It's as bad as they say

I went to Puerto la Cruz for a couple days not long ago. Getting there was an adventure worthy of its own post (Dear Managers of the Metro: Please learn to operate a subway system. Love, Hedgehog.) that ended with me sharing a cab to a hotel at 11 p.m. with a pretty, petite Latina from the States -- call her Doris -- who was visiting Venezuela for the first time. She had been traveling 20 hours and was beat. One of the only questions she managed to ask was, "So is this place as scary as they say?"

As you know if you've ever looked at this blorg, my answer was no. There are problems but it's not as bad as they say.

I spent two days out there, with the only remarkable part being an iguana that was well above 4 feet long, wandering around.

At the airport, leaving, I ran into Doris again. That was odd, because she was supposed to be visiting for four days, and only two had passed. She seemed shook up. I asked her if everything was ok, and she said no. That her visit was awful. The only hint she would give me was to say "It is as bad as they say."

We talked more later -- our flights ended up arriving in Caracas at the same time, and we shared another cab as she sought out a hotel -- and she told me that right after she arrived in Puerto la Cruz, after now 21 hours of travel, she was waiting outside her friend's house talking on a phone in his car, and someone grabbed her by the hair, pulled her out of the car, grabbed her ring, her bracelets, and her phone. Her screaming brought neighbors out of their homes and the guy ran off. It sort of spoiled her trip, what with not being able to sleep and just being upset all the time, so she left.

It reminded me of the other friend who was once outside his boyfriend's house while his better half ran in "just for a minute." My pal was out with the car and a couple kids in the back seat. Four people came up with guns and demanded the car. Fortunately they let him take the kids out first.

And the friend who was kidnapped for a half a day before most of her attackers left her in her car with only one guy guarding her, gun to her head as she lay on the floor. Suddenly he was surprised by various guns pointed at him and she was able to leave: police, who had followed the car with aid of a homing device in the trunk, moved in to free her.

And for all of the utter horror of all of this, all three of those stories involve people who got off alive, and even with most of their property intact, in part because of their own privileges. The daily paper is a litany of miseries about people in the slums, who routinely lose their kids to various forms of gunfire, stabbing, muggings, hit and run, you name it. The bodies, after a weekend in Caracas or Puerto la Cruz or Maracaibo, can end up piled up like cordwood in unrefrigerated morgues and police SUVs.

None of which would be so bad if the police and court system worked. With rare exceptions like my kidnapped friend, it doesn't. Many cities pay their cops something close to the (far from living wage) minimum wage, starting at about $7,000 a year (at the official exchange rate, which is about the same buying power as $3,500), even as they spend $100,000 apiece on Toyota 4x4s to make the cops look tough. Few murders are even investigated. The fear, against which I am constantly arguing, is not insane.

No, not kidnapped

I just hid the blog for a minute. It's back. With sloths.



That's a baby sloth eating. Eventually the grown-up sloth eats a bit too. They were going fast. They probably suspected that they, and we, were about to be hit by a tremendous thunderstorm. Must suck to be a sloth in a thunderstorm.

While we're at it, here, also in Parque Generalísimo Francisco de Miranda (No Longer Known as Parque del Este), is an iguana. It knew I was coming and wisely hid behind a chain link fence where it was safe from my driving skills.

Hoops II

Caracas fails again in its attempt to terrify gringos. BRING IT ON, CARACAS. What does it take? Do we need to start waving the stars and bars or something? We went to El Silencio and started to assemble hoops. The rain beat the living bedryness out of us and we hid under an arcade in one of the area's many lovely housing blocks. We practiced hoops. Various little kids showed up and tried. One or two left with new hoops. Awwww. We kept trying to make hoops. The PVC tubes we had gotten at the nearby hardware store wasn't quite up to snuff. I just learned today there are three major suppliers of PVC electric conduit in Venezuela. The good stuff, apparently comes from Brazil. Come on Pequiven! Give us something we can hoop with. We want to support the home team!

The rain stopped. We went back to the plaza. We hooped. Cristian, a guy from the blocks showed up and made friends. Assam, guy from India who spoke no Spanish, was walking by and stopped, an open can of Polar Ice beer in his hand. He couldn't hoop to save his life but he played frisbee for a while with us and then left. A group of six females aged four to 70 showed up. The oldest was by far the best hooper. People who had never tried hooping learned to hoop, including those who thought they had just come to take pictures. Hooray for hoop. Sorry, Caracas, if you want to be scary eek run away, you will have to try again.

