I was prepared for Saturday, December 23 to be a really rough travel day. I was ambitiously planning to travel from Los Roques, Venezuela to Santa Marta, Colombia, just two days before Christmas. The trip would involve 2 flights, a number of buses, a couple of taxis, a rough border crossing and a very tight timeframe in which to accomplish it all so as to avoid getting stuck in allegedly very dangerous regions of either Venezuela or Colombia.
The night before I left Los Roques, I exchanged some emails with Lucinda, a British girl I had met on the Angel Falls tour. She had just completed a bus trip from Maracaibo, Venezuela to Santa Marta a couple of days before. (This same bus trip would be the final leg of my big travel day.) Unfortunately, she told me that it was a complete nightmare, and that the journey from Maracaibo to Maicao (just over the border into Colombia) took 8 hours, and her bus was stopped by “soldiers” 9 times, and it was necessary to bribe them in order to get through. The trip from Maracaibo to Maicao should only take about 2.5 hours total (it’s only about 100km). This additional information made me even more anxious about my plans for Saturday, since the earliest I could hope to make it to Maracaibo was around noon, and that was assuming that I could make a connection to a 10:30am flight from Caracas to Maracaibo, which was doubtful since I had paid to change my flight from Los Roques to Caracas from Friday afternoon to Saturday morning at 7:00am, so as to avoid having to spend another night in the sketchy neighborhood near the airport in Caracas. Even though the flight from Los Roques to Caracas should only be about 30 minutes, which would get me to Caracas airport by 7:30am, I already knew the airline was notorious for delays, and I knew I would need to allow a lot of extra time at Caracas airport to get my luggage, get to the proper terminal, change some more cash on the black market, wait in the interminable line for Aserca Airlines, pay for my ticket to Maracaibo, check in, wait on line to pay my depature tax, wait on line for security, and finally board the plane. Accordingly, I actually made a confirmed reservation for a flight to Maracaibo leaving Caracas at 1:30pm (rather than 10:30am), just to be safe, but was still hopeful that I would make the 10:30am flight instead.
During dinner at my posada on Friday evening, I was telling this lovely family from Maracaibo about some of my anxiety about the border crossing the next day. (Mind you, they didn’t speak a word of English and I really don’t speak Spanish…) They told me that instead of going to the Maracaibo bus terminal, I should go to a particular shopping center in the suburbs of Maracaibo, where there’s a bus company that runs nicer buses direct from Maracaibo to Santa Marta, without any need to change buses along the way. They highly recommended this option, and impressed upon me over and over about how
peligroso (“dangerous”) the
frontera (“border”) was, and that I had to make sure not to attempt it after nightfall.
So I went to bed on Friday night with no small degree of apprehension about the next day, but somewhat optimistic that I was starting very early, and would just deal with whatever came up, and worst-case scenario, I would spend the night in Maracaibo, and start my bus journey first thing Sunday morning.
Saturday turned into a total snafu. As instructed by Aerotuy Airlines, I showed up at their office in Los Roques promptly at 6:00am, only to be informed that my 7:00am flight was cancelled because not enough people booked it. So instead I would be flying out on the next flight at 8:00am, which I was then told would be leaving at 8:25am, then 8:45am. Needless to say, the flight finally left at 9:15am. Sometime around 8:30am, when no plane had even shown up on the runway yet, I sort of lost my crap with the manager of the airline office, demanded my not-inconsequential change fee back (since the flight I paid to change my ticket to so as to avoid spending a night in Caracas was now cancelled, thereby causing me to miss my 10:30am connection (a connection that was really all in my head, since I conservatively had not booked that flight anyway), and that now since basically every flight from Caracas was sold out for the holiday weekend, I would most assuredly be stuck staying in Caracas for a night, and be losing an entire day in the process). I basically accomplished nothing other than pissing them off, which probably explains why I lost yet another strap off my new backpack on this flight. I was also especially on edge because of how difficult I knew the rest of the day was going to be, because I had not eaten any breakfast because I was supposed to check in at 6:00am and breakfast at my posada (included in my room rate) was not served until 8:30am, and because I am on anti-malarial medication, the effects of which are – I suspect – quite similar to acute PMS.
