Hunting for anacondas and caiman, stick in hand, knee deep swamp water 
Roraima tepuy landscape from our bush camp
The beautiful and extremely rare King Vulture (all the ugly black and turkey vultures are everywhere!) 
The Gran Sabana of southern Venezuela is a vast area of open Savannah land covered in lush grass and palm trees
look what we found while walking around in the swamp - a 5m anaconda!!!
Playa Medina on the shores of the Caribbean Sea is claimed to be one of Venezuela's most beautiful and natural beaches
Pirhana fishing in Los Llanos was a lot of fun and the little biters tasted great for supper!
Venezuela has a lot of different ecosystems and the mountain vegetation adjacent the countries highest pass (3870m) is both beautiful and interesting. 
Playa Grande near the pretty little seaside town of Pto. Colombia was a enjoyable break from our road trip across the crowded roads of Northern Venezuela.
High water levels in the middle of rainy season made for some impressive salto (waterfalls) in the Canima lagoon. 
evening in the palm tree forests of the Caribbean coast 
Lori with some of the locals and their catch from the sea
A first...numerous road killed Caiman in the Los Llanos wetlands.
Lori with a very cute Capybara (at least this one didn't bite like the others) who loved to have his belly scratched!
Salto Kama..just one of the many waterfalls (Saltos) that line the beautiful road through the Gran Sabana province of S Venezuela
After 55 km of rough dirt/mud road, a 20 minute boat ride and finally a 3 km walk we are at the base of the impressive Salto Aponwao! Definitely worth the mud, rain and biting bugs! 
root strewn trail to Angel Falls
Angel Falls - highest waterfall in the world (976 m)
Red and Green Macaw...nature is beautiful!
alive and well in the jungles of Venezuela
Lori and the red rocks of Salto Kaui-Meru in the Gran Sabana
wet season rains have turned a lot of the roads into a mud bath
camping near Roraima (August 12th)
Hello Venezuela...August 8th near dark we cross into Venezuela and into the small town of Santa Ellena...a mining (small gold and silver mines everywhere) and tourist town. The food is good, rooms cheap and best of all we can trade off our American dollars on the black market for almost double the going bank rate! (2500 vs. 4000 Bolivares to the US dollar)
Felix is heading to Trinidad as we set out to explore the Gran Sabana...a huge Savannah like area dotted with palm trees and absolutely gorgeous in wet season. This entire area is a large park but indigenous people are allowed to live within the park boundaries. The most famous aspect of the Gran Sabana is its waterfalls (Saltos) and Table Mountains (Tepuys) and we set out to explore them via a series of dirt (mud in the wet season) roads. The scenery is great, riding somewhat challenging due to mud and we managed to find some really nice camping spots to get back into the hang of camping.
One really nice aspect of this park is that virtually everything is free...the indigenous people usually set up a small market that sells goods and crafts and I suppose they feel that it is in their best interests to get as many people into the park as possible to sell their products. We saw many waterfalls but one stands out in our memory as we had a very rough ride into a small village where we camped and survived a virtual deluge and an incredible number of biting varmints to then take a boat ride to Aponwao Falls which were in full flow. Very impressive indeed!
Aug 16th, after leaving the Gran Sabana via a road that led us through some of the best virgin rainforest we have seen we cruised into the large city of Ciudad Bolivia and booked a flight into Canaima in a Cessna 185 to visit Angel Falls...the highest waterfalls in the world at 978 meters. We spend a very relaxing and enjoyable 3 days camping at the falls and near Canaima and Angel Falls were definitely worth the visit. We also ended up walking through a large cave over which a huge waterfall dropped and this was insane! (It took a full 10 minutes to walk from one end to the other!) The noise, water flying everywhere was incredible and we actually enjoyed this part of the trip more than the 6 hr boat rides and or Angel Falls!