PS: Well after dark, I went out onto a street corner and hooped some more. No one seemed to notice me.

Hoops!

The best thing happening in my little corner of Caracas is Ser Urbano, a Spanish acronym for Fun People With Facial Hair or Tattoos Make Fools of Themselves in the Plaza. Today we'll have a hula-hoop party in Plaza O'Leary (pronounced plasa ole-EH-ahree) in El Silencio. I have been knocking over furniture, computers and glasses of water in both office and home as I attempt to practice for this. I have a feeling it will be a while before we are full-on Bay Area Hoopers (and truly, I can do without the self-consciously "creative" rave baloney), but I also have high hopes for the local talent, given the abs and rhythm sense that come from dancing salsa.



Digressing...Speaking of hidden talents, I didn't mention that my house-guest and traveling companion to the Gran Sabana took a frisbee to the jungle. The most amazing thing was when he pulled it out on our hike out, after we had to cross a log bridge that descended deeper and deeper into the storm-swollen river, and our Pémon guide, Ricardo, had taken a little swim. I was getting ready to brave the current by jumping in when my guest hucked me the the disc. I retreived it from the river and threw to Ricardo. He caught it perfectly and threw a perfect throw. It went from there. He had much better aim than I, even with my 25 years more experience with the toy. In the village of Kavanayen, 6-year-old girls were throwing spot-on tosses within minutes. Pretty amazing.

Dinner

OK one last item of the night. One of the most bizarre and amazing things for me is how this country is so jaded on presidential theater. Tonight, I took a cab to meet friends for dinner. The cabbie was freaking out about how the president had just gone into "cadena," which is when the government takes over all airwaves for a special announcement, in order to give a typically lengthy speech in which he talked of the "Yankees of shit" and told them to go "100 times to hell."

I met my friends and we walked to dinner, passing pungent fallen guavas on the sidewalk, arriving at length at a beautiful Moroccan Jewish restaurant under a mango tree. We ate a tasty dinner as did everyone else in the place. I took pictures of a gecko on the wall chasing a junebug bigger than the lizard's body. We talked of the city and art and plazas and makeup and the usual topics. We left and watched lightning over the southern suburbs and one of us played harmonica as we walked and it was a lovely and remarkable evening and there were no loud conversations of politics and no words of worry from any quarter that the president of the country was evidently trying to start a war. While he plays like he is under attack, it felt nothing like Bolivia today, or like the U.S. seven years ago, or, I imagine, like Chile 35 years ago.

The lack of passion among those opposed to Chavez (look! his name shows up at last in this blog!), and among many of his ostensible supporters, is really the shocker to someone coming from the outside after hearing about the supposed revolution. There is "revolution" without revolutionary fervor, or much counterrevolutionary fervor. Most people just want to get home to dinner with the family and can't be bothered to worry so much about far-off concerns like whether the U.S. was behind riots in Bolivia or abstractions like unnamed pitiyanquis.

Sidewalks

I'm obsessed with making Caracas's sidewalks useable.



This is what it looks like on a Thursday, Friday or Saturday night in much of Chacao and Las Mercedes, the only rich-ish neighborhoods that have anything like walkable streets. In fact, this is in El Rosal, which is widely credited as the most walkable part of Caracas. So what is wrong with this picture?

1. Yes, those are cars. Yes, that's a sidewalk. I've been asking the omnipresent parking attendants why they leave cars on the sidewalk and most claim that their business has special permission. When I ask to talk to the owner, the owner is never there. I have been telling police that I think this is bollocks, and that they should do something about it. They generally tell me to talk to a supervisor. I'll let you know how that goes. As is now, you can either walk in the street or walk through here:



2. Above, I said it's a sidewalk. But when you look close you can see that there's no significant change in relief between the street and the sidewalk. If anything, the sidewalk is just a poorly built parking area. Poorly built in the sense that the concrete is cheap -- notice all the cracks. (I recently noticed someone had used wood chips as an aggregate in a sidewalk in Chacao. The wood is gradually disappearing, leaving cavities. It looks kind of cool except that the cavities fill with dirt and grime and the concrete will probably endure much less time thanks to this cheap trick and the lack of engineering inspections.)

