We're back in civilization, or at least what passes for civilization around here. Isla de Margarita is Venezuela Vacationland, a duty-free port where people come to stock up on cheap booze and cigarettes and incidentally lounge on the beaches and party in the nightclubs. Imagine the Miami Beach strip with a computer-inserted backdrop of dry Arizona mountains. The anchorage is rolly but the water is fairly clean, and lots of our cruiser acquaintances are here. Some are on their way to the western Caribbean, like us, or the Panama Canal; others are just visiting Venezuela before going back east, and a few ran down here from Grenada when Tropical Storm Jerry threatened and haven't gotten around to heading back.
The center of cruising life here is Jak's restaurant and bar, where an expat American named Don and his Thai wife Jak serve up good food and cheap drinks. It's in the middle of a little strip of beach bounded by Marina Concorde, which is only for local powerboaters, and Marina Juan, which is not really a marina at all. These two businesses are at opposite ends in more ways than one.
Vemasca (Venezuela Marine Supply) is a small chandlery with a dinghy dock at the powerboat marina and employees who speak English and French, and for some years they had the monopoly on cruiser check-ins. (Checking into Venezuela at Margarita is apparently fairly complicated, and unless you speak Spanish fluently and have a car at your disposal it is highly recommended to use an agent.) Juan (who also speaks English and French, and claims fluency in a total of five languages) recently bought a ramshackle building with an extremely long but shallow dock, and opened his own check-in service along with other things such as internet, trash, and laundry.
Thus began the War of Check-Ins. Because his dinghy dock is huge and obvious, most cruisers (we're guessing 75% or more) go to Juan. The price is the same, about $55 of which around $18 is the agency profit. Vemasca just began striking back, though, offering free check-out services to people who check in with them. Juan is furious. He paces back and forth in front of his small office, muttering in five languages that Vemasca can make money from their chandlery, but the only profit he gets is from check-ins, if he doesn't get all the cruiser check-in business he will have to close at the end of the month, no more dinghy dock, no more trash service, the cruisers will all be sorry they didn't help him out, woe, woe is me!
We checked in with Vemasca, as we'd arranged ahead of time to have our mail sent there. Everything went smoothly, but of course a US passport tends to have little problem, at least in this part of the world. Our friends Greg and Tomomi on Sherpa had more difficulty. The problem was not that Sherpa is of Canadian registry -- it's that Tomomi's Japanese. Apparently Margarita's been having a plague of immigrant Chinese who arrive illegally on false Japanese passports, and the officials made Tomomi come down to the airport for a personal interview. She squawked to the Japanese embassy, and eventually things got cleared up. (But she confessed to us that she was highly tempted, afterward, to tell the officials "Xie-xie" -- Chinese for "thank you".)
We spent a frustrating morning being driven around to every ATM in Porlamar, finally discovering that nearly all Venezulan banks are on a different system than our bankcards use. Fortunately we had a small amount of US cash on us, so we went to a Casa de Cambio and traded it for some local currency. Wow, did we ever feel rich with "$65,000" in our pockets! Of course, that was in bolivares (Bs, pronounced "bees" among the cruisers), and there are nearly 750 Bs to the US$. This means that prices are all big numbers: a taxi downtown is 2000 Bs, a movie ticket 2500 Bs, and lunch at Jak's set us back almost 10,000 Bs. Most people drop the zeros in speech, i.e. the taxi driver tells us the price is "dos", and many places round the prices as well to the nearest 100 or even 1000, even though the currency goes down to 5-bolivar notes and 1-bolivar coins.
There are amazing "hypermarket" groceries-cum-department-stores with an incredible selection of European, American, and local products (my favorite product name so far: "Yuky-Pak" juice boxes), but the prices are in general a disappointment, and I wish I'd done more shopping in Trinidad. Still, we need to provision now for at least the next few months, so we're stocking up. The good deals here seem to be mostly on booze and fuel. Margarita is a duty-free port, and all alcohol sold here has a special label with a red bar across it. The local beer is 200 Bs a can, Chilean wine around 2000 Bs, a fifth of Gordon's Gin or local rum 2000 Bs. They have a huge selection of Scotch whiskey but the only American whiskey available is Jack Daniels, at prices just a little higher than in the US. Diesel is 50 Bs a liter at the fuel dock or 100 Bs from the fuel boat which putt-putts around the anchorage every morning -- that's about 25 or 50 cents a gallon, but of course Venezuela is an OPEC country and awash in the stuff. The fuel dock here is problematic, but since we need a lot (we last filled up in Puerto Rico!) we'd rather not pay the premium for delivery. Instead, we've decided to go around to the town of Juangriego, on the north side of the island, which has a dock with an easier approach. Of course downtown has lots of stores offering just about everything you could possibly want to buy. The farmacias sell prescription drugs, no prescription necessary, at rest-of-world prices (as opposed to US prices), and I stocked up on my allergy medication for a bit better than half-price. For those yachtsmen who feel the need for additional personal protection (and I don't mean condoms), a discreet word to Don at Jak's bar will get one in touch with a purveyor of fine armaments.
Spending money is only half the fun. Mickie and Sam on Beaujolais have been here for three months, and when we complained to them about our ATM woes they took us to Banco Provinciale, the only one they've found that is on the "Plus" system. But there's a catch -- the machines seem to think they are in Las Vegas, because they dispense what at first appeared to be random amounts of cash. Pretty strange to have the machine announce "Here is your money" before you even request an amount! But Mickie and I finally figured out the system: if you press the "Fast Cash" selection followed by "Withdrawal", you get 50,000 Bs, and if you press "Withdrawal" alone you get 30,000 Bs. A strange way to get money, but hey, it works.
Our hailing port is Boulder, CO, and we're always on the lookout for other Colorado boats -- at least it's an excuse to get to meet people. While in the Tobago Cays in June, we dinked up to a spiffy aluminum boat with Golden, CO on the transom, and introduced ourselves as fellow Coloradoans. Rick had just bought Infidien in St. Martin and was taking it to Trinidad with the help of two friends; his wife and five-year-old daughter would be joining him there in August. He was a relatively young guy, seemed nice, so we looked forward to maybe bumping in to him later.
I was over on Kajsa when we heard Infidien hailing Vemasca on VHF, saying they'd be in the harbor in about an hour. It turned out that Teresa and Patrick knew them from Trinidad; they made arrangements to meet them at Jak's for a drink, and we tagged along, figuring it was always good to meet new people. Britt and I reintroduced ourselves to Rick, who remembered us from the Tobago Cays, then turned to his wife Patti. "You know me already, too," she said to us. "We did a Grand Canyon river trip together ten years ago!"
Sure enough. I stared for a minute and then remembered her exactly, Patti the kayaker. We'd been to her house to watch a video someone else on the trip had made, and socialized a little, but lost touch after that. She had no idea we were out here, and even though we (now) have lots of cruising friends in common, generally people refer to other cruisers by boat name rather than by their names, so she had no way of knowing that "Windom" was us. Pretty strange to meet someone from our "old life" here in Margarita!