Venezuelan Sugar and Coffee

On our way to lake to Lake Maracaibo to visit the lightning, our tour guide Alan brought us to a sugar factory, and a coffee plantation.

Here is what the sugar factory looked like as we approached:

The process works like this:

In the lower left of this picture is a huge pile of cane. Which gets handed to the shirtless guy, who puts it through the crushing machine. The crushing machine outputs sugar cane juice, and crushed cane.

The crushed cane gets hauled out into the sun to dry:

 After the cane dries in the sun, they burn it to boil the cane juice. This guy's job is to haul the dry cane into the furnace bit below the boiling tubs.

The boiling tubs look like this:

This guy's job is to stand by the boiling pits preventing boil-over, and generally moving scum towards the right, and yummy to-be-sugar to the left.

All the way to the left of that guy, was a big table, where they take the sugar and form it into blocks.

Alan purchased 2 blocks for one or two dollars each. It ended up being the sugar we used in our coffee for the next few days.

The scum on the right kept being pushed towards the final tub, where it was boiled down to make molasses.

This is molasses. They use it to feed animals.

After visiting the sugar factory, we drove up a hill to check out some coffee.

There was a narrow concrete path down the coffee plantation.

This coffee plant has lots of beans growing.

But only one ripe red bean.

It was steep jungle all around.

Back in the processing building, Alan weighed himself on the bean scale.

They washed the beans in this big tile area for several days.

Here is their huge roaster.

We drove back down the mountain and enjoyed a fresh cup of coffee. Lisa has a "grande".

We were asking about exports, when Alan explained, that Venezuela doesn't really have any exports right now, and is importing a lot of food just to feed everyone.

Infrastructure across Colombia and Venezuela

I doubt I'll ever again see worse poverty than the slums in Nairobi, but I was still shocked by some of the inconsistent, and often lacking infrastructure of both countries. Overall, Colombia is doing much better than Venezuela. In Colombia there were a lot of iron gates/bars, no major highways (that I saw even going across 1/3 of the country), and stop lights were only a suggestion. We planned parts of this trip to be spontaneous so we didn't have a hotel reservation for the day we landed. The next day we were going to hop a bus to Venezuela so we weren't feeling picky. At the airport we saw a poster for the Best Western Plus so given our lack of planning we told the taxi driver that's the hotel we wanted. He was quite confused and eventually we just told him to pick one for us. On the way we drove past the gutted concrete and rebar shell of the Best Western Plus. Across all of Colombia we saw thriving shops beside crumbling buildings. That contrast was very striking.

Venezuela was an entirely different thing. The currency is destabilizing. The bank exchange rate was fixed by the government at 6.3 Bolivars to the US dollar. However, every restaurant or hotel exchanges somewhere around 25 Bolivars to the dollar (at the moment). That rate varies, but it's such a discrepancy from the 'official' rate we constantly found ourselves thinking things were very expensive, no wait, really cheap, etc. I was very curious how wage rates compared to the cost of living when the value of the currency seemed to be so unclear. The answer was the people were struggling with a lot of basic items. When I went to a major grocery store in Merida (a big city) there was no toilet paper. The store often doesn't have milk but did get a shipment that day so everyone in line had 1-4 containers of milk. Items like toilet paper and toothpaste were sold in the street where they were highly desired. Electricity wasn't stable everywhere we went and some of the toilets were genuinely gross, even by my post-Kenya visit standards.

Honeymoon in Colombia and Venezuela

For our honeymoon, Lisa and I decided to go to Colombia and Venezuela.

We picked South America, because neither of us had traveled there. We wanted to see the Catatumbo lightning, take a jungle hike, and do some scuba. The lightning narrowed our options down, and we ended up basing our trip out of Santa Marta, Colombia with a visit to Venezuela.

The posts that follow will be Lisa and my recollections and pictures.