Fine dining – a Venezuelan Hot Dog
The university town of Mérida is described as the adventure activity centre of Venezuela.
Unfortunately, most of it seemed to be closed for the holidays, so the only three activities on offer were paragliding, canyoning or horse riding. I’ve never fancied paragliding and $43 seemed a bit cheap to me to expect much safety. I’d enjoyed canyoning just a few weeks ago in La Fortuna in Costa Rica so didn’t really want to do it again so soon and knew that we’d be spending a lot of time on horses once we get down to Argentina. Later reports showed that the paragliding equipment was a bit suspect* and the horse riding was cancelled due to lack of interest so most people went canyoning. The course sounded more exciting than the river I’d traversed, although with so many people there was a lot of hanging about in a cold river.
* One riders harness detached entirely from the glider, just before takeoff, which seems like a flaw. She said she’d been told he was regularly in competition, although I this think she may have misheard him being regularly incompetent. Either way, she was nearly incontinent.
Anyway, that’s a long way of saying I was at a loose end in town for a couple of days so took the opportunity to do some shopping, picking up new toiletries and after hours of searching finding a shop selling decent authentic sunglasses to replace mine lost in the water.
Being a bit of a town expert by now I took the returning canyoneers into town for lunch, then on to an ice cream shop listed in the Guinness Book of Records as having the most ice cream flavours in the world. It was packed with people trying to choose from the 900 flavours on offer, although this was quite tricky as alongside the usual fruits and not so usual veg, were flavours such as Jurassic Park or Portugal. Despite being tempted by the taco combination of meat, tomato, salsa, avocado and rice I settled on the unsuccessful trio of cheese (salty), octopus (fishy) and baby (tasteless) flavour. It may have been better if they’d not been stacked in a cup, all merging together into an unappealing mess, but it’s more probable it wouldn’t have made much difference. On a subsequent visit I also tried beer (surprisingly good), Viagra (no idea how it should have tasted), Sangria (weak) and raw garlic (which flavoured everything I tasted for days to come).
After a few drinks in a bar I suggested dinner at a burger place famous for its big blue burgers. As we walked there the cities power cut out again, so surviving the pot holes and kerbs in the pitch black, we arrived there to find them able to cook burgers but not sell drinks. The blue burger turned out to be a normal beef burger with some blue coloured sauce, which was a bit of a letdown. The power cut left them able to cook burgers but not sell drinks and by the time we left it had started raining, so the whole evening was a bit of a washout and we were in bed by 9pm.
The next day was free as well, with nothing much to do until 4pm when we all had to divide into cook groups and go shopping at the local supermarket a short way out of town. We had to prepare a couple of lunches and had rather ambitiously decided on hummus and grated carrot sandwiches for the first day. Unsurprisingly Venezuela isn’t big on Greek salad ingredients so we settled on fresh avocado wraps with chicken or ham. The cooking is going to be a pain as between 20 people we’ve got to accommodate no chicken, no fish, no red meat and no dairy. Fish or chicken I can cope with, but the red meat person is going to Argentina, where they’ll be strung up, and I’m quite partial to adding milk or butter to most dishes.
We had a quick dinner in the shopping mall food court before walking back up the hill to the hotel, then on to a bar advertised as the ‘best bar in the world’ which was closed, so we walked downtown and found another decent bar full of students and drank there until another power cut got us sent home. As usual the rest headed home and the usual 4 tried to get into another bar but got put off by the cover charge and went to find some night time street food instead. I had a truly amazing hotdog covered in salad and chips, but paid the price the next day.
By the end of the day I’d walked up and down the hill into town 8 times which is going to come in useful as I’ve opted to climb the 2km high Mount Roraima over the course of 6 days, starting on the 7th January. Fortunately the other two doing it are both heavy smokers so I’m hoping the pace will be pretty slow. The rest have chickened out (as it is a pretty serious undertaking) and will be kayaking along the river to the Angel Falls instead.
