Massimo's photoblog

La Guaira, Venezuela (Dec 29. 2004)

The last day has finally arrived. We had packed everything the night before, and at 6:30 AM we were ready for the radio taxi we had reserved to go to the Caracas airport in La Guaira (photo, from the airplane). Getting a taxi in Caracas can be an interesting experience. The easy and expensive way is to call a radio-taxi. They arrive at your house with large black SUV, and you are taken where you want without troubles in an aseptic vehicle with darkened windows and air conditioning that physically isolates you from the world outside. For what is concerning you, you may as well be in New York. This kind of transportation is useful to go to the airport early in the morning, because you are sure to have the taxi waiting for you at the requested hour. The 30-40 min trip to the airport from Caracas costs 40,000 bolivares which is about $20 at the official rate, ok for us but quite expensive for the average venezuelan.

There are of course other taxi options. The other way is walk down to the closest taxi station or stop a taxi in the street (taxis in Caracas do stop, like in New York, and differently from Boston). The only problem is that you need to understand if you can trust the drivers or not. Things are usually ok if the taxi has some “official” mark, but most of the taxi are now living in a semi-legal state after a liberalization promoted by the government. Many of the taxi drivers do not have a licence, they put a TAXI sign on the top of their patched cars and start to drive around. For these taxi it is up to your judgment to decide if you can trust them or not, and is advisable to ask beforehand the price of the ride, to avoid being ripped off. We had taken such taxis a couple of time, like when we went to the Universidad Simon Bolivar for the second day of Mayli’s conference, paying a few thousand bolivares for a ride that Mayli has payed many times more the day before with an “official” taxi.

Anyway, the ride was smooth and we arrived at the airport in time, made the check-in and the first of the many security checks of the day, and soon we were on our way to Miami. In Miami we had the first disappointment of our return to US: we couldn’t find a decent place to have lunch in the gate areas, and we had to resort to a Pizza Uno. Ugh, welcome back to the famous US cuisine.

The second (expected) disappointment was when landing to Boston (with one hour delay because the plane cleaning crew in Miami didn’t show up in time): everything was covered by a white mantle of snow. We new about that because we received via email a snow advisory from our city, but the hard reality of returning to winter after 20 days of summer still hit us.

At home we had the final blow: as a consequence of the snow emergency declared by the city, we got three fines for a total of $90, because of parking on the wrong side of the road, and not moving the snow submerged car within 48 hours. So we spent the first hour back home shoveling the snow to avoid getting more 48 hours fines... What a nice welcoming back!

With this I finish my Venezuelan diary. It was quite an effort keeping up with the posting while traveling, but I did enjoy fixing my thoughts and travel impressions at the end of each day. And it also forced me to start screenting my photos right away, which is quite a feat since usually I don’t touch them until weeks after returning from a trip. I hope you also enjoyed the reading and the photos as much as I liked posting them. In the next few days I’ll resume the regular posting of the blog: I took several hundred pictures during this trip, from the beaches of Los Roques to the mountains of Merida; many of them are just crap, but there will be some worthy to be published, and I’ll post them in the weeks to come.

Thanks for reading this far. If you happened to hit this page and want to know what is this all about, you can go the beginning of my Venezuela travel diary here.