Los Roques: a week in paradise (Part I)

As I mentioned in the previous post, I didn't book anything for Venezuela. There is an issue with the exchange rate: the official rate is 1$ = 2.1 Bolivar, but in the black market you can get 4.5 or 5 Bolivar(www.dolarparalelo.blogspot.com).

This means you pay double if you use your credit card. If you come to Venezuela, you have to carry with you all the money you plan to spend.

As soon as I arrived at the international airport in Caracas a guy offers me to change dolars at 4. I managed to get 4.4 and I changed 400$ in a hidden part of the airport. To make sure the bills were real, I checked them in a coffee shop.

I told the guy muy travel plans and he offers some advise to find a cheap flight to Los Roques. We had to run to the national terminal. I checked prices in a couple of places before going to the one he suggested. Indeed I saved 20% following his instructions, so I decided to change more money with him. I almost lost the flight because of that as we had to get back to the other terminal for the "transaction".

After all that extress I got the desired flight to Los Roques. Los Roques is a Natural Park, is a set of small islands protected by coral reefs. This is the view from the plane.

The airport tawer was just a truck with a box on top.


Here there are no hotels, only 'posadas' (guest houses), where everybody have breakfast and dinner together and they are usually very familiar. Most of them are managed by Italians, and there is a lot of tourist from there.

I stayed the first two nights in the Botuto, but it was very expensive and the food wasn't good. The only curious thing was that the showers were roofless.
Here you stay in the Big Roque where there is no real beach. There are fast boats that take you to the other islands, some of them only 5 minutes distance and others almost 1 hour.

This is the view from a peak in the Gran Roque.



Next day I planned to dive. They requested the licence which I had lost a long time ago. I could contact my instructor and she sent me a scan which was good enough.

Later on I found out that a girl died a week ago diving. It was like in that movie, I think Open Water. She was the girlfriend of an instructor who wasn't diving that day. She wasn't in the list and she went up first and couldn't find the boat. The boat left without her. Sadly she drawned.

Probably that's why most of the diving centres were closed because of "reforms" as they said and why I was requested the diving licence. After a couple of days the only two open centres agreed the prices and raised them to more than $100 for two dives: outrageous.

The agent I met the first day helped me to find another Posada, where the food was amazing, it had air conditioning and it was almost half price. If any of you go to Los Roques try to stay in Los Corales.

I visited a few roques: Francisky, Madrisky, Crasky, Carenero, Cayo de Agua. If I had to chose I would recomend Cayo de Agua. These pictures are from there.



Full moon in Los Roques.


View from the Gran Roque.

This is from Madrisky.A few pictures from The Gran Roque.




This is Spenky. All the islands were awesome


Sorry for the delay but in Los Roques there was no software to reduce the pictures. I will update soon with the second part of Los Roques.