After 2 nights and 3 days in the Venezuelan outback of Los Llanos, we had enough, and decided to throw the towel in and ask for some of our money back...
The tour had not been quiet as successfully as what we had planned. We should have known this right from the beginning, when just getting to the place was a pain in the a$$. It was hell, but we got through that so we thought that the rest of the expedition would be okay... WRONG...
So, finally we decided to leave...again, we thought this would be an easy process but alas..it wasn't... (man, I need to learn Spanish). We had to find an ATM in Mancatel that would take our cards, unfortunately there where only two banks and both of them didn't take international cards. So we where stuffed. Then we visited a shop that allowed large eftpos transactions but with a 12% BS fee.
We had no choice but to do this. Dodgy as man. There was a point in the transaction process where the lady had swiped B's card and then started to walk off with it. We both screamed out loud protesting to her removing the card from our sight. B by now was really nervous about us getting scammed, I was too a little but we had no money to pay for the tour that we just went on so we had no choice.
Finally, the transaction went through and we got money - paid off the lady from the tour and we were off to the bus stop.
We followed a nice lady from our hotel to the bus station. We were going to catch a taxi but she said the station was really close and there was no need for a taxi. She was right... it was about 300 metres away.
The bus we caught was called a Los Llanos Express, looked like a nice bus. I had seen them driving around the countryside..It was a 12 hour bus ride to Caracas from Mancatel, 6pm to 6am...
The bus ride was rough, the roads are bad and the driving is hectic...To make it that much more exciting for us, the bus was freezing, seriously, were talking like 2 degrees C. With the television not working we where provided with the alternative form of entertainment, concert style salsa music.
To easy the misery of the bus ride nothing like a couple of night time cold and flu tablets... My dealer seems to have an endless supply of these tablets. Take two in Mancatel wake up and your in Caracas...
Peace
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