Here I am about to to take off from Los Roques. It’s only 9:10am, and I have already had my first meltdown for the day.
This is how the next several hours went:
9:15am Take off from Los Roques 2 hours and 15 minutes later than I had planned.
9:45am Land at Caracas. Still hopeful I might be able to catch the 10:30 Aserca flight to Maracaibo.
10:20am The luggage from the 14-person flight from Los Roques finally shows up on the luggage belt (notice that this was more than the total flight time and that a total of about a dozen bags had been checked on the plane). I’ve obviously missed the 10:30am flight.
10:23am I manage to persuade Aeropostal Airlines to sell me a ticket on their 10:50am flight to Maracaibo. I am awash with a wave of optimism. Perhaps I will only be 20 minutes behind my target schedule afterall.
10:35am I manage to pay for my departure tax and circumvent an obscenely long security line by sprinting to the far northern end of the Domestic Terminal, where I know – because this is my fourth time in this airport in 3 weeks – that there’s a second security check there which is hardly ever used. Optimism builds.
11:05am Flight to Maracaibo takes off. Only a few minutes late. Not bad at all.
12:05pm Land in Maracaibo. This is excellent. Only need to collect my bag and hop in a taxi and head off to the Centro Commercial San Miguel in the Maracaibo suburbs.
12:35pm The last of the bags come out on the luggage belt. Mine is nowhere to be seen and has clearly been lost. I don’t whether to feel better or worse about the fact that Aeropostal has managed to lose luggage for at least 20% of the passengers on the flight. I get on line for the Aeropostal office in the Maracaibo Airport. Nobody speaks English. Everyone else who has lost their luggage provides a cell number and a local address. I have neither. Supposedly, my bag should be on the next Aeropostal flight arriving from Caracas at 2:30pm. I am thinking that perhaps this isn’t so bad after all, since the Aserca flight I would have been on otherwise would have landed at 2:30pm anyway, so it’s pretty much a wash.
1:00pm I have lunch at the Big Pecker in the Maracaibo Airport and am thrilled to discover that there is free Wi-Fi in the terminal, so I check my email and try to get additional info on the border crossing. I briefly consider abandoning my bag altogether and just traveling on to Colombia with my tiny daypack, since I have my laptop with me and that’s worth more than the rest of my stuff put together. Then I decide I’m being ridiculous and I can’t abandon my SteriPEN (thanks, Rachel & Tom!) and Therm-a-Rest (thanks, Erin & Christine!). I decide to wait the 90 minutes for my bag.
2:30pm The Aeropostal flight is delayed. The Aserca flight lands, its passengers debord and collect their luggage and move on with their lives. I try not to feel bitter.
3:50pm The Aeropostal flight finally lands. Now I just have to get my bag…
4:30pm A full 40 minutes after landing time, the luggage starts coming out on the belt.
4:45pm My bag finally arrives, more than 4 hours after I do. I race out and hop in a taxi and tell him to take me to the San Miguel Shopping Center.
5:05pm I arrive at the San Miguel Shopping Center, find the office of the bus company the Maracaibo family told me about, but it’s closed. I get back in my taxi and tell him to take me to the bus terminal, which is now much farther away and three times the fare it would have been from the airport. Fabulous.
5:35pm I arrive at the Maracaibo Bus Terminal. It is utter chaos and strangled by some of the worst traffic I have ever seen.
5:45pm I confirm that there are no more buses departing for Colombia today. I weigh my options, of which I don’t have many. I feel very driven to at least make it over the border into Colombia today for some reason.
5:55pm I squeeze into a dilapidated 25-year-old Ford Conquistador with 7 other people to attempt the drive over the border to Maicao, Colombia.
