Venezuela is the kind of place so extravagantly warned against that you start to suspect someone’s trying to keep it for themselves. The official travel guidance from most respectable governments can be summarised as follows: Don’t go. Don’t think about going. Don’t even think about thinking about going.

His Majesty also cheerfully recommend avoiding it entirely: “No travel under any circumstances. Armed robbery, kidnapping, political unrest.” Which is British for: “You will almost certainly be murdered, and if by some freak miracle you aren’t, you will probably die screaming of cholera in a ditch while stray dogs debate which parts to eat first.”

The US State Department, never one to be outdone in the theatre of fear, added “terrorist activity” to the list, which came as news to everyone except them—along with “violent gangs,” “rogue militias,” and something politely called “acute shortages of essential goods,” which is the diplomatic way of saying “bring your own lunch.”

It wasn’t so much travel advice as it was a legal disclaimer to avoid fishing your remains from pirate-infested jungles.

The only foreigner I’d ever met on the trail who’d actually visited, and survived, was lovingly escorted everywhere by two machine-gun-wielding private guards—the law in Venezuela, it seemed, was whoever was holding the biggest gun.

It was a place so magically volatile that it practically dared you to enter, to poke the hornet’s nest and see what came shrieking out. Most travellers take the hint and sensibly opt for somewhere less complicated and more relaxed—like Chernobyl, or an active volcano. The whole country sat at the top of the continent like a loaded revolver, waiting for some idiot to pick it up.

 I couldn’t resist.

I said goodbye to reason and bought my ticket for a group tour and soon as one was available and safe enough. Not out of courage. Not out of stupidity, though the evidence was indeed mounting. But because Venezuela, according to every weathered drifter from Patagonia to Panama, was the last glittering prize. The Promised Land. The shining, dangerous final frontier of the Gringo Trail. A place still thrumming with the reckless promise that makes travel worth the trouble in the first place.

Ask any Venezuelan out in the wild about their homeland and they’ll give you a hundred reasons not to go—and a thousand why you should. I liked that math. The whispers were all the same: the Caribbean beaches gleamed, the mountains roared with green jungle thunder, and the people—if they didn’t rob you—might just be the warmest you’d ever meet.

So yes, it’s dangerous, unstable, and you’ll probably question your life choices twice before you even land—but if you’re going to get mugged, rained on, lost, poisoned, or potentially shot at, you might as well do it somewhere that looks good while trying to kill you.

That was my grand logic.

Getting there, however, was another matter entirely. It required persistence, stubbornness, and a healthy disregard for my own common sense. The Venezuelan border seemed to open and close without any given reason and direct flights were rare, wildly expensive, and could spontaneously vanish from existence overnight. Connecting flights were also a roulette wheel: you might get in in via Panama, Colombia, maybe the Dominican Republic, but there’s no actual guarantee you’ll be able to get out.

Against all odds, I’d snagged a direct flight from Madrid. There I sat, staring at the departure board, hoping the connection hadn’t been “suspended indefinitely.”

Boarding felt like stepping into a time capsule: a 9-hour flight with no seat screens, ancient ashtrays still embedded in the armrests, and the surreal novelty of having pizza served as the in-flight meal. Pizza on a plane. A clear violation of natural law. From above, Venezuela looked like paradise—endless green mountains, tangled jungle, sprawling towns. Beautiful from the sky. Hopefully less terrifying up close.

Landing was only the beginning of the circus. My Venezuelan tour operator told me to sprint to the front of immigration or risk being swallowed alive by the system. The entire process was rumoured to be a multi-hour affair, an epic saga that would test even the most stoic traveller. Despite being among the first off the plane, after the business class aristocrats, my position near the front meant nothing.

There was a special line for foreigners, where we were funnelled into a holding pen— a warm, if not bewildering, welcome to the Venezuelan bureaucratic rodeo— somehow more intriguing than outright miserable.

Border formalities hinged entirely on whether the man behind the glass that day thought my face was worth the paperwork. Some of them smiled. Some of them stared through me like they were measuring the size of the ransom my family could pay if I mysteriously vanished. Or maybe that was just my own misplaced paranoia, fuelled by global fearmongering. I couldn’t decide yet.

Eventually, a uniformed official with zero urgency snagged my passport, slouched against a wall like it was too much effort to stand, and examined it like it was a particularly dull jigsaw puzzle. He tediously typed my details into his phone—maybe an official database, maybe a dating app. I kept my mouth shut.

Then came the interrogation: “Show me your itinerary, every hotel, city, province.” Luckily, I had a PDF from the local operators which i handed over, like digital salvation. They typed some more, I twiddled my thumbs some more, and somewhere in the haze, I wondered if they were just messing with me.

Then shuffled in another official, bigger hat, same questions, heavier stare. My passport went in a joy ride. Passed from one official to another like a hot potato—ultimately ending in the hands of some scrawny kid barely out of high school, probably deciding if I was even cool enough to enter.

For the grand finale, I was escorted to another cubicle, where I repeated every single detail again, recited my life story, blood type and return flight details—because apparently, they don’t actually want you to get comfortable.