3. The lighting just doesn't work for pedestrians. Granted, Chacao is doing something about that. On Francisco de Miranda, the main avenue through that municipality, the city installed two-tier streetlamps with lower lights for peds and higher ones for traffic. Good stuff. Only problem is that the installation took months, during which there was no light at all for a long block of the street. During much of that time sidewalks were also closed for construction, so everyone had to walk in the street behind limp caution tape.

I keep thinking about making flyers to try and rally pedestrians to demand their rights...but further research is needed. I don't even know who we should be making our case to. Like I said, I'll keep you posted.

Fear

Fear is a controlling aspect of life everywhere, but I've never had fear drilled into me so completely as I have here. When I was 21 and biked across the U.S., every adult asked me, first off, if I had met any "wackos" out there. I eventually decided they were the wackos, letting their lives be governed by fear of wackos rather than pursuing their dreams and living their freedom. But on the other hand, reality can be as bad as the hype. Here are some of the headlines in Caracas's best-selling newspaper, the tabloid Ultimas Noticias, translated for your pleasure:

Page 30
Muggers relieved him of his life and his motorcycle: He arrived with three shots at Clinico, where he died

Shuttle worker perforated in Barcelona

They killed three youths in a house: Merida: The cadavers were discovered by the landlady of the residence where they were renters. One of the fatal victims was four-and-a-half months pregnant.

Page 37
They ambushed a youth to kill him with 4 shots. El Rodeo: The gangs "Toñito" and "Kilo of Bananas"* implicated in the crime.

A run-over indigent died

Page 38
They killed a man in La Trilla

Page 39
They finished off a man in the La Trilla sector: The victim was working as an ironworker in Betania City (yes, this one appears to have merited two stories)

Page 40
Sports. Harmony after dissonance, a gentle touch after torture, the soothing voice of Big Brother following the Two Minutes Hate.

Murder is omnipresent. Since the government doesn't publish crime stats on the Web (or does it? if you know where to find them let me know), here is an article from June that gives some sense of it:

In 1997, Venezuela, Brazil and Mexico, countries with similar social characteristics, had very similar homicide rates, while Colombia and El Salvador amply exceeded them. The former had 19.6 murders per 100,000 residents; 20 per 100,000 in the second case; and 18.4 per 100,000 residents in the case of Mexico.

"Now Mexico cut its index to 14.7, Brazil remains around 20, Colombia also reduced to 37 and Venezuela, taking as a reference the official statistics, has a rate of 45 homicides per 100,000 residents," said Briceño León, who recalled that the survey published by Conarepol in 2007 gave 49, and the last release from [human rights group] Provea referred to 46. Official data from El Salvador say that the index in 2006 was 54 per 100,000 residents.

The resulting fear is omnipresent. It affects the most quotidian decisions, like which trail to hike (go to Sabas Nieves and hike a "secure" overused fire road with 2,000 of my closest friends, or go to a narrow trail through the woods and see more butterflies at the (low but present) risk of being robbed?) where to buy plumbing supplies (pay less in the ghetto or pay more and remain in the zona verde?) What pants to wear on a hot day (long pants and fit in, or shorts and stand out as a non-Venezuelan and risk who-knows what)? Bigger questions like where to live, whether to have children, what career to choose, all are driven overwhelmingly by fear for nearly all my friends.

They recruit. People tell me daily not to ride my bicycle in the city, citing the danger (even as they drive, risking carjackings and robberies by guys on motorcycles). There is a constant pressure to not do any number of (usually fun, interesting) things, because of this supposed danger. It didn't affect me so much at first, but I notice it affecting my reactions to little things. I had a weird cab ride last night, as the cabbie first was willing to chat and agreed to help me with an airport trip in a couple days, but then fell obstinately silent when I asked his name and number so we could arrange that same airport trip. I found myself assuming that he was a robber or rapist or some such thing. It didn't even occur to me til afterward that maybe he was mentally ill and paranoid or maybe he just didn't like me.

^*No kidding. "Kilo'e Cambur."

Golf

A couple posts below mention golf courses. Yes, there are golf courses in the middle of Caracas. There is also a military airport, several freeways, a national park, a bunch of non-park forests that wend 10 km uninterrupted by streets, a tremendous military base, a couple spread-out, gated university campuses, and a collection of shopping malls.

These big blocks of land are dedicated to one function -- transportation, defense, shopping. They are fine, in their place, but for those who don't, for example, need to go to the mall or the university or the airport, they are mostly obstructions to urban life, rather than amenities. Since most of the time, most of the people don't need to do any one task, it's best to keep these things either small, like a single city block; or porous, meaning streets go through; or diversified, meaning that the mall might have some offices and housing above the roof; or stashed safely on the edge of the city like a medieval wall, blocking further sprawl.

