I arrived in Caracas in the back of a pickup, and immediately biked across town to Tierra Viva, an environmental group that supports different sustainable development projects around the country. With their help, I visited a school, was interviewed by a radio station, and appeared on the front page of El Nacional.

   Crossing the city by bike, I was amazed at the traffic. I have never passed so many cars so easily on my bike. I biked one section of town in 20 minutes in what someone told me it would take 40 minutes in a car. Watch the videos below (especially on the left) to get a sense of traffic in the city.

   The city does have a metro, which I took once and had my wallet stolen. At 3pm on a weekday, the metro cars were so packed with people that there was not space to move, and I literally could not move while someone took my wallet out of my pocket (lost only cash).

   The city is in a scenic valley, has a pleasant climate (it is at 3,000 feet), and plenty of trees. But the quality of life — and yes, energy efficiency — of the city could be dramatically improved if the transportation system were changed.

   While in Caracas, I also continued to learn more about Venezuela’s political system. Here is a brief account of what people have told me: In the first half of the 20th century, Venezuela had a series of dictators. In the second half of the century, a two-party democracy was established. Most people complain about how this was run, and a number say that the two parties were more corrupt than the dictators beforehand. In 1992, Hugo Chavez, the current president and a former military man, attempted a coup, but failed, took responsibility, and was put in jail. A few years later, he was pardoned, and in 1998 he was elected president from a third party. With the people’s support, he had the constitution rewritten, and, in the elections that followed, the government was filled with almost all Chavez supporters.

   Chavez, a ’21st century socialst,’ has done some amazing things, including using oil money to support social programs for the poor, including far improved health care and education for the poorest. He has also picked fights with the U.S., packed the supreme court, and appears to have almost absolute control over the country (and especially its oil wealth). Nearly every middle or upper class person that I talk to does not like Chavez — they worry that he has too much power and that he is scaring away investment that is needed to grow the economy. On the other hand, most poor people that I talk to say Chavez’s programs have helped their lives considerably. His current power, however, seems well tied to oil revenues — over half the government revenue is from oil money, and oil prices are currently very high.

   The last day in town, a good friend of mine, Tom Hunt, flew into Caracas to bike with me for the following two weeks. We spent a Saturday walking around the capital, where we visited the Natural History museum (they had an exhibit on global warming!), and then watched an anti-Chavez demonstration before packing up to leave town.

   I crossed the Venezuela border, climbing into the Andes again and to the town of San Cristobal, where I stayed at the fire station for the night. Crossing into Venezuela, I was immediately struck by the number of cars — Venezuela has the world’s 7th largest oil reserves, and it uses this oil wealth to keep gas prices low. Gas costs 15 cents a gallon, and the cities are full of cars, many of which are old U.S. cars with poor gas mileage.

   Oil is a huge part of the Venezuelan economy, and I have entered the country with a very simple question: is this oil wealth good or bad for the people of Venezuela?

   Because I had lost a week of travel to being sick, I could no longer make it to Caracas on time to meet a friend who was flying into town. Promising myself that I would use this method of travel only for traveling north to Caracas, I stuck out my thumb and hoped for friendly trucks.

   Half biking and half hitching, I traveled north to northern Lago Maracaibo (see map), where I spent 3 days biking around the northern edge of the lake. The shallow lake, which is connected to the sea and thus not a true lake, is covered by thousands of oil wells, and the area produces a million barrels of oil a day. I camped one night next to a family that lives in a small community with oil rigs off shore. The father of the family worked on the oil rig, yet the rest of the people in the town, which was very poor, lived off of fishing. The man, of course, said that oil was good for the country, and also cited a series of new government programs that use the oil wealth to provide the village with health care and education.

   As often happens in these small towns, a family feeds me and then stands around staring at me.

   Continuing on, I biked to the city of Maracaibo, where I was interviewed by the local paper (La Panorama) and stayed with the Bomberos. I continued to be struck by how central the car is to Venezuelan society, and how much space in the cities is taken by car traffic.

   My final day around Lake Maracaibo, I biked along the northeast edge, where many oil rigs could be seen offshore. The cities along the shore were not pleasant places, and I was stopped once while biking down a street because I was told that I would get robbed. So much oil had been extracted from the ground that the city Ciudad Ojeda has actually sunk 6 meters and a levy had to be built to keep out the lake water. I spent the night with two engineers who work in the oil industry and had seen me in the newspaper.

   The couple (who also pointed out that oil companies can help sequester carbon) have drilled for oil in many places around the world and were adamant that it is bad for a place to discover oil. ‘I have seen villages in Africa where the people abandon their farming to work in oil, and then when the oil field dries up, they are unable to return to their old work.’ The city where they currently worked, Ciudad Ojeda, was a very unpleasant place — oil wealth apparently gives little incentive to invest in education or local infrastructure.

   From Lake Maracaibo, I hitched along the coast to Punto Fijo, where Venezuela’s largest oil refinery is located. I tried to ask the guard questions about the refinery, but he yelled at me to go away, as all information was confidential, and he also told me not to take any pictures. From the people I talked to while hitchhiking to the refinery, most said that the oil did not help Venezuela at all, which was interesting. One man, a carpenter, complained ‘before the refinery was built, the locals drank, smoke, and womanized. Now they have money, so they drink, smoke, and womanize more. You can’t just have money — you need to educate people.’

   After six days of half hitching and half biking, I arrived in Caracas. Hitching with a bike turned out to be very easy — I caught 17 different rides, and my longest wait was 45 minutes. To be sure, my method was foolproof — bike to the tool booth, show the police the newspaper article about my trip, and ask them to help me ask drivers of pickup trucks. But, even on the open road, my average wait was only 20 minutes.