6:15pm One of 5 people “sitting” in the back seat of this beat-up old car, I keep assessing and re-assessing how dangerous this ride is from the point of view of: potential engine trouble, potential injury from accident with 8 people in a car wearing no seatbelts, potential guerilla activity in the region, potential corrupt border crossing patrols, and potential criminal mischief at any point along the way, including in Maicao (described by the Lonely Planet guidebook as “widely and justifiably known as a lawless town…stay there as briefly as possible and don’t move outside the bus terminal”). I am just hoping against hope that there might be some way to continue on from Maicao to Santa Marta this evening and that I’m not stranded in a bus terminal in an extremely dangerous city for the night.
6:30pm It’s getting dark. I am wondering why oncoming traffic keeps flashing their brights at us. Then I realize we obviously don’t have any working headlights. I reassess the ride’s danger quotient, taking into account the lack of any visible road markings, and the rampantly random nature of the lowbeam orientation and excessive abuse of highbeams among the oncoming vehicles. I also wonder what type of permanent nerve or other damage can result from sitting in a contorted position on only one ass cheek for several hours in a row.
7:00pm We are stopped for about the 5th time by soldiers with machine guns. We give them a small bribe each time and they let us continue. Not a single person in my car, nor any of these soldiers speak a word of English, by the way.
8:00pm We cross the border into Colombia. Stopping by immigration upon our departure from Venezuela and also upon our arrival in Colombia is all surprisingly easy and efficient, though it does involve some more small, customary bribes, in addition to the official departure tax. It also involves a big leap of faith, as I am the only passenger who needs to get out of the car at both locations to go into the immigration office, leaving my large backpack (and therefore most of my possessions) in the trunk, and just hoping they’ll patiently wait for me while I get my paperwork squared away.
8:13pm A station wagon speeds past us at breakneck speed. I am so relieved Maicao is only about 6km away so this nailbiter of a car ride will finally come to an end. I’ve decided that everyone talks about the drug smuggling, FARC kidnappings and other guerilla activity in the area, and the general lawlessness of the border towns, but it seems to me that what’s most dangerous about this border crossing is the unsafe driving and poor maintenance and overcrowding of the vehicles on the road.
8:15pm At an intersection in front of us the station wagon that had just passed us plows into a truck at full speed, so much so, its tail lifts up in the air and then crashes back to the ground. Our driver slams on the brakes and we begin to skid on gravel. I throw my body into the footwell behind the passenger seat and brace myself for impact, hoping that the seat will stop me from turning into a projectile. Unable to break in time, our driver manages instead to pull our car off the road entirely and we finally skid to a stop.
8:16pm All 8 of us get out of the car and get a good look at the accident. It’s absolutely horrific. What I could not tell from actually watching the accident happen in front of us in the dark (because we have no headlights) was that it involved not only the station wagon and a truck, but also another car and a motorcycle as well. At least 2 bodies had flown through the windshield of the station wagon. There are bodies on the pavement. There are broken glass and vehicle parts scattered all over the road. There is fluid of some kind spilling out everywhere. The station wagon seems to have been completely packed with both people and stuff, and I can see various limbs pressed up against the side windows of the car, and these limbs are not moving. The women from my car are crying, and the two men race over to help pry some doors loose and try to get people out of the wreckage. Soldiers also come running and start pulling at doors and attending to bodies. I stand there for a moment, unsure of what to do, because I don’t want to leave my small daypack with my $3,000 laptop and credit cards and passport and other vital stuff in an empty car off to the side of a road along a dark stretch of highway in an incredibly dangerous border zone. Then again, I do not want to
not help either. Then again, I am very concerned that there might be gasoline all over the road that could ignite all four vehicles at any moment. Plus, everyone is screaming to each other in Spanish, and it is getting more frenetic by the second. I stand there deliberating for perhaps 20 seconds, when a soldier turns around and holds out a screaming and bloody young woman for me to take. Decision made, I take her and carry her as gently and swiftly as possible to a well-lit spot a safe distance away where a couple of women from my car can look after her and then run back to the wreckage to help extricate others. I wear my daypack with my laptop, etc. the whole time and it does not seem to impede me.
