Venezuela is truly one of the world’s marvellous countries, and possibly the most expensive one, on a par with other petroinflationary economies, unless you bring cash with you and exchange on the black market. Then it becomes the equivalent of Europe’s poorer neighbours; as my contacts in the country did not alert me to this fact, I am using this blog to alert you! All glory to WordPress!
But first a word on travelling here from Europe. It could be that the cheapest option is the Madrid-Caracas route, served by now infamous Santa Barbara Airlines http://www.sbairlines.com/ , but Lufthansa is likely to dominate your travel plans with its Frankfurt connections. Frankfurt airport proved a joy to overnight in, mostly quiet, pay-per-use internet and a Samsung booth with two terminals occasionally providing internet access, a certain amount of metalic recliner seats more comfortable than any economy seats on the plane, and of course access to drinking water. Then my many battery powered devices needed a recharge and my boat wasn’t floating anymore. After going up and down most of the airport I was able to find an available electricity socket close to a cul-de-sac, I guess where staff gains access to the runways, and next to some kind of tobacco vending machine.
There are two forms to be completed when entering the country, one for tax and one for immigration purposes, and one of the two includes carbon copies which require a proper surface and ball pen to fill in. Predictably, there was no pens by the immigration officer desks, but this did not end up mattering at all as the staff there are some of the most blaze people I’ve seen in a while, not fussy at all with the quality of the copies and filling in various sections (like “your address and phone number in Venezuela”). The woman who handled my passport had some rather different passions: she was asking me for dollars that she offered to exchange to 2.5 Bolivares Fuertes as opposed to the 2.1 official rate (she said, it was a bit higher). I said “not in front of the cameras and the guards” and she proceeded with the next customer as if nothing had happened.
The airport’s waiting space and services are generally crap, with the local hustlers being incessantly on your case and no tourist information or leaflets anyway in foreign languages, and very little in spanish too. It was however an electricity paradise with sockets everywhere with the triple pin of the Americas apparently (trifasico), and no adapter being on sale or on loan anywhere. Too bad for me as my contact information was not on paper and by my mistake (not turning off my phone) and some quirk of the technology my battery had ran out too quickly, in something like 12 hours – I guess I should have discovered my “airplane mode” earlier, searching for a GSM signal is known to kill batteries. It was also not clear where from and how to make a phone call. There were mobile phone shops around, but my certainty that I could buy a local SIM was dashed. In fact, when after a week of continuous effort I finally managed to get a Digitel Simcard for 25BsF at the CCCT mall (next to the giant Sambil mall at Chacao or Chacaito, that nevertheless had no simcards), it was obvious why: all kinds of fingerprints, forms and IDs were needed to get a local phone number. By the way, calling from your phone is surprisingly expensive on Pay-as-you-go, I suspect again it is some kind of world record, frugal visitors should use the phoneros in most places downtown offering rates of .2BsF per minute.
Luckily there is an internet cafe for 4B an hour (downtown Ipostel, the post operator, charges 1.2B/hour) where I recovered my contacts and the instigation to go to the mysterious Nacional, I thought it was the highway but it was just the terminal for domestic flights a few minutes walk through unsigned and somewhat threatening territory. In fact the “threat” is projected by security personnel in various states of disarray, one of them told to take a taxi when all I had to do was walk two minutes to the coach that for 13BsF took us to Parque Central, another threatening place. This bus follows the nearly universal Venezuelan theme “only depart when full or overfull”. The ride after dark features some of the most disheartening and creepy vistas ever, whether compared to fact or fiction.
All these missions were accomplished with cash from the rip off exchange desk at the Internacional, where my Danish kroner lost around 40% of their official value – oh well. My BRF bank also delivered a nasty suprise when it charged me nearly 5 euro for a withdrawal of 20 from a local cash machine and from my cash account (no credit card).
