La Claritas – El Dorado - 90 km
As always, when in a new country, nearly all things come as a surprise. In
Venezuela, the amount of trash alongside the road was astonishing. The no-mans-
land next to the highways appeared solely for discarding empty beer cans.
Secondly, the lack of infrastructure was shocking for such a wealthy country. Trucks
still delivered water to houses in villages. In a country receiving that much rain,
practically no one had a water tank to harvest rainwater. It, thus, came as no
surprise to find taps dry, and no one seemed perturbed by it. The Boiling Frog
Syndrome sprang to mind.
Our route ran through densely forested areas with light traffic, making chatting
while riding possible, not something that happens every day. Ruta 10 was wide and
featured a good shoulder but, sadly, it soon became overgrown and relatively
narrow. Road maintenance didn’t appear high on the Venezuelan agenda. The lack
of infrastructure was a surprise after spending such a long time in well-organised
Brazil.
Following 90 kilometres of biking, El Dorado made for a convenient overnight stop.
Being another typical Venezuelan town, the centre appeared disorganised, revealing
muddy, potholed streets, a small market and a central square. A few Chinese-run
shops lined the street and old V8 cars were lined up at the petrol station. The
queue extended from the start of the village, along the main drag, and into the
petrol station!
The guesthouse we located couldn’t have been more basic. The room had a
cement-screed floor, a hole in the wall as a window and two wobbly, sagging beds.
The bathroom had no water and was useless. It, however, had a TV offering one
English channel. One could only laugh, and I quite enjoyed the craziness of it all.
The name, however, conjured up images of the search to find gold in the mythical
place of El Dorado. Remarkably, El Dorado was indeed situated in the centre of an
immense basin containing a large amount of gold deposits. Over the past centuries,
many came to find their fortune.