Day 8: Still Under the Weather.

Now, just to add insult to injury, I have "pink eye" as well as the flu.  Nice.  This photo sums up my life right now.

Still Have The Flu. Seven Days and Counting.

Seven straight days now with a fever between 99.5 and 100.7. I feel like crap. For a while I was soldiering on, but I am out of energy. My maid, Yaneth, is actually taking great care of me. Between her and my Spanish Tutor, Virginia, I am well provided for. They bring me home remedies, chicken soup and check my temp. about every hour. Last Tuesday (or was it Wednesday?) I went and saw the doctor at the Embassy. He took my temp., looked in my ears and my throat and told me I had either a bad cold or mild flu. Well no shit Dr. House, you had to go to medical school to figure that out? What gave it away the coughing, the runny nose or the low fever? So he tells me to take something like aspirin or ibprophen to reduce the fever and gives me some allergy pills and sends me on my way. I went out and got some Dayquil on my own, it was better than the US Govt. could offer. I called the Health Unit again today and was told the doctor was out for the week. It is just as well. But I did want to get tested to see if I have the H1N1 or what ever the swine flu is called. I would just like to document what it was that I survived. Well, I have not survived it yet...

6.4 Earthquake in Caracas

Here is a link to the news story: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32816049/ns/world_news-americas/

This morning I took a group from the Embassy out on a City Orientation Tour. As we were driving around the city and I was pointing out various malls, hotels, parks etc. someone asked me, quite off handedly, if there are ever any earthquakes in Venezuela. At first I said I don't remember any, but then someone reminded me that we there was an earthquake here a few months ago, and then I remembered it.

It was at about 5:00 am and I was laying in bed and I felt the bed shaking, I remember being irritated with the dogs because it felt like one of them was leaning against the bed and scratching, causing the bed to shake. Then I remembered that I put the dogs outside earlier in the evening because they were acting strange, pacing around and whatnot. I sat bolt upright in bed and could hear the windows rattling. I said "Mary! Its an earthquake!" and she said "No its not, its just the wind, go back to sleep." Well I was vindicated when we got to work and the news about the mild earthquake was going around. Obviously, when you are not sure if it is an earthquake or the wind, it is not a real strong quake. I quickly forgot about that earthquake, since it was one of the least traumatic experiences I have had here.

Well, today we had another quake. Once again the dogs were acting strange. Lola was trying to dig a hole in the marble floor. She was totally focused on a spot in the den and was just going to town digging with her front paws. Obviously, she made no progress in the marble floor, but she drove nuts while I was trying to watch "Ocean's 13" on HBO, so I put her outside. A little while later, after the movie ended, I was sitting on the toilet, reading a book about WW II and suddenly felt the building shaking. This time there was no mistaking that the building was really shaking, an effect most likely magnified somewhat by my perch on the commode. It was raining really hard, like sheets of rain, when the shaking started, and it had been raining like that for about an hour to an hour and a half. When it rains like that here, mudslides are quite common (I did a previous post about the mudslides about a year ago) and as I sat there wondering what was going on I thought it was a mild earthquake and was slightly amused, not worried at all because the shaking was quite mild. But the shaking got stronger and stronger until there was what felt like a hard jolt, like the building hit something. At that point I was thinking mudslide; that the building was about to slide off the hill (we are built into the side of a really steep hill) or that mud was crashing down onto the building. I jumped up, took stock of my delicate predicament, decided I did not want to be found dead in the rubble sitting on the toilet, grabbed a hand full of toilet paper and did a "rush job" as I ran into the hall outside the bedroom. I stood there for a few moments and realized that the shaking had stoped. I looked pretty riduculous standing there with my pants half way down and a hand full of toilet paper. The crisis passed, nothing happened and I pulled my self together so to speak. You can always count on me to keep a cool head in a crisis.

Kavak

Note: This is a continuation of the story of my visit to Angel Falls. Please see earlier posts about Angel Falls. Photos will be added later.

After bouncing to a stop on the grass strip, we climbed out of the plane, unloaded our backpacks and started the 200 yard walk toward the small gathering of thatched roof huts that comprised the town (village? hamlet?) of Kavak. Before we got to the village, the pilot turned his plane around and was in the air again. Technically, Kavak is not a “real” village. It was built by a tour company to house tourists. In exchange for allowing the construction of a lodge on their land, a group of Pemon (this particular group is called Kamarkotos) get to live in the village. There were no more than a dozen huts in Kavak, each constructed of mud, sticks and palm fronds. Most Pemon live in buildings made from modern materials like concrete cinder blocks, the huts were for the tourists. Four of the huts were for visitors and came with concrete floors, the rest had dirt floors. “Electricity” was supplied by a few solar panels and was limited to one solitary light bulb in each hut. Running water was supplied by a cistern in the village and was pretty much limited to toilets. There was also no place to recharge my camera battery, which was a bummer because I neglected to charge it before we left and it was getting low. We were shown to our hut, which had beds, and after settling in, Greg and I set out on a short walk to a nearby creek to take a bath and hang out. The village was in a stunning setting, nestled up against the southwestern corner of Auyan Tepui with the seemingly endless Sabana on the other side of the town. After our bath in the creek (it was raining the whole time) we headed to the large rectangular hut in the middle of the village for a lunch of roast chicken, pasta, fruit, strong coffee and ice tea and cassava bread. After lunch, our guide (Felix) led us on a hike into the foothills of the Tepui to a waterfall located in a slot canyon. As we climed up the hill toward the Tepui, the Sabana gave way to denser vegetation until we were in a heavily forested area. We came to the beginning of the slot canyon and realized that we would be swimming up most of the canyon. We took off our shoes and shirts, put them in the dry bag and jumped into the cold water running down from the top of the 8000 ft tepui. Ropes were strategically placed so that we could pull ourselves along as we made our way up the canyon against the strong current. At several points we had to get out and hike around short waterfalls. We finally made it to Kavak Falls which was about a fifty foot fall down into the narrow slot canyon. We sheltered under a ledge across from the fall and were blasted with mist from the fall. After resting a while we headed back. This time there was no need to hang onto a rope, we rode the current. It was a little like tubing without an inner tube. Along the way back we saw another 100 ft cascading waterfall. We hiked back to the village and changed into dry clothes.

