HIGHLIGHT OF THE DAY: Seeing some beautiful butterflies
BUMMER OF THE DAY: It's bloody HOT
WORD OF THE DAY: Egrets
I woke at 7am and lifted my head out of the hammock to see 90% of people already awake. I hate that when I am one of the last to get up. Breakfast was already on, so with a change of clothes, a wash of my face from the rainwater tank, I had a plate of great scrambled eggs and some juice to kick start what was to be our third day of interrupted sleep, travel and routine. It is starting to take a toll on people already as some people have their ‘cranky’ faces on. As we were eating brekkie, the boat drivers were divvying all the food that we and Allan had bought at the markets yesterday. They were going into 30 blue plastic bags to start with and then they would be distributed to the families on our way out. Gray had bought 10 dozen eggs, which was a challenge to start with, as we had to get them from the market to the truck, the truck drive, the truck to the boats and then the boats to the house and then the house back to the boats to get to the families. It wasn’t the kindness of the eggs that Gray bought them; he wanted to see how many eggs would actually make it over the distance. I am happy to report, besides the dozen we ate this morning for breakfast, they all made it safe and sound into the hands of the families without any casualties.
We left the lake house at 8.45am for the food drop to the 30 families that live in the water village. It was quite and the houses are quite basic. You wonder why they choose to live out here the way they do. Maybe it is a better quality of life; it is a choice I suppose. You could clearly see the effects of the oil spill on the hulls of the local’s boats as they were covered in a thin black sheen of oil. I wonder if they still eat the fish when they have been swimming around in the oil for 4 weeks and how long does it take an environment to recover? It is so sad to see and how these people are affected and not just as a news story on the TV. As we dropped the food off there weren’t many people smiling and to be honest I don’t think they looked very grateful for it. I don’t expect then to be kissing our feet, but smiles are for free and I felt like they were a little hostile. Maybe they just don’t like gringos? Even gift baring gringos. The highlight of this water village was a small girl of around 8 years old, float past us in a small wash tub to go and visit a friend at a neighboring house. That is how they roll here. It was a great photo op and she was more than happy to oblige.
We motored another 30 minutes to an inlet off Lake Maracaibo to do a spot of butterfly catching. This is Allan’s forte and he is super passionate about butterflies and his enthusiasm was contagious. Even though the weather conditions for the human race were not ideal, with the sun high in the sky and the humidity hanging around the 94%, inside a mangrove inlet, it took a lot of will to suck it all up and just be grateful where we were and who we were with. Allan’s grandfather introduced him to butterflies when he was a young boy and even found some undiscovered butterflies and Allan’s love stemmed from there and he has also found some undiscovered butterflies that he has named. We set a few traps, don’t worry no butterflies were damaged in our hunting as Alan stuffed some plastic socks with mushy bananas as we motored up the inlet and tied them to low lying tree branches and we would double back to see what butterflies were attracted to the delicious brown disgusting bananas. In the meantime Allan had his butterfly net at the ready and would swish and swosh to catch unsuspecting butterflies and show us their beauty. He was gentle with them and after showing us all individually their wing colours he would release them back out. There are approximately 9000 species of butterflies in the world and 2600 of them can be found in Venezuela. It was really interesting and it was a hot, sweaty 45 minutes but worth every second. Throw a few boat fumes in there, it pushed a lot of people to the edge, with lack of sleep, the heat and the fumes there was a lot of people complaining and I just wanted to slap them all silly. I hope that Allan didn’t pick up on it. We are in the middle of Venezuela, butterfly hunting with a specialist in his field, for this once in a life time experience, yes it was hot, yes the fumes were disgusting, but SUCK IT UP PEOPLE this is what you came here for. In my eyes, since Lightning Lake was a bust, Allan just wanted to give us our monies worth by showing us some other things, I know he felt bad even though he can’t help the weather, so I really had to hold my tongue and not lose it to these whingers. I did let one comment fly and then just let it go. Things are what you make of them and I can’t make people see the good, they either work it out themselves or they will just have a shit time. It is not my problem; I just need to tune out so they don’t drag me down with them.
