Going somewhere south? Avoid Caracas

I prefer not to go with the crowd and would always choose, some might say, the difficult option. Recently I was going to Chile, directly south, and it seemed absurd to travel over a thousand miles north to the cultural frontier between north and south America and one of the most unpleasant airport experiences in the world, just to travel south again. And since I have never been to Venezuela, just next door, Caracas seemed more logical than Miami.

In the 1950s and 1960s, when I was growing up in Trinidad, there was a distinct look to Latin America. Most, if not all, of us, were encouraged to study Spanish at school. The great continent behind us beckoned. It had been a place of work for many Caribbean people during the 20th century and before too. We islanders played our part in the building of the Panama Canal, and we had toiled in the oilfields of Maracaibo and gone as immigrants and agricultural workers to Simon Bolivar’s republic.

Forty years on, most Trinidadians still speak little or no Spanish. Only our governments and entrepreneurial businessmen grasp the importance of expanding that market for our goods and services. Everyone else seems caught in the magnetic pull of the North-American dream.

A 24-hour stopover in Venezuela was attractive to me, the great advocate of Latin-American/Caribbean relations. A hotel near the airport, for an easy exit next day, was the plan. I was warned that Caracas thieves were the most deft of all, that credit card fraud was rife, and that despite how much of a seasoned traveller I may be, that Caracas would present a challenge.

I listened but was confident that Caracas could not be worse than anything I had experienced while living in Cairo, or in the Mexican capital. I was used to people trying to make a fast buck, to the desperation of urban poverty that made human beings prey on one another.

But the confrontation with Venezuela began almost immediately. I brushed aside at least ten opportunists between the currency exchange desk and the taxi rank, but one of them grabbed my bags. He implied he was a registered taxi driver and ran ahead, merely to place my luggage in the back of a waiting taxi, complete with driver. I defiantly refused his demands for money.

The earnestness of the real taxi driver was reassuring but the short trip to the hotel was not. The roadways were choked with zigzag lines of noisy, old vehicles, belching fumes. The crowded pavements were filthy and broken, the roads were potholed and chaotic, the buildings coated in thick grime. I was back in the shanty town medieval streets of modern Cairo, but without the eastern charm.

With relief I entered the clean four-star hotel standing like an oasis on the edge of a sprawling slum. It overlooked a pleasant bay with its own beach huts. But I was marooned there. The room would be ready too late to allow a safe, daytime trip to the capital some sixty kilometres away. And worse still, the Reception had no safety deposit box for valuables.

So, my stopover was finally spent locked in a comfortable air-conditioned room looking down pitifully at the bathers, further along the bay, who were oblivious to the stench of effluent emptying into the sea from the wide river on the other side of my hotel. They had not noticed, either, that the branches of the coconut trees everywhere were covered in big, black corbeaux that fed off the filth that filled the air with a pungent smell. I compared it all to TT and decided that we hadn’t quite got there yet, despite our best efforts.

I was glad to be leaving for Chile the next morning, but Venezuela hadn’t quite finished with me yet. The airport exchange desk refused to accept the unused bolivares for the US dollars I had handed over just a few hours earlier. Exchange control regulations do not allow the export of foreign currency without permission, even by the unsuspecting tourist.

An insolent official advised me to spend the now useless equivalent to US$50, in the airport duty free shop. That is more than many people earn in one week. Nobody had warned me that the worst of all pilfering to expect was that perpetrated by the state which, in addition, set a departure tax of US$35 plus a US$27 airport tax, both of which it tried to extract from me as an in-transit passenger on my way back to Trinidad two weeks later.

After a phenomenal struggle I saw off that last attempt of thievery but I now own a very expensive bottle of Jil Sander perfume which, whenever I use it, evokes the sweet, cloying stench of raw sewage.

Ideals and reality do not often coalesce, so, with regret, it looks as if it is Miami airport here I come, but at least not for a long while yet.