Merida, a beautiful town nestled deep into the Sierra Nevada mountains of the Andes, is the extreme sports and adventure center of Venezuela. Hiking, biking, kayaking, rafting....anything your fear factor can handle.
We decided to go out to a nice dinner here (for the first time in a while...and we proceeded to lounge on every piece of antique furniture we could find) to make our adventure plan.
We netted out on two air "sports" and one water sport.
Yesterday we went up the longest and highest teleferico in the world - built by the french - and it took four stages and two hours to climb. We climbed from a scorching 89 humid degrees at the bottom to about 40 at the top. The ride offered beautiful vistas of the rapidly changing landscape and gave us a greater understanding of the flora and fauna. The roundtrip adventure concluded at about 1pm and we headed straight to one of the three fabulous vegeterian restaurants in town (LIKE CHRISTMAS MORNING) and refueled before we went paragliding.
For me, paragliding entailed having a chiseled South American man run really fast behind me until we lurched off the edge of a cliff and then soared through the air like a trembling bird. Honestly. it was the most peaceful and stunning experience of my life until he said "hold on, mamita, let me show you why this is extreme..." A couple of loops and swings later and my stomach was ready to collapse. We whizzed through the sunset a dozen different ways and we glided to the bottom of the valley and landed by the moonlight.
We joined two Irish women for a dinner of pizza - yes, the Venezuelans have more pizza places than ATMs - and then we treated ourselves to a little icecream at the Guinness world-record-holding shop that boasts 900 flavors. (No, I did not try the garlic with shrimp and mushrooms)
No comments:
Post a Comment