?, Sunday June 21, posada room ....Puerto Ayacucho

MS beat me to the words as we settled into our posada room: it is raining and Sunday, what else is there to do? These were my very thoughts as we shared a meal of chicken, rice, a piece of yucca and a scoopful of coleslaw at a restaurant in Puerto Ayacucho.


Puerto Ayacucho restaurant

This is the first really good downpour I've seen in a long time. Utterably suitable for the town that is the gateway to the Venezuelan Amazon. We arrived here in Puerto Ayacucho around 9.00am, 13 hours after we left Puerto Ordaz in the small, cold bus that never stopped playing music at us. On our first stop I made a joke about the bus vendors who sold blankets and pillows - but not chocolate. So MS got me chocolate. We split a bar of Nestle Savoy chocolate con leche. Not exactly the 73% cocoa Frey's chocolate we'd been sharing.

A national guardsman boarded the bus to check IDs. The soldier was a young man with a very serious face. I said he looked 12. MS said he was 18 and, considering the size of his gun, much too young.

Upon arrival in Puerto Ayacucho, MS and I walked from the bus station until we found an internet cafe. We searched the internet for cheap hotels and MS went to call them while I blogged. It started to rain, so we caught a taxi into town, getting dropped off in front of food (the above restaurant).

After a couple of hours it stopped pouring, so MS and I got ourselves out of the hotel room to go explore Puerto Ayacucho. We passed an 'artisan's' market, half closed on this rainy Sunday afternoon and MS talked for a while to a Peruvian necklace seller while I stood around a bit bored. MS asked where he might find food and liveliness and the artisan directed us to the river as a place locals hang out on Sundays.

MS and I don't fit in here. People stare at us and MS says 'Buenos dias' and smiles at them. On our way looking for food, we found the Puerto Ayacucho national cinema and MS talked to the men who worked there about whether any movies were in English. But he was hungry so we kept moving towards the river. When we arrived there were some bodegons and kioskos open and few people about. We looked out to the pretty scene of the Orinoco River. We passed a tugboat tipped over into a woody verge, painted in washed-out shades of green, red and yellow, one colour for each layer of the old tug. Nestled in the long grasses it was a pretty site, something rare here.

Puerto Ayacucho is a low-lying city with a distinct absence of the skyscrapers that define Venezuela's other cities. It is the youngest city in the country and I have trouble describing it. There are coloured concrete shopfronts and houses with pull-down gates and walls, bars on the windows, garbage on the sidewalks, kisosks with DVDs and families sitting in front of courtyards or at little stalls. Signage is either homemade or Pepsi-made, basic or bright. The sidewalks are uneven, bits of road full of beer bottle caps. It is not an inspiring place.

MS ate a mini empanada and we walked back towards the movie theatre, stopping to share a banana split, something I haven't eaten in a long time. It was made with cheap, sugary ice-cream but a treat nontheless. When we got back to the cinema, MS tried to convince the 'projectionist' (the cinemas show DVDs) to put the movie on with English dubbing or subtitles but then two women and their children walked in so it had to be in Spanish. A documentary about Congolese refugees taken to Norway began, but about 10 minutes through the film the projectionist came up to us and said the women wanted a movie, not a documentary, for the children and since I wanted a movie in English he'd put on a different film. I waited in anticipation to see what film he would choose ad it turned out to be The Triplets of Belleville! An excellent choice: almost no dialogue -for me - and a cartoon - for the children. Though I don't think the children liked it, as the women left with the kiddies halfway through the film. Nice, however, for me to see it again and a treat for MS, who hadn't seen it before. He thought it a strange moive, but I heard him laughing so I think he liked it.

After the movie MS and I went to a pizza place for dinner. We sat on the verandah. I had a pizza with corn, peas, onions and red capsicum. The pizza was oily, melty and thin-crusted, nicely a bit sweet, from the corn, I think, or maybe the cheese. MS had maraschino cherries on his pizza and I relished them as I plucked a few off.