The traffic was real bad all week, since Caracas suddenly grew by 80,000 tourists.
Credit: Sophie Simon-Ortiz, Youth Radio
Next thing I knew, we’d landed at the Caracas airport, which is actually a few miles outside of the main city. It was the middle of the night, but we still had a long ride ahead of us. It took about three hours to get to the city because, in a really unfortunate turn of events, the bridge from the airport, which usually makes the trip into the city only half an hour, was declared unstable and unsafe for the amount of traffic that was about to descend on the city. Fabulous... This meant the trip that usually takes half an hour would instead be a three to four hour winding trek through the mountains-- the whole ordeal was a sign of how most of the trip would go. People at the airport told us that the road we were taking was pretty dangerous, so the government provided us with a police escort, which was much appreciated and completely unexpected. There were no hijacking attempts or anything like that, but just to know that the government didn’t even hesitate to escort us was more of a thoughtful gesture than anything totally necessary. When we rode into the city center at 4 am, total excitement took over the exhaustion of an entire day of traveling...at least until we found out our rooms had been given away. Apparently, every hotel in the city switched their official policy from “reserved rooms still held” to “tourists snooze, tourists lose”. Long story short, the only hotels with vacancy for the eight of us were in the city’s Red Light District.