Day 7 - Separatists, pickpocket monkeys and coral snakes

Today I saw a monkey try to rob a Dutch Lady’s purse. Today was our tour of the capital, which had its ups and downs. We caught a coach bus this morning outside of our hotel, and since Alaina and I along with an old couple totaled the only four Anglophones on the bus, the tour was primarily in French. French was the language of the of the other 12 people on the bus – even though they were all Canadian citizens. Damned Separatists. I have been in this country for a week and my Spanish vocabulary has grown x 10. If I spent a year here I know I would be completely fluent, now explain to me how you can live in a country for over 30 years in which over %95 of the people speak English, and not know enough English to have a tour in that language. Very frustrating. I know I live in a bilingual country and I should learn French as well, but the truth is the people here learn enough English to get by by watching TV, so how hard do you have to try to ignore the world around you to speak about as much English as a mute? Anyway, it all boiled down to us having a guide that barely spoke English, but very good French, so we missed out on a fair bit of the history, but the tour was still worth it. We drove through the capital where we skipped seeing the second oldest church in South America Senora de La Asuncion, thankfully we had seen it the day before. The church was built by the spanish settlers in the 1600's, and is incredible. It is still in its original state, doors and all. We visited a couple of fortresses converted to jails in the days of the pirates before the country was liberated, and the history of the country’s heroes and heroines was exhilarating. We drove again through Porlamar, had a delicious lunch at a beach side restaurant in the city. We dined with an old American couple under roof of grass by the water. We stopped at a pier where Sardine fishermen shove off, margarita being one of the top sardine exporters. The waves crashed so violently here that they ejected water out of the sea and shot over the road. Our guide said she’d never seen it like this. Next came the lowest point of our day. A trip to the mall. The bus dropped us off in an area of the city of Pampatar which had a mall as big as something you would find in Toronto. Prices were as high as Toronto as well, ridiculously inflated for this part of the world. We walked around miserably, laughing at how ridiculous the whole thing was. I was annoyed that I had paid to be dropped off at a place where I might spend money, as this ritzy part of this poor country was certainly not something I needed to see up close. I felt like I was back in Canada. What was sad is that amercian culture was diluting the Latin American one. We left after an hour and some icecream from a joint called simply “Happy Time”, right up the stairs from “Kinky Donuts”, and my only relief was a Cerveca which our driver naturally kept in a cooler under the bus. The highlight of our trip, unbenknownst to us, was ahead. We went to a sort of outdoor botanical garden, which housed many plants which grow naturally here, some up at higher altitudes, most of which do not survive in the drier lowlands. We were familiarized with many fruits and plants, but the ultimate was after the maze. We walked through a maze of Benjamina trees, simply designed to be a buffer to kill time and hold tourists from crowding what awaited at the end. After we exited the maze we were greeted with pools of turtles and enclosures housing land tortoises. Further out various varieties of curious tucans greeted us, hopping from far branches over to near ones to get a closer look at us. We fed them watermelon through their cages and they eagerly took them from us. Friendly parrots flew around, and the centerpiece of the scenario was a huge mango tree which housed a white-faced monkey. He was a mischievious little one, gingerly jumping onto people’s shoulders before revealing his ferocious nature, climbing up their faces and down the backs of their shirts. We watched one Dutch tourist make faces and hold offerings of coconut out to him for just a little too long before he jumped on her and spent the next 5 minutes trying to get into her purse, manipulating buttons and zippers as he saw fit. I also got some good macros of a 12 foot Python from about 2 inches away from the face. The personal highlight for me was as I was staring down into an enclosure of 6 foot boa constrictors, one of the park guides asked if I would like to hold one, and seconds after I eagerly agreed I had a 6 foot constrictor draped over my shoulders. Feeling the weight of the muscle of the beast and staring into its reptilian eyes as it slowly slithered around my neck was an experienced unmatched for me. I’m not really sure what keeps these domesticated ones from snapping our bones like popsicle sticks, but thankfully it was a gentle beast. I’m sure the guides would never allow it if it was dangerous. . . maybe. I also fed a couple of parrots, looked face to face with a caiman, had a tarantula crawl over my hand, and craziest of all found out the snake we saw in the jungle was a member of the coral family, and was extremely venomous. I don’t know too much Spanish, but I recognized those words on its terrarium. Let’s hope we don’t have an even closer encounter with one on our second attempt to summit El Copey tomorrow.