Jamie Maslin - Socialist Dreams and Beauty Queens: A Couchsurfers Adventures in the New Venezuela

Copyright 2011, 2014 by Jamie Maslin

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

ISBN: 978-1-62873-720-2

eISBN: 978-1-62914-066-7

Printed in the United States of America

Books by Jamie Maslin

Iranian Rappers and Persian Porn:
A Hitchhiker's Adventures in the New Iran

For my wonderful
Wemsy

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

S everal people deserve a special mention for their help during the creation of this book. I wish to express my gratitude to the many wonderful and varied CouchSurfers who so kindly put me up all over Venezuela; to Charles Brewer-Carias, Farrin De Fredrick, Sabrina Durling-Jones, Alan Highton, and Paul Rideough for providing many of the beautiful photographs used to illustrate this book; to my parents for their ongoing support; to Charlie Wood and Marcin Szymanek for their generosity in lending me their apartment and PC to edit the book while traveling in Kyrgyzstan; and to my long-suffering girlfriend, Emily, for putting up with my extended trips abroad and antisocial writing hours.

A particularly special thank-you must go to my editor Jennifer McCartney for first giving me the opportunity to have my writing read beyond my humble collection of friends and family; to all at the Spitzer agency, Philip Spitzer, Lukas Ortiz, and especially Lucas Hunt, whose unfailing faith in my work, encouragement, support, advice, and friendship mean the world to me; and finally, a big thank-you to my sister, Hannah, for finally making me an uncle to beautiful little Thomas. Nothing to do with the book whatsoever, but worthy of mention nonetheless.

In the interest of protecting employment, sparing blushes, and preventing slaps from wives, certain names and minor details have been strategically altered in the text. (You know who you are.)

Prologue

V enezuela is an extremely dangerous country. Dont trust anyone. Including the police. We were preparing to board a flight to his hometown, Venezuelas capital, Caracas. On hearing that I spoke no Spanish and was not going there on business but vacation, he shook his head and asked incredulously, What do you want to go there for? This was a reaction I was not expecting.

On the flight the man and his family kindly told me everything that was wrong with their countryit had roughly fifteen thousand homicides a year with Caracas recently topping the list of the worlds murder capitals, the national institutions were rife with corruption, it suffered regular infuriating power cuts, most towns had an unofficial curfew after dark such were the dangers, and the president was a baboon. His wife warned me that Id have to be very careful not to get mugged, kidnapped, or arrested before my stay was over. I thought of the two grand I had hidden on mestashed away in my shoes and socks, in different pockets, and in a money belt around my waistand, not for the first time, felt a twinge of concern.

Venezuela might not be renowned as a popular tourist destination, but it certainly held some attraction for me. It boasted the longest Caribbean coastline of any country, the worlds highest waterfall, an expansive savannah, Andean mountains, Amazonian rainforest, and even a desert. Twenty percent of the worlds known bird species call it home, and within its western regions was an unexplained natural phenomenon I was determined to experiencelightning with no thunder.

I had first made up my mind to visit after casually flicking through a National Geographic magazine in the dusty confines of my favorite secondhand bookstore in London, Keith Fawkes Books, on Flask Lane in Hampstead. As I turned the page, a photograph gave me reason to pause and sent my heart rate soaringand Im not referring to a tasteful topless shot of an indigenous maiden. Rising from the page was the bizarre anvil-shaped plateau of an isolated mountain, standing alone in a sea of Amazonian mist that shrouded the forest below. This was Mount Roraima. It looked like a sacred temple where the gods might dwell. If they did exist, then they lived in Venezuela. Even before reading the article, I knew that one day I would have to visit it.

Id experienced the National Geographic effect before. A casual flick of the page in a doctors waiting room had sent me to a remote and obscure slot canyon in Western China, twisting its way to the worlds highest natural archway, Shiptons Arch; a nonchalant browse at a dog-eared copy in a dentists office had taken me to a sacred Navajo rock formation, Naatanii Nz, off the beaten track in New Mexico. In the wrong hands National Geographic is a dangerous magazine. So with Mount Roraima in my sights, I began to read up on Venezuelas other attractions. It looked like a place of staggering natural beauty, and in more ways than one. In addition to its stunning landscapes, Venezuela supposedly possessed the most beautiful women in the worldwomen who had won more international beauty pageant titles than any other country. Reason enough for a visit, methinks.

While the beauty queens merited occasional mention in the Western press, more often than not it was the countrys president, Hugo Chvez, that garnered journalists attention. From my experience, when the mainstream media routinely place adjectives before the name of a countrys presidentsuch as populist, firebrand, demagogue, and would-be dictator in the case of Chvezthen its a sure sign of a nation worth visiting. You never see those adjectives attributed to Western heads of state, as they're reserved for that most despicable type of leaderone with large reserves of oil.

From Chvezs theatrical speech at the United Nations, where he made the sign of the cross then clasped his hands together in prayer to protect himself from the US president, or as he put it, the devil, to his weekly national television broadcasts, which can last for up to eight hours, there is much to write about Mr. Chvez. But if the main export of Venezuela were broccoli instead of oil, then it is unlikely the president would regularly fill quite so many column inches here in the West. But oil it has and aplenty.

Venezuela is so awash with black gold that it has the cheapest pump prices on the planet. Drive a gas-guzzling SUV there and the cost of gas is unlikely to bother you, as at six cents a gallon youll be able to fill up for a solitary US dollar. It possesses the largest reserves of conventional light oils in the Western Hemisphere, but when it comes to the heavy stuff, its in a league of its own, possessing a staggering 90 percent of the earths entire extraheavythat is, tar oilreserves. For years these heavy oil reserves would have been irrelevant, as it was too costly to extract and process them, but thanks to new extracting technologies and a high oil price, these reserves now take on far greater meaning. If the price of oil continues to remain high enough to make the heavy oil extraction commercially viable, then Venezuela easily eclipses Saudi Arabia as the worlds oil reserve supremo. Attaining this status has huge implications, one of which is the control of OPEC. (Based in Vienna, the current Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries includes Algeria, Angola, Ecuador, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Venezuela.)