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.