Coro and Maracaibo

Coro

In just a few hours by bus we were already in the new city and, having quickly found accommodation, we set off to discover why Mr UNESCO had bothered to declare this place a World Heritage Site. Wandering through the city streets we couldn't make any sense of it: apart from a few traces of colonial origin, kept in questionable condition at that, there wasn't much else to justify this title. Be that as it may, after the usual obligatory photos we immediately asked about the times and prices of the buses to Maracaibo. The plan for the following day was to spend the morning among the sand dunes of Medanos de Coro National Park (on the outskirts of the city) and the afternoon devoted to the journey to our new destination.

Maracaibo

And so it was: as expected, the time we had devoted to this little town had been more than enough, and in the late afternoon of the following day, after about three hours of travel, we were at the central station of Maracaibo, one of the most dangerous cities in all of Venezuela. A port city devoted to the extraction of very costly black gold, Maracaibo can certainly not be called a city made for tourists, and apart from the characteristic bridge that crosses the gulf there really was nothing else to see. We stayed in this big city as guests of our Venezuelan uncle for roughly five or six days, to organise our crossing of the border between Venezuela and Colombia (which by everyone's account is extremely dangerous and where tourist kidnapping is very much in fashion) and to sort out the details of our plane ticket, on which we had changed one leg.

At three o'clock on a dark morning we got up from our little bed and headed for the bus station to begin the border crossing. Having shown up right on time, the bus decided not to do the same: without any clear reason, the vehicle that was supposed to escort us to the frontier had not shown up for the appointment. After a brief consultation we decided that it would be pointless to go back to bed and try again the following morning (with the risk that the same thing would happen again!), the only solution that seemed possible was to take a shared taxi. And so, with our luggage loaded and in the company of two Colombian women (mother and daughter), we set off towards the border. The journey was calm until about ten kilometres from the border, from where an endless number of checkpoints began (as if they were trafficking cocaine!) that slowed our progress a great deal.

In the end we made it, and after the usual paperwork and stamps in our passports our taxi driver friend took us across the Colombian border to a bus station where we stayed just long enough to have breakfast and catch the next vehicle to Santa Marta.