The best example of this being done right is El Avila National Park and the adjacent Cota Mil freeway, which protect the north side of the city quite well against sprawl. There are no informal "invasions" of land uphill of the Cota Mil, and while there are some invasions of the Avila elsewhere, most remain small, for now. (The only big one is the government's "Socialist City" for which it grabbed 5% of the park and is building an experiment...no word yet on the urbanism of that place, though if past affordable housing projects are a guide, it will be lousy.) Centro Commercial Ciudad Tamanaco is another effort at mixed-use, with its mix of offices, shopping mall and freeway ramps. Sadly, having three land uses, none of which are active after 9 p.m., isn't enough to create an urban neighborhood. Jane Jacobs recommended at least 7; I don't know if there's a magic number but this isn't it. A couple malls, like Tolon that I mentioned below, fit nicely onto a block without destroying the city. And I can think of one example of a porous mall, San Ignacio, which has a street through the short axis of a long rectangle.

There are a bunch of problems with these single-use districts. They make short trips long. They force everyone -- trucks, buses, cars, pedestrians, bikes, horses -- onto just a couple of streets, which have often been turned into freeways. They reduce the space available for housing, contributing to the city's current pattern of having high-rises as the only type of home that's commercially available. The streets are left to themselves, free of storefronts full of curiosities, the glow of living spaces above, and friends chancing to meet. In short, they are the death of cities.

The government has responded with various ideas, none of which get to the heart of the issue. There is a plan to move the population south, off the coast, to the "Eje Orinoco-Apure," the well-watered band of land from the Andes on the west across to the Orinoco Delta on the Atlantic coast. This is based on the false idea that the city is crowded -- it's not, it's just being inefficiently used. Another idea is to convert the golf courses into housing. This could work wonders if the planning were right, as the Caracas Country Club, in particular, is plopped right in the middle of one of the best potentially walkable areas in the city, abutting Chacaito. There is plenty of shopping and work and mass transport; a bunch more housing could be just the ticket. This project, though, is on hold; some say it's because the homes on the golf course are now occupied by supporters of the government -- and they don't want low-income housing any more than the viejo riche. Perhaps the most hopeful program are the community planning councils, which for once give residents a voice in long-term planning of streets and land use. Still, for these to have the best effect, they need to exist in a matrix of visionary, participatory planning for the whole city. Locals won't usually think about the effect of their plans on the broader city unless forced to.

Walloped

A car finally struck me. It was a wonderfully Venezuelan experience. Though if I want to tell the story in a Venezuelan way, I guess I need to say -Se me choquaron -Me golpearon^*. "They hit me."

I entered the crosswalk at Av. Francisco de Miranda and Av. Principal de Las Mercedes in Chacaito. This is a six-lane 2-way street with tall office buildings intersecting another street with four lanes in one direction and a little country street (sans sidewalks) on the north side. It's a major intersection, big enough to have a painted crosswalk. Some guy in a pale green (!) sedan, a Mustang or some such, wanted to turn right from eastbount Miranda onto southbound Las Mercedes (click the map to understand. This is right in the middle of the map, south of the golf course.) Like most Venezuelans, he saw me walking the same direction as his car was going, and the other pedestrians in the crosswalk going the other way, and decided to just go, knowing that everyone is looking out for cars and will yield with the grace of merengue dancers avoiding other spinning couples on the dance floor. The rule, generally, is that once the nose of a car is ahead of you, it has right of way. I didn't care. I was in the crosswalk and I have decided that in this respect I'm not going to be culturally relativistic -- cars suck just as much here as they do anywhere else.

At first he let me go, walking along to the right of his car as he edged closer and closer. He nosed ahead of me. I kept walking, and right when I was about to walk around the front right corner of the car, he accelerated while turning, walloping me with his right-side mirror and then knocking my knee with the car's side panel. It was like he just couldn't stand the idea of some other guy taking right of way from him, and he needed to assert his insecurity in whatever way was available.

10 meters more and he was stopped at the back of a line of cars at a long red light. I know what you're wondering, and no, he didn't run over the other drivers for blocking his way. Drivers and pedestrians here respect the power of other cars (and of politicians, businessmen, and pushy bastards on dance floors) quite unduly. There is a willingness to submit to the power of others that I, as a long-time U.S. resident, find kind of pathetic.

