Maracaibo – Day 1

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I write a lot.  I write long blogs.  I am trying to write shorter blogs but write every day.  I am hoping that by doing this the format will appeal to more people.  Once I start writing, however, I find it near impossible not to write the same way I always have so I find I am having trouble keeping these short.   The following is from the time we tied up to the ship in Maracaibo until four hours later when I returned to find a bunch of weirdness happening on my ship.  I hope it is somewhat entertaining.  Stick around and we will get to the excitement in Venezuela.  Trust me.

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After tying up your ship the first thing you have to do is put down the gangway.  The gangway, if you don’t know, is the “stairs” that people can use to climb up to or off of the ship.  This is important because shimmying up the mooring lines is tricky, although I seem to remember one of Charley’s Angels making it look pretty easy.

I had walked down the gangway and hopped over to the dock so I could pull it over to dry land and something went wrong with the mechanism which controls the raising and lowering of the gangway.  This left me alone on the dock while the engineers figured out how to fix it.  I was gazing at the large city of Maracaibo when a little Venezuelan fella drove up.  He turned out to be the ship’s agent.

Wherever a ship travels there is a local agent to assist in all manner of things, from setting up fuel services to mail delivery.  I try to pin the agent down as soon as he comes on board so I can find answers to important questions before he is bogged down with a bunch of nonsense from the Captain.  You know, things like, “Where is the gate?  How can I get a taxi?  Does anybody speak English?  How do I say, ‘chicken wing?’  Where is the best place to eat?  Is there somewhere to watch football and if so, there won’t be Steelers fans hanging out, will there?”

For some reason, the Captain usually gets annoyed when I interrupt ship’s business with my inquiries so I was glad that the delay gave me the opportunity to pester the agent uninterrupted.  My cross-examination proved to be quite frustrating.  The agent repeatedly emphasized that the only safe place for me to go was the mall and that it was only safe to go during the day.  He relayed a story to me about three sailors who had been robbed and beaten right outside the gate of the port just last week.  Apparently, somebody wanted their I-phones.  One of the poor guys was beaten so bad that he lost an eye.

Geeze.  And I thought the lines at the Apple Store in the Houston Galleria were out of control.  What happened to the good old days when people only killed each other for tennis shoes?

Look – I have been all over the world and everywhere I traveled I have been warned about how dangerous it is.  I don’t give it any thought.  I have been in riots and places that had cannibals.  Heck, I have been to Baltimore!  Anywhere you travel you have to be aware of your surroundings and use some common sense.

Ok….I have to be truthful here.  I am never aware of my surroundings and seldom use common sense.  If you haven’t read my blogs for the last few years you will just have to trust me.  I have been mugged, had multiple cell phones and wallets stolen, been conned in German bordellos and hustled by Nigerians in Japan (yes, you read that right.)  I just didn’t think that I would screw up any worse in Venezuela than anywhere else.

So, in spite of the warnings I went to shore an hour later – the first one off the ship.  I jogged to the gate.  All right, I speed walked.  Really, I strolled.  But I got to the gate and anxiously walked into the city.

Into madness.

I am constantly amazed at how big cities around the world are.  Before I started travelling I assumed that America had most of the big ones, with a few in Japan and China.  I don’t mean in respect to population.  I mean big metropolitan cities with impressive skylines.  Maracaibo has two million people and you could put Orlando next to Jacksonville and I think the skyline of Maracaibo would be a tad bigger.  It consists of crappy buildings and bland architecture, but it is big.

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This would be a good time to fire up Cocaine Blues by Johnny Cash.  Yes, we are sticking with a drug theme.  There is a reason.

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You know how I said there are two million people in Maracaibo?  Well, they are all driving at the same time.  And they all drive American cars from the eighties.  You remember those boxy sedans with bench seats like the Caprice Classic?  That is what everybody drove.  Not nice ones.  They all looked like they had been taken out of the junk yard after having been stripped for parts.  I mean, the few I was inside didn’t have any interior trim.  They were bare metal.  It was just a shell with an engine that sort of worked.

