Our brief crossing of Venezuela was greeted by more military controls and procedures than its friendly neighbor to the west. We sweat through two days of driving, and are happy to at least be saving money on gas. Thanks to Venezuela's rich petroleum reserves, gas costs about 10 cents a gallon.
We arrived at the romantic sounding city of Maracaibo only to find out that it was no where near as lovely as its name. No one we asked would tell us where the "nice downtown" area was. No one could even recommend a hotel. Finally we end up in the "BellaVista" neighborhood, that is far from "bella". The first group of hotels we look into won't rent a room to us because they only rent by the hour. We finally discover what they call a 24 hour hotel (one that rents rooms for an entire night), but the manager takes one look at the motorcycle and says that he doesn't want to rent a room to us because he fears that the motorcycle will be stolen, and he does not want to be resonsible. We protest his refusal - he has a locked garage behind the hotel, the motorcycle is not visible from the street. He fears that "los ladrones" will lift the bike over the wall. He can not be convinced otherwise, but finally relents..... but he makes us park the motorcycle in an iron walled closet at the back corner of the locked garage behind his hotel.
Unfortunately time prevented us from really getting to know Venezuela - the detour into the interior of the country and even to its supposedly amazing coast would take us too far from Central America, and we need to keep moving northward...
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