As he drove off, some guy near me yelled "Demasiado!", obviously shocked. A couple of women in white told me I should have gotten the license plate and told a cop. I realized I didn't particularly care. I thought about how I coulda keyed the car, or kneed it, both of which I would have done when I was younger and in a country where drivers rarely shoot people for small acts of vandalism. It didn't feel worthwhile. This was one little act of unjust power in a city where these things are rampant. Cops, companies, politicians, and just about every driver will take advantage of any little opening to behave in awesomely antisocial, unfair ways. Drivers always, always cut the line in traffic. And I'm no saint, I use my unjust power at times -- I think about getting searched by security schmucks and how you can wow them by mentioning you have a laptop in your backpack. Suddenly they almost always just let you go on through. And besides, I knew I had won. I didn't submit. I just kept walking. That's all I was trying to do, and I did it. I wasn't even bruised.

Such antisocial behavior was, for me, the biggest shock in arriving in Venezuela, with its banner of socialism. One thing I've found -- most people here are incredibly, over-the-top nice. They will do anything for you. Once you've met their eyes. Before that, there is a substantial minority who will fuck you six ways to Sunday. It is pretty easy to join the "us" side of us and them. But until then, beware.<sup>*

*</sup> UPDATE 9/5: Pepito, in comments, notes that my Spanish sucks. That is true. This is why all of my generalizations need to be taken with a grain of salt. Also why I refused to write or speak publicly about Venezuela in general for my first year here, despite goading from friends abroad. As is, I edited the first paragraph to have a better Spanish sentence. I changed the last one from extreme overgeneralization to regular overgeneralization.

PS: Welcome, drinkers of Inca Kola News. And thanks, Mr. Rock, for the link. Very kind. You sure have friends in many places. Hello Buenos Aires! Hello Krung Thep! Hello Sinaloa! Hello Lyngssa! Hello Burnaby! It occurs to me that the Blogger comment software is a bit of a pain. If anyone wants to return the salutation, it's very simple.

Transport for Caracas

Ken Livingstone was here today, rubbing salt in my wound.

As mayor of London, Livingstone made a very odd deal: Cheap diesel from Venezuela for his city's bus system in return for providing cheap(er) bus fares for the poor of London, pro-Venezuela propaganda on London buses, and urban planning assistance for Caracas. This deal was a foil for all sorts of political types: People said Chavez was nuts to give aid to a country as rich as England, that Livingstone was nuts to help out a guy like Chavez, that this was a brilliant move combining socialist policies from rich and poor, that the whole thing was hogwash. Yawn. For me, any effort to enhance the livability of Caracas is worthy of attention, no matter the political weirdness behind it.

Sadly, it wasn't to be.

Transport for London, the transit agency, supposedly send some people here and set up a little office. Half the diesel fuel, about $7 million worth, did make it to London. But for all the talk, we will never, Livingstone said, never see any report from the planners. That project is over, he said. Instead he will offer a bit of advice himself, with the goal of making this a "first-world city in a first-world country in 20 years." (The Spanish translator initially translated first-world as "first-class"; "first-world" isn't a popular aspiration for Chavistas. It's like telling a hipster that he could be in wearing a nice suit in 20 years.)

So, even though no one will give me $15 million in funding, maybe I should offer a few thoughts. It seems to me that the most central problem in Caracas is the lack of street life. Most streets are dead from dawn to dark, and the rest from dark to dawn. The busiest streets tend to be those connecting Metro stops to nearby shopping malls or major employers. (For some reason the stops never seem to be exactly adjacent to the most important destinations.) The lack of human presence is an auto-alimentación: a positive feedback loop. (Positive in the cybernetic sense, not the value sense.) The lack of people makes it easier for miscreants to prey on the few who are there, to leave piles of trash in the sidewalk, to park on the sidewalk, to design buildings with curb cuts across the sidewalk, and worst of all to eliminate the sidewalk completely. I'll post some pictures soon of the most depressing lack-of-sidewalks situations, but suffice to say they are manifold. (Was that pretentious enough phrasing for you?)

