In Falcon I Saw the Stars

Caridad

An encounter with nature in the Venezuelan state of Falcon
A visit to the desert in Falcon, Venezuela.

Caracas is a beautiful city. But like in any city full of lights, it’s impossible to see the stars.  Nor can you see the ocean, only the extended mountain range that has grown green with the beginning of this season’s rains.

I hiked around the state of Falcon, where I could see the sea for the first time since I got here to Venezuela.

We Cubans who leave the island almost always long for the sea.  Many cities are not blessed by the encounter with that powerful blue body.

Falcon is an enormous state (that’s my adjective for almost everything in this country).  Here, like all of this extensive territory, you find the convergence of a diversity of landscapes: the sea, the savanna, mountains and even deserts.

A visit to the desert in Falcon, Venezuela.

In eastern Cuban there are areas that are truly desert-like, given the lack of rain, but I’d never been to a place like the “Medanos de Coro.”

My friends love the desert; me, not so much.  I don’t care for landscapes that arouse the insatiable desire for me to drink water.  Still, I took lots of photos of the area, though this time I didn’t feel the need to drink.  This was because the landscape was grandiose, and when we come face to face with the grandiose, there’s a certain silence; everything is forgotten.

A visit to the desert in Falcon, Venezuela.

Thanks to a kind Venezuelan, I was able to visit a non-touristy part of the extensive dune region.  At dusk I was where Falcon residents go to spend many of their free hours; it’s less beautiful, but it was equally nice to see families having a good healthy time, with no alcohol, and the kids flying all sizes of kites, because in Coro the winds are lively and strong.

There I tasted cocada. The base of the drink is not coca but coconut, which I’m crazy about making in Cuba.

In Falcon I enjoyed a sky as blue as that of Havana’s, and it was filled with as many stars as my desires to look at them.

The most amusing thing was a pack of little donkeys we saw on the trip along the peninsula in the State of Falcon.  Never before had I seen wild donkeys; they were both distrustful and lovers of the sea that greets the most arid territory I’ve ever visited.  It was a landscape whose beauty took me by complete surprise.

Click on the tumbnails below to view all the photos in this gallery

A visit to the desert in Falcon, Venezuela
A visit to the desert in Falcon, Venezuela
A visit to the desert in Falcon, Venezuela

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Caridad

Caridad: If I had the chance to choose what my next life would be like, I’d like to be water. If I had the chance to eliminate a worst aspect of the world I would erase fear. Of all the human feelings I most like I prefer friendship. I was born in the year of the first Congress of the Cuban Communist Party, the day that Gay Pride is celebrated around the world. I no longer live on the east side of Havana; I’m trying to make a go of it in Caracas, and I continue to defend my right to do what I want and not what society expects of me.

2 thoughts on “In Falcon I Saw the Stars”

  • Nice to see cubans and venezuelans enjoying each others’ homelands. There has to be more of that sort of interchange under socialism. It should be a priority, AFAIC. Tourist $$ should not be the main object there.

    And I understand too that a large number of electricity-generating windmill farms are going to be slowing down that relentless, dessicating wind in Falcón..! I’m sure a number of people will soon see that as an ecological problem of another sort; but AFAIC it will be relatively temporary: until the advance of Science will find permanent renewable sources of energy that do not take up valuable ecological realestate. And that would be truly socialist Science.

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