After that came the blessed words: a subdued, almost weary “Welcome to Venezuela.” Delivered in a tone that suggested they might still change their mind. I swear, I’ve never heard a phrase so sweet. I had made it.

On the other side of the glass, a small señorita named Clara waved my name on a placard like I was some kind of VIP—or perhaps just the latest fool to survive Venezuelan bureaucracy,

The madness had officially begun.

Clara drove me out of the airport, straight down a sun-blasted stretch of highway toward Caracas, a city that’s either the jewel of South America or the murder capital of the world depending on who you ask. Twenty-five minutes, she said, if the traffic behaved and nobody decided to stage an impromptu roadblock.

Along the way she let slip the real truth about local drivers: the official road network is just a polite fiction. The real city runs on a secret grid of back-alley speedways, dirt tracks clinging to the hillsides, and impossibly tight barrio cut-throughs. “Not on any map,” she said. Of course not.

We stuck to the main highway, a bold decision that lasted until the sky cracked open dramatically. The heavens dumped buckets on the city, and there I was, face pressed to the window like a wide-eyed kid, soaking in every absurd, soaked detail.

Motorcyclists swarmed under bridges, huddling in the wet gloom, while a gang of street vendors casually roasted corn with what looked like actual industrial blowtorches—fat plumes of black smoke curling into the rain.

“That,” Clara shouted over the wipers, “is very Caracas.”

It was. Every inch of it. Beside the corn-burners were makeshift barbershops—just a guy, a chair, and a pair of scissors—perched dangerously close to storm drains that were vomiting brown water into the streets. Everyone who stayed was here for a reason, haunting the same streets where the ghosts of the ones who left still wander in memory.

We rolled into the Hotel Alex without incident—no bullets, no hijackings—and I tossed my bags in the room before climbing to the rooftop bar. From up there the mountains loomed, damp from the storm. Clara lingered just long enough to warn me about the local meteorological uncertainty: sunny mornings, downpours by noon, then clear skies again by sunset.

By dusk, her words had come true. Darkness fell, the rain was gone, and the barrios in the hills were lit up like vertical galaxies—thousands of tiny stars climbing the mountainside, flickering and shifting as if the whole city was breathing—or just suffering rolling blackouts.

 I celebrated the moment with my first Polar beer, a crisp Venezuelan brew that somehow cost $3—steep by local standards, criminal by mine. I wanted to know if the horror stories were true—if stepping into the streets after dark meant getting riddled with holes before the check arrived—so I took my beer buzz and my idiotic curiosity outside, trying my absolute best not to look like the lost foreigner I obviously was.

I looked around. No death squads. No dodgy assassins lurking in doorways. Not even one sweaty man with a machete whispering “amigo” from the shadows. Just busy streets—too busy. This was without half the population who had already fled. If they all came back at once, the city would surely explode in a glorious, choking haze of green bills, exhaust fumes and arepas.

I drifted aimlessly, following the gravity of the city, an unarmed tourist floating through the same city people warned was ready to shred me limb from limb. There was only a couple of suspicious looks—nothing worse than what I’d get in a Lidl car park midnight.

I was no longer on the front lines of danger. That idea had dissolved into something else: weathered streets, chipped paint, and a capital city functioning— against all logic—fluid, improvisational, and somehow still standing. The paranoia began to leak out of me, replaced by that dangerous thing called enjoyment.

The dollar was king here now, strutting around like it owned the place—which it did. Street stalls hissed with frying oil, tiendas spilled their goods out onto the pavement, but the prices were higher than my back-alley math had prepared me for. Considering the average monthly income was $200 USD, something felt bent out of shape. I couldn’t quite figure it out. Caracas plays its cards close to the chest.

I drifted toward Plaza Candelaria, where I stumbled on an open-air communal gym filled with the biggest men in Venezuela—human tanks with muscles like boulders. It was 11 pm, and they were still at it, pumping iron like they were training for the next coup. A drifter assured me—in fast, rattling Spanish—that they’d keep squatting and grunting into the early hours. Sure enough, when I stumbled past hours later, they were still at it. This city doesn’t sleep—it bench presses.

Later, I found a restaurant-bar that looked halfway respectable and was offering half-price beers. I ordered a cheap meal, a bucket of ice-cold bottles, and parked myself in front of the TV to watch the Phillies vs. the Mets. Baseball of all things.

The barman leaned in, all serious, and declared that “the best baseball players in the world are Venezuelan.” No debate, no hesitation. The man would have gone to war over it. In most of South America, football is religion, but here baseball is the national sport. The high church, and the saints swing bats.

By the second bucket, pulled into a booze-soaked tribe of locals, shouting at the screen, spilling beer, and laughing like we’d been drinking together for years. It was the sort of warm, chaotic camaraderie that could melt your cynicism if you weren’t careful. A far cry from the hellscape I’d been warned about.

In fact, it was all rather lovely.

Which, of course, made me wonder—maybe somebody really was trying to keep this place all to themselves.