Aug 23rd, heading North we are starting to see some of the problems in Venezuela that people in Santa Ellena told us about: namely rising prices, incredible traffic problems, poverty, some garbage and people that are not so friendly! I took a wrong turn in a raging rain storm and we missed one of our trip objectives but eventually we worked our way to the Caribbean and onto Playa Medina and Puy Puy...both called the most beautiful beaches in Venezuela. Both were beautiful but Medina was packed with people and overnight camping was not allowed. Playa Puy Puy was empty and the 2 KM of white sand, palm tree lined beach is indeed gorgeous. The water was exquisite and I don’t think that either of us have ever spent so much time in the water doing nothing but relaxing. Our tent is set up right on the beach under some palm trees so all is good. We had a little excitement during the night when someone tried to rip us off but I saw a shadow pass the bikes and then a person looking into our tent from about 6 inches away. I kicked the guy in the face and yelled thief as he ran off. (too slow to blast him with my bear spray though..that would have been good!!)
We ended up spending an extra day here as the locals were protesting the bad state of repair that the road was in and had it blockaded for two days. No one could get in or out on the main road through to Caracas! Finally found another way around.
Crossing the north coast line of Venezuela was not a lot of fun on the MC’s. The only good (great!) thing about it is that as a MC rider you are expected (no OBLIGATED!) to get to the front of every traffic jam, blockage ASAP by whatever means available. Riding on sidewalks, through ditches, between and around vehicles, accidents etc. Is mandatory! At one traffic stop (for flood damage repair with heavy equipment) we stopped...several small kids (10 years old) started motioning us to proceed and would not stop until we pulled out, weaved between the cars etc and sure enough when we came to the dump trucks, hoes, backhoes we were waved through! Not too safe but one sure feels great passing hundreds of stalled vehicles and having every one give you the thumbs up or helping you to get around vehicles! (Don’t think that this would be classified as good MC etiquette in Canada!)
Aug 27th, riding though Caracas in the rain was kind of neat. A huge city with a massive Barrio (ghetto area) often referred to as one of the more dangerous cities in S America. No problem for us and amazingly no traffic jams despite numerous accidents! (Everyone here drives insanely slow when it rains and I couldn’t figure out why but with 2 cent/litre fuel every piece of oil leaking crap vehicle plies the streets and leaves lots of lubricant on the road surface...not good at all on a MC!) The city is accessed via a series of long tunnels that cut through the top of the mountains and Caracas itself lies in the valley bottom with the colorful barrios are perched precariously on the steep mountain sides. Yup...going into the Barrios would not be a good idea and although I wanted to take some photos (the barrios looked absolutely amazing on the steep, verdant green mountain sides) Lori gave me the big thumbs down when I stopped! Driving through the last long tunnel the junker in front of me quit right in the middle of this huge tunnel...don’t even want to think of the traffic jam that caused! After passing through what seemed like an endless series of cities packed with traffic and lacking traffic signs (oh what fun!!) we finally found the road to Puerto Colombia that runs through Henry Pettier Park. This narrow hairpin road is absolute death on a MC and by far the most dangerous road we have traveled on...slippery, single lane and plied by buses. But the scenery (when one can take their eyes off the road) is spectacular and ranges from jungle cloud forest to Caribbean beaches over its 50 km length. We spent several days in Pto Colombia and really enjoyed the beaches!
Back on the road we are heading into the far south of Venezuela into the huge Savannah /wetland complex known as Los Llanos (which is Venezuela’s equivalent of Brasil’s Pantanal). Some fantastic riding once we clear the large cities. Stopping in some of the small villages is one of the reasons we like to ride MC’s as people flock around you and all of us have a great laugh as we try to figure out what they are asking us in Spanish while they try to figure out what we are saying in Spanglish. (cross between Spanish and English...get it!!) By the time one leaves it feels like you have made a new group of friends!
Aug 29th, we ended up setting up our own multi-day trip into Los Llanos are rode out to the Rancho Grande where we had a great time taking a boat ride up one of the rivers (looking for wildlife), when piranha fishing (successfully I might add...they taste great!!), horseback riding (my sore butt) and hunting for Anacondas and Caimans.