Happily, we have a role model for some aspects of this just 1,000 km away. Colombia's capital, Bogotá, was rescued with incredible haste -- a three-year mayoral term was enough to turn it from a fatalistic deathtrap into an optimistic deathtrap with many more bicycles. In one term, a mayor fixed a host of my biggest pet peeves: He brought back sidewalks that had been caved out to make unpermitted parking spaces, created a real car-free day, and made a citywide bus rapid transit system. Perhaps instead of Mr. Livingstone with his 20-year timetable, we could use a visit from Sr. Peñalosa?

La Linea

Yesterday I explored a part of Caracas I had never been to, La Linea in Petare. Explored is such a great word -- it's just like Colombus "exploring" these places where there are already millions of people. But that's what it felt like, anyway. Starting out at the central roundabout of Petare (a packed shopping area with little stores, street vendors on every square inch of sidewalk and quite a bit of the street as well, and tens of thousands of people walking through) there are little shopping streets going downhill in a couple directions. The one I knew before goes back to the Metro station, and I was in no rush so I took a different one. Following the crowds I went into a little street barely bigger than a hallway where old men waited in line for the beer store and young women lined up to get into a Mercal government-run discount supermarket in the back of another store. Continuing on I could see gaps between the buildings showing that this gradually widening pedestrian street was following the Rio Guaire, the year-round river that is now jailed in a concrete trench for most of its trip through the city.

The concrete street had little shops on either side on the ground floor of homes. Typical was a stand selling gum and frozen plastic tubes of sugar-water for about 300, 400 bolivar debiles (30 or 40 of the current bolivar cents, or about a dime in U.S. or Canadian money) under a little awning in the front of a lady's home. Her name was Belkis, a common enough Venezuelan name. Her daughter was Bisbel, a combination of her parents' names - also a common Venezuelan thing to do. They lived up a set of stairs with a rusty railing in this beige-painted house and went out on Saturday to collect a few bucks. Couldn't make more than $5 on the day even if they sell everything, but it's also a chance to see friends and meet new people, so why not.

Downhill from the street was the river, gradually breaking out of its channel. I could see a sandy beach on the other side of the river, the Macaracuay side, the first beach I've ever seen on that river. The uphill side of the street was a precipitous incline made of some mixture of buildings, retaining walls and exposed loosely consolidated sedimentary rock. I saw one retaining wall made of shotcrete and rock bolts that looked like it would hold up through a lot, even if the rock bolts were already rusty and were thinner than my pinkie. The depressing thing was the wall made of corrugated steel, the kind used to line trenches. That kind of steel is very strong but in this case the individual pieces weren't tall enough, so someone welded other ones above. I'll get a picture next time. It's a bit hard to describe but the point is that this welding was only on the street side, not on the hill side, and was very superficial, rather than being done with the kind of massive welding rig you normally use to connect sheets of 3/8-inch-thick structural steel. So the upper elements were already distended out, breaking off from the ones below. They are certain to fall before the hill gives way. A good early warning system but a dangerous one, and one that wastes expensive steel.

The homes on the uphill side were equally chimboso (Venezuelan for cheesy) but were at the same time miracles of engineering just for staying up. They climbed up this crumbly hillside at an almost 45 degree angle, at times cantilevered out 30, 40 feet, supported by 10-inch pilings going down 20, 30 feet. In a seismic zone. With multistory homes up above, sometimes 4 stories. Pretty amazing. I want to meet the engineers. They are geniuses at improvisation with limited and cheesy materials.

Walking out of the commercial section the street stayed quiet, with just a few buses and motorcycles. I saw a guy walking his moto down a set of stairs from the next neighborhood up the hill (according to Google Maps, which has finally posted some Venezuela street names, that next street up is also La Linea...as is the next...) and I saw another guy pushing/motoring up a very steep staircase out from under a house. Looking down through you could see he came from a little neighborhood in the back yard that gets out to the street through these stairs. It's a medieval level of complexity in a modernist city.

Onward the street traces the river downstream more and more. I saw a few other people walking, mostly quiet. There were peeping birds. Motors in the distance. Between the homes on the uphill side, even back in the commercial part there were patches of sugar cane and vines and banana (cambur!) trees, and getting further out the Venezuelan countryside was clear: hills ahead covered in absolute greenery interrupted only by a quarry, hills at 10 o'clock mostly green but for a couple fancy high rises, and then what's that, one of the homes on the river had a horse. A horse!

Eventually I saw a camioneta (small bus) that had stopped to change its destination signs. End of the line. I got on and took it back to Petare's center. It continued on to Altamira, Chacao, Bellas Artes, and Silencio: terra cognita.