Before dinner, we were offered a local delecacy, boiled grasshoppers with a hot sauce made from some sort of really hot pepper and the “butts” of leaf cutter ants. The hot sauce was ridiculously hot. Slap-my-ass-and-call-me-Sally hot. I think the peppers were grown by inmates in an insane asylum. The ant-butt-juice came from the venom sac of the soldier leaf cutter ants. (Leaf cutter ants are huge and can strip a tree of leaves. The soldiers are even more huge and have a venomous bite.) The grasshoppers were not bad. They were a little salty and not as crunchy as I thought they would be. It was served with cassava bread, which is an unleavened wafer/biscuit of mashed up cassava root. The Pemon make giant sheets of the bread which are then kept in big Hefty trash bags. Every meal includes cassava. All in all the grasshopper snack was pretty good, especially when taken with a very conservative amount of the hot sauce. Dinner was spaghetti. The grasshoppers with ant-butt sauce was better than the spaghetti. We turned in early In anticipation of our first day on the river.

Gripe: n. a cold; the flu; Pronounced gree-pay

Yo tengo gripe. Not fun. Stuffy nose, sneezing, body aches, coughing. It is not all fun and games.

I went whitewater rafting last weekend in the foothills of the Andes on the Rio Acequias, in Estado Barinas. This area is very remote and wild. It is also beautiful. I will post photographs here and on Facebook. I have some friend requests pending for some of my regular readers on Facebook, friend requests that have not been accepted because certain people do not ever check their Facebook pages, apparently.

The gig in Maricaibo is comming up pretty soon. But first we have a gig at the Embassy on Sept. 18th for the "Pirate Party" we are going to dress up like pirates and talk like pirates. (Arrr...). Here is my favorite pirate joke: Q: What kind of movies do pirates like? A: Ones that are rated Arrrrrr....ok that is pretty lame, but kids seem to love it.

We are having a sale here in the CLO office right now. One of the vendors sells Venezuelan Chocolate. Good stuff. It is a little known fact that Venezuelan Chocolate is considered the best in the world. There are different strains of cacao, the base ingredient in chocolate, much in the same way as there are different strains of grapes from which wine is made. The cacao from the Chuao region of Venezuela is considered the best in the world and is exported to the specialty chocolate makers in Belgium, Italy and Switzerland. Your can really tast the difference if you do a side by side taste test. Rum, chocolate and beauty queens are the three things that Venezuela does best.

Everything else...well thing are going south fast here. Here is a recent article from El Universal, a newspaper in Caracas:

Employers: Venezuelan private sector is slaughtered
Foreign exchange in short supply, labor clashes and constant harassment among the reasons

Economy In the opinion of Antonio Peñalosa, the Secretary of the International Organization of Employers (IOE), the outlook is dire for Venezuelan businesspersons. Their day-to-day routine is very worrisome. "Businesspersons in Venezuelan lack oxygen. The private sector is massacred." Peñalosa substantiated his allegations by underscoring the stumbling blocks faced by the private sector, which have gotten worse in 2009, in the transition to socialism and in the middle of economic stagnation. "We know they have troubles to get funding, to get foreign currency, and they should face labor conflicts and lack of consultation to set guidelines. There is harassment of the sector," he said. According to Peñalosa, the Venezuelan economic and social outcome mirrors such reality. He is positive that very few businessmen wish to invest in Venezuela, "except for those cases where investments are with the State." "The numbers on capital input and investments are catastrophic. Venezuela gets a tenth of the capital received by Colombia and far behind other nations, such as Costa Rica and Panama," he noted. Forsaken requests Peñalosa took a few minutes to list the requests that have been made for over eight years by international organizations, such as the International Labor Organization (ILO) and the IOE from the Venezuelan government. "There is still in this country no social dialogue; no national joint taskforce has been created to include businesspeople, the society, workers and the government itself; no tripartite working table has been organized to include the private sector, employees and public servants; no discussions have been conducted to set the minimum wage among the parties involved. Furthermore, a regulation on labor stability which violates the ILO Convention 158, signed by Venezuela, is still effective," he said. Failure to meet the demands does not break the IOE spirit. Its secretary seized the opportunity to ask the Executive Office "to listen to the requests of both organizations; to talk with businessmen and not against them." He also said that his organization is able to denounce what is happening in Venezuela in the field of business. Peñalosa also noted that his organization views the Federation of Trade and Industry Chambers (Fedecámaras) as the only lawful business agent. "Such organizations should be free from meddling and independent. In Venezuela, Fedecámaras is the only one which meets it (this requirement)."