In Falcon I Saw the Stars

Caridad

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.

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.

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.

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