8:22pm I focus on trying to pry open the doors of the station wagon and clear out some of the tightly-packed crap in there, so we can get the injured people out. I decide it is best to let others attend to the bodies on the pavement and those partway through the windshield, because I don´t want to be making a determination of who might be dead or not. We carry a severely-injured older man from the wreckage to our car and put him in the front seat. A woman sits up front with him and the driver, and the remaining six of us all pile on top of each other in the back seat as we sped off. We do the best we can to keep him breathing and conscious and to try to get some of the blood off his face with my anti-bacterial wipes.
8:26pm We arrive at the Maicao Bus Terminal, the first building of any note to appear along the road. The 7 passengers all scramble out and grab their stuff from the trunk and let the driver speed off with the accident victim, presumably to get him medical attention as quickly as possible. I stand there somewhat dazed over how surreal the prior ten minutes were. Then I realize I’m in a very dangerous town and this seems to be the dodgiest bus terminal I’ve been to yet on this trip, and I better see what I options I have to get to Santa Marta.
8:35pm/7:35pm I set my clock back an hour on account of crossing over into Colombia and also confirm that there is absolutely no means of transport whatsoever from Maicao to Santa Marta tonight. I have no choice but to wait for a bus in the morning.
7:45pm I find out that there is a hotel a short distance up the road. But I speak to 2 of the women who were in my car and they’re spending the night in the bus terminal, waiting for a bus the next morning as well. They tell me over and over again that it’s more dangerous to stay in the hotel than in the bus terminal, but since they don’t speak any English, I can’t really tell if they mean it’s
dangerous because I might miss the first bus in the morning if I don’t stay in the terminal, or the hotel is
dangerous because it’s
dangerous. They encourage me to stay overnight in the bus terminal. I mull it over for a few minutes, and decide it’s better for me to stay in a potentially dangerous hotel if there’s a lock on my door, than to stay in a clearly dangerous bus terminal where I might fall asleep with all my valuable possessions freely available to anyone for the taking.
7:50pm I walk up the dark highway to the Hotel La Frontera, trying to look as intimidating as possible. I make it to the hotel where I discover they have just one room left. Obviously, I take it. Juan and Mario both escort me to the room. They don’t speak any English, but both seem visibly excited when they learn I am from New York. As a total
non sequitur, Juan then turns to me and says (in Spanish), “my friend is extremely fat,” referring to Mario, then laughs hysterically. Mario laughs uncomfortably, and I sort of look around the room with as blank an expression as I can muster.
How bad can the hotel be? I mean, they’ve got their own towels.
7:55pm Juan and Mario leave. I discover my room is full of discarded cigarette butts (and the appurtenant smell), a small colony of large ants, quite a few cockroaches, a number of suspicious-looking exposed wires coming out of the walls, and a large rusty fan bolted to the wall above my bed such that if I reach up in the middle of the night I would assuredly lose at least 2 fingers. I feel considerably better than I did in the bus terminal, and go down to the hotel “restaurant” to eat something for the first time since the Big Pecker.
8:00pm Juan makes sure I have the best table and recommends I get the “steak.” I take him up on his suggestion. Then I sit there and try to recover from the insanity of the day. Juan then sits down next to me and asks me (all in Spanish, of course), if I like Spanish? And I say, sure, it’s great, but I know very little and hope to learn more on this trip. Then he says, no, but do I like the Spanish the way that he likes Americans? Then I realize he’s giving me a very intense look, and it dawns on me that he’s actually coming on to me. I pretend to not understand what he’s saying.
8:05pm Juan brings me soup, and I say I didn’t order any soup, and he says he wants me to have the soup and it’s on him. And I say okay. And the soup is apparently chicken soup, but it has more bone than chicken in it, and the first bone I pull out of the soup is definitely mammalian in origin.
8:20pm I eat as much of the “steak” as I can. Juan keeps trying to engage me in conversation, and seems particularly interested in talking about 9/11, which is the very last thing I want to think about at the moment, so I extricate myself as politely as possible and retire to my room, where I try to ignore the other occupants (see pics below) and go to bed.
Two of the many fellow occupants of my hotel room
Next up, a 5-hour bus ride on Christmas Eve to Santa Marta, Colombia!
