Los Llanos - Animal Safari, Venezuela

After Harry and I climbed Pico Bolivar it took us a few days to recover, it was even difficult walking the stairs in the hostel. We arranged to do an animal safari to Los Llanos for 3 nights 4 days, costing a small $100 all inclusive. We left 3 days after the climb, the journey to Los Llanos was 8 hours long but such beautiful country side. We stopped at a local beef restaurant which ( Juan ) our guide always stops at, his a big guy and loves a good feed of beef haha, it was close to the Los Llanos area, where the beef is famous for being the best in the country and that it was, we ate about 600 grams of beef each! 

The trip was long and by about the 6th hour everyone was getting bored, so we got Juan to pull into a bottle shop in a small town. We had such a great group of people and having a few drinks on the trip was really fun, making Juan pull over for piss stops every 30 minutes. We seen a dead Anaconda on the road and Juan turned back quickly thinking it was alive but it wasn't, it was only a small one. Arriving at the camp village around 9 pm and a little drunk we all went straight to bed. We woke early for breakfast, shortly after getting ready we head 5 minutes down the road to where the river was, where we all got in the boat and started the river safari, when we arrived we already seen two crocs sitting there on the bank, i would love to be able to name everything we seen but it would be Impossible, basically it was snakes, about 8 different types of hawks / eagles, pink river dolphin, iguanas, two types of turtles, fish, crocs, cranes and heaps of other things. 

 

 

 I think the funniest of the group was Helga, a 67 year old lady from Austria, she was just travelling alone and was the funniest down to earth/ straight to the point person i had met, she just loved hanging out with us younger group. At the start i thought ohhh here we go, but she really made the trip what it was. At camp they fed us                
   really well every meal. That afternoon we went out on a 4x4 safari in the land cruiser
again we seen so many animals much the same as in the boat but more quantity, we stopped at these canals and everyone was fishing for piranha, but i walked of for a bit with my camera and Helga haha and we tried getting some cool pics of the crocs, it was kinda scary standing only 2 meters away from them only looking through the view finder on my camera, the scariest part is when they were in the water already and you got to close they would breath out really loud and go under creating all these bubbles as they lowered themselves underneath. We had an amazing sunset out there and as usual my battery died about 20 minutes before sunset.. 

 The following day we woke early again and got ready for our horse ride, before even booking this trip there was a great photo on the wall in the hostel of an owl, and basically thats what attracted me to this trip, we had seen so many animals but not an owl yet, before the horse ride Juan said "get that big lens ready we are going to see an owl" I was so excited not even 10 minutes into the ride Juan said "look ahead it's the burrowing owl" i pulled up the horse and said "can i get off" i didn't even care about his answer i was already off the horse and creeping slowly towards the 2 owls, they didn't mind to much until i got a little close and they started squealing, but i was completely satisfied with my photo, i had never seen an owl before and it was awesome, they weren't what i expected, they were tiny..  

Los Llanos was so amazing, i just loved using my camera the whole time trying to get the perfect shot even tho its hard when your on a boat, 4x4  and horse. After getting the photos of the owls i was done with the camera and ready to ride the horse, i gave my camera to Juan, before getting the horse he gave me the biggest and most obedient one, but it was also by far the fastest. After giving my camera to Juan he said we can just do what we want so he told us the directions on where to go and i ran back to the camp as fast as i could, i felt like i was on a cowboy movie the horse was sprinting as fast as it could go, i guessing it would have been at least 60kmph, it was really fun id never even galloped on a horse before let alone sprinting. It was such a fun few days, would go back there any day!!!