No doubt about it, the hi-light of our Venezuela trip was capturing a 5 plus meter Anaconda! So to get this varmint one grabs a large stick and steps into swamp water that is knee keep, muddy and full of weeds. (Since I didn’t have running shoes I went bare-foot and Lori (along with a lot of other people) decided to let us do the hunting! One of the fellows on our group (Markus) is an absolute fanatic when it comes to snakes (has a boa as a pet) and within a minute of entering our swamp he found this snake! Three of us then spent several minutes trying to figure out where the head was (as it thrashed about) without getting bit (they can bite something vicious). Once we grabbed the head whatever fight he had in him was gone! (He had just fed on something so that helped a lot) Lori had no problem getting into the water and grabbing him by the head...pretty cool as this is definitely the largest live snake that we have ever seen and held. (I think a rock python we saw in Mozambique was larger but was a fresh road kill)
Sept 1st, back on the road we headed into the mountains and the tourist town of Merida where we relaxed for several days until Felix hooked back up with us. This is a pretty nice city and the weather (cool as we are up about 2000 m) suited us better than the heat of the coast. Hiked into a few lakes and explored town but never did get on the longest and highest cable car ride in the world as it was sold out days in advance.
It feels strange to be riding with someone again but Felix is good company and the ride from Merida to the Venezuela/Colombia border was interesting as the mountain scenery covered in virtual forests of cactus was an entirely different ecosystem from anything we have seen to date in Venezuela.
So what did we think of Venezuela?
-first of all never visit Venezuela in July, August or September as this is the kids summer vacation and the place is overrun with Venezuelan tourists (not all that many foreign tourists)
-Traffic is horrendous in most of the heavily populated north! This probably would never really affect one in the comfort of an air conditioned bus or rental vehicle but on a MC it made for some pretty rough times. - -- That cheap fuel really is a curse as the road infrastructure just is not up to the task of handling this traffic and no doubt maintenance of roads takes up dollars that probably could be spent better elsewhere. (Interesting to note that when president Hugo Chavez tried to raise fuel prices to 12cents/litre last year, there were full on strikes and riots! I can’t imagine what the traffic problems cost Venezuela in terms of dollars because of commercial trucking delays etc. (no railroads and few airports so everything has to go via truck!) and how much money per gallon the Venezuelan government loses when it sells gas for 2 cents a litre when the world market price is around 60 dollars a barrel!!! (what is strange is that despite strained relations with the US the US still buys most of Venezuela’s oil!)
-in general we would say that people are not as friendly in Venezuela as in any other S American country. I would say they are still more friendly that anywhere in N America! The friendliest people are the rich people from Caracas and those in the remote villages.
-Venezuela is now definitely one of the most expensive countries in S America...(outside of fuel which is insanely cheap...we put on a combined total of 10,000 km in Venezuela and it cost us just under 11 dollars US (black market conversion!)..with only Chile having room and food prices higher than Ven. (then again cost may be up because of tourist season)
-This is obviously a country in big trouble! People do not appear happy and we have never seen so much drinking in our life! The president (Hugo Chavez) is trying to socialize the country but despite huge oil revenue the economy is sliding down the tube as investor confidence in Venezuela is zero! Their currency is worth absolutely nothing outside of Venezuela and Chavez is planning on introducing a new currency next year. Chavez is riding the polls on the votes from the poor while the rich are in panic as the social reforms threaten to destroy their business (or at least that is the way they see it...and they are probably right) One thing that is sure noticeable is Mr. Chavez...his face decorates thousands upon thousands of bill boards all over the country. The cover of every newspaper has his smiling face on it and the TV stations have hours of Chavez politics on every day. We have heard that he is trying to pass legislation that will make him president for life and it looks like he has the support of the poor (app. 65% of the population lives below the poverty line while the rest are incredibly rich!). If the oil ever runs out or prices drop...goodbye Venezuela!
All in all...southern Venezuela is great but we can leave the North!
