I´m a millionaire!!!!!!

Last time I wrote, we were eating pizza and sleeping in an epic shithole in Chaguaramas, Trinidad, hoping that we could somehow gank a ticket to Venezuela on the next morning´s ferry.

So we woke up at 5:30 am on Wednesday, ate cold pizza that just barely escaped the clutches of the termites and zombie spiders, checked out of the palacial hotel, and grabbed a taxi for the pier. The ticket booth wasn´t open when we arrived at 6:45, but there were signs everywhere saying that tickets would not be sold on the morning of the sailing, and that four days advance reservation was required. Clearly, we were screwed. But we sat down with a nice Swedish/Kenyan couple that was waiting to board the ferry, and had a good chat. We figured that it was worth trying to beg our way onto the ferry.

At this point, it probably sounds like travel in T&T is incredibly irritating. Objectively speaking, it is irritating. If I were trying to travel on a schedule for, say, business meetings or something, then the wobbly travel infrastructure in T&T would probably make my anus bleed. But we´re leisure travelers, with no time schedule whatsoever. Why get upset? Most of the time, none of this stuff really bothers us, unless we´re hungry. It can also get bad if the heat is bothering us--this happens much more often to poor Amber (sunburns, heat rashes, dizzyness) than it does to me.

Anyhoo, people are pretty friendly in Tobago--I can´t really speak for Trinidad, since we spent hardly any time there. The travel delays can actually be kind of fun at times, and sometimes we ended up having nice conversations when we would ask somebody for directions.

Okay, so back to the ferry. We waited for awhile while the other fifteen passengers checked in. Then they decided to sell us a ticket, with almost no fanfare whatsoever. Very nice...the travel gods seemed to be with us that day.

We met up again with the couple that we had met earlier--he was Swedish, she was a Kenyan living in Sweden, and they had two adorable little girls, ages 14 months and 3 years. They were an amazing pair--she speaks four languages, he speaks seven. They were on ¨parental leave¨ for six months, earning 80% of their normal salaries. Hooray for the Swedish welfare state!

This was definitely the best experience I´ve ever had crossing an international border. There were only about 20 passengers on the ferry, and there was a makeshift T&T immigration post set up in a tent on the small pier. Definitely the most beautiful place I´d ever had to go through customs--literally standing over the Caribbean on a beautiful morning. Good stuff--way better than an airport.

It was really hard to find any information online about the ferry, and it seemed that some of the locals in Chaguaramas had no idea that it even existed. Which explains why there were only 20 people on the ferry...but it was a wonderful ride. Nice, comfortable little boat with an open-air deck and fresh coffee. What more could you want? We spent the whole ride chatting with our Swedish friends and a really cool Venezuelan guy named Edward. Not Eduardo, but Edward.

After four and a half hours, we arrived in Guiria, Venezuela, a crappy port town of about 30,000 people. Four serious-looking guys in military garb boarded the ferry as soon as we docked. They had swords. I think they were fake--they didn´t look even the least bit sharp.

Then three Venezuelan immigration people set up a makeshift office on the boat, and began to process the passengers. Edward sailed through in a minute or two, with almost no conversation. The Swedes took a good 20 minutes. We were last.

Supposedly, Venezuela and the United States aren´t too friendly with each other these days. A few of you (you know who you are) actively discouraged us from traveling to Venezuela, out of fear of the anti-American dictatorship in Venezuela.

We had a really fun, pleasant chat with the immigration people--they really got a kick out of the fact that Amber studied International Relations. Once I told them that, we were just joking around while they stamped our paperwork.

Then, we were off the boat to another small tent on the pier, where the four serious military guys were looking through baggage. They barely glanced at our backpacks, and welcomed us to the country. I don´t think that I´ve ever seen such friendly bag-searching soldiers.

They didn´t seem to like the Swedes so much. They ended up in the back of a truck, and were taken somewhere else for further searching. We know where they planned to stay in the city of Cumaná, and we plan to go looking for them in a couple of days...we didn´t even have a chance to exchange email addresses or anything.

The good thing about the ferry was that we managed to avoid the insanity of Caracas. The bad thing is, we were at a grungy port which looked almost abandoned--a fair number of really old sunken ships could be seen in the harbor, not far from where we docked. There was no obvious taxi stand or bus stop or anything, and most of the other passengers had left already.

The next fifteen minutes were a crazy blur. I heard some guy say ¨taxi,¨ and I told him that we wanted to go to Rio Caribe, even though I had no idea where that town was in relation to where we were. Next thing I knew, some gangly pockmarked teenager had grabbed both of our packbacks, and was taking them to a beat-up old 1979 Chevy Malibu. I barely had time to negotiate a price--I thought that we´d settled on 25,000 bolivars, but I couldn´t understand the cabbie´s accent at all. And they were just racing down the road, with our backpacks. We had to follow. Amber and I gave each other the ¨I think we might get killed in the next hour or so, but we have no choice but to follow these guys¨ look.

Luckily, there were already three other passengers in the taxi, and one of them was our friend Edward. To make a long story short, all was well, although Amber didn´t figure that out for another three hours or so--I had argued with the bag-carrying guy about his tip (he asked me for about ten times more than what was fair, and I politely told him to take the TT$2 that I offered and fuck off), but everything was fine. The cabbie was a great guy, actually, and I figured that out pretty quickly. But poor Amber had no idea where we were going, and couldn´t understand a word spoken by any of the Venezuelans in the car.

It was three hours to Rio Caribe, as it turns out. Lots of time for Amber to get a little bit freaked out. But all was well--we checked into a little posada on the main plaza, just a few meters from the sea. It´s a crazy charismatic place, with that classic shoddy half-built improvised Latin American look. No hot water, but clean and friendly. The door is somewhat broken (if the door is locked, it takes a key AND a knife to get in), but it´s definitely a safe home in a charming small town.

I played Powerball once when we were in North Carolina last month, and I won. Now I´m a millionaire.

I went to an ATM in Venezuela, and took out some cash. The ATM receipt said ¨available balance: B$15036305.00.¨ I´m a millionaire!!!! Fifteen million B$!!! Sweet.

Okay, so I only won $4 in Powerball. And fifteen million bolivares doesn´t really buy much of anything, even in Venezuela. Apparently, it won´t even buy a bottle of fernet--because as far as I can tell, there isn´t any. Waaaaaaah.