I got a bit of a late start from Santa Marta, Colombia to Mérida, Venezuela. I, foolishly thought i could make the trip in 6-7 hours because it "didnt look that far" on the map... I started around 2 pm in Santa Marta and was ready to take a bus to the border when my taxi driver informed me (dropped me off) with a Collective Taxi service which cost about the same as a bus but was a private car that took as many passengers as they can fit into the vehicle. This system worked very well and got me all the way to the border town of Maicao. One of the funniest things during the trip was the method used to avoid the toll plaza. At the final toll plaza some very entrepreneurial Colombians that owned the land adjacent to the plaza constructed a dirt detour road around the plaza and charged about $.50 instead of the $3.50 for the toll so everybody went around the toll booth and hopped back on the highway on the other side... wow...
I spent the night in rough and rowdy Maicao... it was a typical border town full of contraband and corruption so i stayed in my hotel so that i could get an EARLY departure in the morning and avoid any sort of night-time trickery. Early in the am i jumped into another Taxi Collectivo for my ride to the dirty petro city of Maracaibo, Venezuela where I was to catch my bus to Mérida. As we approached the border our driver (in his 1985 Chrysler Conquistador... think chevy caprice large boxy car) stopped to sell his full tank of gas. A guy with a big syphen quickly syphoned the car to nearly empty as gasoline is one of the major commodities that Colombians like to get from Venezuela and as near as I could tell, all the cars go to Venezuela empty and come back full because thanks to Chavez it only costs about 50 cents to completely fill a tank and the Colombians are only too happy to help him use up some low cost petrol.
The actual border crossing was very quick and painless. We then started bouncy down a bumpy road towards Maracaibo. Once in Venezuelaa we stopped and filled the tank and headed on. Bout 10 km from Maracaibo the car overheated and there we sat on the side of the road watching the radiator steam... normally i'd have freaked out but down here you just you just relax and watch a solution present itself; in this case within about a minute we were hopping on a bus to town and our taxi handed us the fare... problem solved!
In Maracaibo I hopped onto the bus for Mérida put my favorite playlist on, put the seat back and fell into a deep sleap until we arrived.
Mérida has turned out to be a very nice mountain city that is set in the very north part of the range but is completely surrounded by peaks. For the next few days I plan to paraglide and go on a rafting expedition.
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