Out of the inlet and back on Lake Maracaibo we motored for another 15 minutes to a larger water village called Congo. This had a population of 700 people that were living in 100 homes. The boats were just like cars and there was an ice cream shop, we motored past a bar and we stopped at the local church, all on stilts to get some photos. It was just like a mini city on water. The first known settlements on the bay were those of the Goajiros, who still are present in large numbers, but have re-settled in the western boundary area with Colombia. The first European to discover the bay was Alonso de Ojeda on August 24, 1499, on a voyage with Amerigo Vespucci (the same one for which the American continents were named). Legend has it that upon entering the lake, Ojeda's expedition found groups of indigenous huts, built over stilts on water ("palafitos" in Spanish), and interconnected by boardwalks on stilts, with each other and with the lake shore. The stilt houses reminded Vespucci of the city of Venice, so he named the region "Venezuela, “meaning "little Venice" in Italian. The word has the same meaning in Spanish. Although the Vespucci story remains the most popular and accepted version of the origin of the country's name, a different reason for the name comes up in the account of Martín Fernández de Enciso, a member of the Vespucci and Ojeda crew. In his work Summa de Geografía, he states that they found an indigenous population who called themselves the "Veneciuela," which suggests that the name "Venezuela" may have evolved from the native word. It was a little scary looking at some of the houses on our way out with small children not older than 12 months standing in the doorways, no barrier, no safety net, I wonder how many children fall in? I guess a life on water, you would assume that they can all swim, even at an early age, but something like that would be unheard of back home.
We now had a 2 hour journey back to the port and the truck. Allan decided to take a short cut and take the Catatumbo River back and then the last 40 minutes back on Lake Maracaibo for the last time. The river was amazing as it had long reeds on the banks where birds were resting and nesting. When they heard the boats they would fly off and especially seeing the egrets in flight is a pretty spectacular sight. It always looks like they just may not get airborne and then they tuck in their necks and off the swoop. I am fascinated by these guys for some reason. I took a gazillion pictures of them trying to get them in midflight with not much success…. O our way back in we saw some more iguana’s, howler monkeys and plenty of boats on the river, from small canoes to some pretty impressive cruisers that even in Australia would be worth a pretty penny. It’s Easter and like everywhere in the world people makes the most of the time public holidays for families and recreation.
We got back to land at 12.30, back to the Easter madness at the port with boats and water taxis all waiting their turns to pick and drop people off when they could. Rosita was in one piece, a sauna, but in one piece and we were back on the road again at 12.50pm for the 2 hour drive back to Merida. Lunch was going to be difficult today as it is Easter Thursday here, so we were just going to see what came along as we drove. We were lucky to find a bakery that was open, so Allan stopped and bought some tomatoes, fresh bread rolls, cheese and some turkey ham and we were going to pull up somewhere and have a picnic. In the end we ended up having lunch at Merida Airport at 3pm, as we had to drop Nez off for his flight back to Caracas and this was the best and safest option, which was fine with all of us. We also used this opportunity to use the airport toilets and with the building air-conditioned to an icy cold temperature it was hard to leave the building. I also managed to jump onto their free Wi-Fi for a couple of minutes to read messages and shoot a quick reply back to Zeme.
We got back to Merida at 5pm, checking back into the same rooms we had yesterday. We are all running on empty, but it is good to be back to a bed for the next 2 nights. Dinner was at the local pizza place and then it was back to the room for a well-earned sleep. It feels great to know we don’t have a thing on tomorrow and even if we wanted to being Good Friday we were going to be lucky if anything was going to be open anyway.
It was a great trip out to Lightning Lake even if we didn’t get the spectacular light performance we were hoping for. This really is a special part of the world that is for sure.
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