The following morning we headed back to the road where we had got off the bus and tried to beckon buses.\u00a0 This is commonplace in countries like Venezuela and buses appear to stop just about anywhere to pick people up.\u00a0 What you come to realise is that, just because somewhere doesn\u00b4t have a bus stop it doesn\u00b4t mean that the bus doesn\u00b4t stop there, or even that it is recognised as an informal bus stop.\u00a0 This was one such place and we were pleased when two locals joined us to get the bus from there.\u00a0 After a little wait we got on a crowded bus and headed to Valencia.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Once at the bus station Reynold left pretty much straight away as he had a plane to catch from Caracas.\u00a0 I headed to find out when buses left for Merida, a spot in the West famous for having the World\u00b4s longest cable car, its outdoor pursuits and access into Los Llanos to see the area\u00b4s wildlife.\u00a0 I had read that there were night buses to Merida but was kind of banking on there being one during the day.\u00a0 I was pleased when I got to the right place and there was one advertised at 11AM.\u00a0 Unfortunately they told me that the 11 o clock bus was not leaving today, as did all the other companies I asked.\u00a0 The next bus after that was at 6pm but, as it was a ten hour journey, this would arrive at the rather unhelpful time of 4am the following morning.\u00a0 With a big sigh, and the realisation that this would give me more than twelve hours in Valencia bus station, I opted for the ten thirty bus to Valencia.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
I was considering heading into the city but it didn\u00b4t look too exciting so I conceded that I would do exciting things like update my blog so that it wasn\u00b4t a complete waste of a day.\u00a0 I am also now the World\u00b4s expert on buses in and out of Valencia, their times, the services of Valencia bus station and the surrounding areas and shops.\u00a0 I know that none of those sound like the most exciting things in the World and in reality, they weren\u00b4t.\u00a0 I spent so long at the darn bus station that I began to blend into the place, to the extent that locals starting asking me questions such as directions.\u00a0 That\u00b4s when I knew that things really had got bad when I lost my identifiable gringo status.\u00a0 So I spent the day exploring, woohoo, online, eating, drinking coke and smoking cigarettes.\u00a0 The mean ones of you out there may be thinking that this is not unlike my normal kind of day but, in all fairness, I normally don\u00b4t dedicate -quite- as much time to such pursuits.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
When it came to around the time for my bus I was actually quite excited.\u00a0 This was partly as it was a double decker coach and I was at the top, partly as I always like going to the next place and largely as it meant I was actually going to get out of Valencia bus station.\u00a0 Typically, after telling myself that\u00a0 I only had two hours to wait, one hour to wait, etc, the bus was over an hour late!\u00a0 Once on the bus I was pleasantly surprised at how comfortable, clean and safe it felt.\u00a0 The only problem was it kept stopping, firstly so people could buy food and drink and then a number of times possibly or possibly not for reasons known to the driver.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The following morning we headed back to the road where we had got off the bus and tried to beckon buses.\u00a0 This is commonplace in countries like Venezuela and buses appear to stop just about anywhere to pick people up.\u00a0 What you come to realise is that, just because somewhere doesn\u00b4t have a bus stop […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=170"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}