Salt Flats and Sand Dunes: From Paraguaná to Coro

I was staying in my friend’s hometown of Maracay. The travel money was burning a hole in my pocket, so I booked a 15 USD flight to the city of Coro in western Venezuela.
I flew directly from Caracas to Coro and spent my first few days in the Paraguaná Peninsula, just north of the city. I stayed in a large, colonial building, which, at one point, was the childhood home of Don José Falcón, the first president of the United States of Venezuela. The property was a barren desert with wild donkeys wandering around eating the plants.

Paraguaná is well-known for inexpensive electronics, but due to governmental expropriation of businesses, most of the electronics malls had already gone bankrupt. Nevertheless, I managed to purchase a few inexpensive DVDs and flash drives.

Over the next few days, I explored the peninsula. On the first day, I went to Cabo San Roman, the peninsula’s northernmost point with an isolated lighthouse. From there, on a clear day, Aruba can be seen in the distance. In fact, Aruba is so close that many Venezuelans are taking rowboats to the island in search of work and better living conditions.

In the afternoon, I tried my hand at kitesurfing. It was significantly more difficult than I anticipated. My technique was so terrible, in fact, that my instructor would not even allow me to practice in the water.

I spent the rest of the day relaxing on the beach and checking out the salt flats, which were previously used for salt mining before Hugo Chavez expropriated and bankrupted the business.

The following day, I returned to Coro. It was much different than the peninsula. Coro is known for its Spanish colonial in building various stages of disrepair and picturesque sand dunes. It looked like Trinidad, Cuba, in the middle of the desert.

I met up with a buggy company and drove to the famous Médanos de Coro (Coro Sand Dunes). I spent part of the afternoon sandboarding and dune buggying over the most beautiful, rich red-brown sand dunes I had ever seen. Although I had sandboarded before in Nazca, Peru, this experience was more enjoyable.