Venezuela: Cultural Immersion

I haven’t slept in a bed for month and I am the most rested I have been in ages.  Being here in Villa Marina, Venezuela, the childhood home of my husband, has reawakened my love of hammocks.  

Now I seriously wonder how I will ever sleep in a bed again.  The lower back and hip pain that has plagued me nightly for a year has completely disappeared.  Here I awake each morning feeling as if I have spent the night in an aerial nest.  

Kiko totally gets it.  His entire youth he slept in a hammock together with his younger brother, until leaving home to travel at the age of 16.  His mom, 72, only sleeps in hammocks.  I recall how upset she was on our previous visit when the hotel we brought her to in the mountains of Venezuela didn’t have hammocks.  She suffered an awful night sleep on the “nice” bed.  I can just imagine my mom’s reaction if we took her to a hotel with only hammocks to sleep on.  

The hammock is the perfect image to illustrate the change in travel style we are experiencing here in Venezuela, where everything has slowed down.  

Over the 15 years that Kiko and I have known each other we have traveled together many times to visit his family in Venezuela, each time fitting in one or more side excursions to some of the many diverse areas of this beautiful country.  Due largely in part to the current political and social unrest in Venezuela, (read more here) as well as the desire for some real family bonding time, we have chosen to forgo our customary excursions, leaving us one month to live in this small, sleepy, fishing town on the Caribbean Sea.

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