Merida

Merida is a nice university town sitting the mountains in the south west of Venezuela. It is also the base for many of the best outdoor activities in the country and thanfully for me, it was nicely cool and away from the sweltering heat of the coast.

I bumped into a lad from the States at the bus station. His name was Quinlan - his first name. Bit strange that but he was dead-on and we ended up knocking around together for the next few days. The fucker had spent the previous year in Rio as part of his masters studies and was about to start a PhD in Berkeley in a few months.

Merida is a attractive enough place and in no way as edgy as Caracas. As Quinlan´s mum is a Dutchie, we both had a strong interest in watchin die Oranje play the Ruskies in the quarters but unfortunately they were well outplayed and went crashing out. We had two great nights out in el Hoyo and Biriosca. Suprisingly, Merida had a pretty lively nightlife, especially during the week due to the large student population. We met a rake of american students and another big gang of eh ´religious converters´.

One of the other inhabitants at our guest house. Comforting.

Quinlan headed back to Caracas after the poor bastard spent two days in bed crippled by the Scutts (!). Started hanging around with this crazy lad from Catalunya - Alfonso. My first impressions of him were rather worrying, that he was truly off his rocker. It must be added that this was during the Spain v Italy game. Man, it was like being at the match itself. Priceless. He practically watched the game from behind his hands and every twenty seconds or so he´d jump up off his seat and roar some obsenity at the top of his voice.

He nearly had a break down during the penalties. As each Italian would make the walk up to take the spotter, Alfonso would start roaring at the TV - insulting their mothers, questioning the legitimacy of their births etc and as a Catalan he left aside his disgust for all things Madrid and Royal for the duration of the game.

Watching the Russian game with him was a more tranquil affair due to the superiority of the Spanish team. In between the two games we headed further into the mountains with Sarah, a Kraut from near Bremen, to a village called Los Nevados. It took a very bumpy four hour jeep ride to get there and a five hour hike early the next morning (although Sarah took a mule much to our amusement) and then we descended on the longest and highest (apparently) cable car in the world.

The day after the game I took the bus and headed for Colombia, the focal point of my trip.