First days in Caracas

Our first days

Actually our crew which flew to Caracas was me, Carlos, Edie and my dad. He needed to take some time off so he decided to travel with us and experience the culture of Latin America.

As I said in the title. We finally reached our new home. Flat of Carlos mum and his “home” is located in the Cumbres de Curumo. Which actually is not anymore part of the Caracas city. But I would say that only  biger difference is that we do not have that much traffic jams and there are no slams close by. This part of Caracas is very nice. More or less quite, although we live in front of the main avenue so we are in the centre of traffic. There are mostly only big family houses, parks, supermarket and all basic shops with services you might need. To the centre you have to go by car or bus. But since petrol cost basically nothing (full tank of petrol is about 2-3 BF which is about 20-30 CZK) since Venezuela is petrol nation, everybody drives car. Which creates constant traffic jam with never ending sound of horns of impatiens car drivers.

There is everything measured by time. If you ask how far is some place in Km it is not relevant. Everything depends on traffic and everybody will tell you distance by time. So in our case it used to take about 40 min to down town and when we were unlucky also about 1-1,5 hours. Unfortunately down town is one of the most dangerous places, it belongs to Chavistas and their companeros. You are not allowed to go there without local guide, who in our case was Sandy and Carlos. I felt safe and nobody was bothering us but we could hear around “mira Gringos” (look American guys) so obviously we did not look local. With our white skin we were more than visible. Our white skin was shining among the “chocolate” citizens.

Caracas had about 7 mil inhabitants and if we count all tourists and also people who travel insight of town because of work than we can easily count about 10 mil people. If we count also that most of the people have car than you can imagine how it look like. Not everybody follow the traffic rules so it creates a bit mess on the road.  Caracas is divided into many parts from which you can easily see which one belongs to Chavista Party  and which belongs to opposition. Chavistas had most of the infrastructure destroyed (problem of common ownership) and opposition has nice neighborhood. I consider Caracas quite green and more or less clean, depending in which part you are. Although more and more places is filled with barrios or ranchos (slams). Which from far behind looks cute, colourful and I did not saw them as poor places. Still you can see that they are built from bricks and on the top of iron wood you can see satelites with direct TV. Because it does not matter that people do not have enough money for food and their car looks like after hard fight time. The most important is to have direct TV with non stop access to soap operas 🙂

That is Caracas and its life –  80% of population live int he poverty, large fields of slums are the sights of reality

Although there is also beautiful Avila mountain which is surrounding Caracas from northern side and makes the natural border and protection against sea

I like the life in Caracas although is very different from the one I am used to.
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Writer: Zlata B. Vaskova

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About zlatavaskova

Young always smiling mom of 2 boys . Finished her master degree at the Economical University in Brno (Czech Republic) country in the heart of Europe. Heading new life stage with a brand new role in my future life career. I have been working for student NGO AIESEC, playing accordion for 11 years, swimming as a competitive mono flip swimmer, singing in a teenage choir and joining different hobbies when any opportunity appeared. I love traveling and exploring new countries so that's why I have been studying abroad (Finland, Thailand), working abroad (Estonia) and daddy of my kids is from Venezuela :). I am a passionate dancer too. Now working for various projects, passionate about a vegan diet.