The people that weren’t driving were passengers because there were a ton of people in taxis.  Venezuelan taxis, at least those in Maracaibo, are unlike any I have seen around the world.  The taxis in Maracaibo are the same crappy cars that everybody else drives.  They only way you can tell it is a taxi is because it has a sign on top.  But that sign does not say, “taxi.”  The sign has some word, or maybe it is a name, and they are all different.  I think I figured out that the name on the sign indicates the area of town that taxi can service.  Actually, I am not sure that is it at all because every area of town has taxis with different names on the top.

Before I even had to figure that part out, I had to figure out how to get a taxi.  I was having trouble flagging one down because they were all full.  I waited about thirty minutes and never saw an empty one drive by.  I finally struck up a broken conversation with some guy on the street and I think he agreed to get me a taxi for $5.  He flagged down a taxi pretty quick but it already had four people in it.  I was on the verge of demanding my cash back when everybody in the car started motioning for me to enter the car.  Apparently I was holding up the show.

It turns out you don’t get your own taxi in Maracaibo.  Every car holds five people.  I guess this is why they like the bench seat.  As the taxi man drives down the road he holds up a number of fingers which indicates how many passengers he can take.  Weird.

I had written three places of interest on a piece of paper.  One was supposedly an outdoor market where you could get native Indian artifacts.  The second was a plaza that was supposed to have good restaurants.  The third was the mall.  I never go to malls when I travel.  We have malls in America.  But I wrote down the name just in case I needed a fallback position.

Turns out I needed it.  The driver would not take me to the first two locations.  He kept pointing at me and shaking his head.  I tried to indicate that I didn’t understand, even saying, “no comprende.”  He passed my paper around to all the other passengers.  Each of them did the same thing.  I was getting the impression they were saying, “You will get killed if you go there, gringo.”

We drove and drove.  People would hop in and people would hop out.  It was a flat fare.  For the equivalent of $1.25 you could ride all day as far as I could tell.  After about forty-five minutes the driver pulled over in a rundown part of town and told me it was time to get out.  This was definitely not a mall.  I demanded he take me to the mall but he just kept shaking his head and pointing at the roof of his car.  He kept repeating, “Sambil,” which was the name of the mall.  It turns out it was also on the signs of some of the cabs.

I had no idea what the guy was saying but I guessed that I had to get into a taxi with Sambil on the roof.  I stood awkwardly on a street corner for twenty minutes until I saw the right taxi and flagged him down.  Another twenty minutes and I finally got to the mall.

I won’t bore you with stories about the mall.  It was a mall.  It was ridiculously expensive.  A small ice cream was the equivalent of $12.  The women were amazingly beautiful but they didn’t hablo ingles so I didn’t have any memorably encounters.  Basically, I was disappointed with my outing and wanted to get back to the ship for a nap before my watch.  I made it through another weird cab ride and back to my ship.

The Chief Mate was on gangway watch when I returned, which is unusual.  He said everybody was in the ship’s office and I needed to get my passport and show it some officials.  Didn’t seem like too big of a deal.  I walked into the house, down some stairs, turned the corner and….

What the bad word?!?!?!?!

Remember that scene in Traffic where there is the drug bust out in the middle of nowhere by a bunch of Mexican officials.  That is exactly what these guys looked like – undercover cops that looked like Hollywood had called central casting for a crooked cop.  Then you had uniformed army types.  I felt something licking at my crotch and thought one of the pretty ladies from the mall must have followed me home, but no!!  It was a drug sniffing doggie wearing a vest.

What the bad word is going on?

Find out in tomorrow’s installment – “I don’t think a few cartons of Marlboro Reds are getting us out of this one.”

Sorry we still haven’t made it to the exciting part.  I’ll give you a little poem to make it up to you.

 

When you visit Venezuela

You better not bring no drugs

Your crotch will be sniffed by doggies

And maybe some of Chavez’s thugs

They will eat up all your ice cream

And munch your potato chips

The doggies will poop wherever they want

‘Cause they just don’t give a shit.

They will make up bogus charges

And give your family a scare

So make sure to leave your dope at home

And stay out of Chavez’s snare

 

Have a groovilicious day.  Give a dollar to a homeless guy.  You don’t need it all that much.

See ya

Russell Yale