have learned the metric system.
• The buses here look like customized bread trucks.
• Everywhere I look, green, green, green, everything is green and they say it’s winter here.
• Many tree trunks are painted white to protect against bugs.  Back home, I thought painting trunks was some kind of patriotic display.
• The sun is more intense closer to the equator, make no mistake about it – we are closer to the equator.
• For $50,000 U.S. dollars, a person could buy a mansion here.
• The Texas Rangers are called the Texas Rancheros.  And Philadelphia is spelled phonetically – Filadelfia, the way it should be.
• Hours after watching the World Cup championship match in which Alemania defeated Argentina 1-0, 4 of us were sitting around a table talking and out of the blue, one of Juan’s friends said. “You look like Klinsmann!”  (Jurgen Klinsmann, the West German footballer). I wasn’t sure if it was an insult or compliment.
• The backs of all trucks read: Carga Larga.
• Juan bought a sack of empanadas de pescado for 100 Bolivares, or about $2.00 U.S. Dollars.  Had there been more, I would have eaten more than 2.
• Polar is the Venezuelan champagne of beers; Belmont Extra Suave, the Venezuelan Marlboro Light.
• There sure are some nice arboles along these roads with curvas peligrosas.

Me, August 1990

Jurgen Klinsmann courtesy Wikimedia CCA Share Alike 3.0