Blogs from Canaima National Park, Guayana, Venezuela, South America - page 4

To get to Angel Falls is a tricky business. Unless you have a machete and a lot of time on your hands you have to fly in and the cheapest method is to go via Ciudad Bolivar (oh yes Bolivar got a town named after him too) a 10 hour bus trip from Caracas. So it was with little sadness that I left my grotty hostel in Caracas (though I had been having a nice chat with two danish girls under a mango tree on the balcony there when a mango fell down on the table - we promptly ate it!). I dared the metro at 8pm to the Rodovias bus terminal, despite being advised to get a taxi, and was beginning to regret that when I realised the last 300m to the terminal were ... read more

After we left Merida we first went north for a day. We will tell more about that in a later entry on the blogg. After that we went to a town called Ciudad Bolivar and from there we took a tour to Canaima and the Angel Falls. Canaima is a small settlement that attracts thousands of tourists every year since it is the major starting point for people who want to visit the famous Angel Falls. We have looked forward to visit the Angel Falls for several months. We therefor decided to visit them on a long tour taking three days rather than a shorter one. From Ciudad Bolivar we had to fly to Canaima, since there are no roads leading there. The flights to and from Canaima are a somewhat different from most flights we ... read more

The pics for this entry are from our amazing time in Canaima National Park, where we spent four days (Jan 24-28) and visited Salto Ángel (Angel´s Fall), the highest waterfall in the world. We slept in hammocks in a beautiful camp set in front of three water falls, of course, smaller than Salto Ángel. To arrive to Salto Ángel, we took a boat ride through the Carrao and Churm rivers, with 7 other tourists (Venezuelans, a gringo from San Francisco, two Argentinian girls, and an Australian dude), plus a guide and boat drivers. The ride lasted four hours and a half, which included an hour stop for lunch and to enjoy an amazing waterfall on the way to the big one. This area is called "El Pozo de la Felicidad" (Happiness Well), and it gave us ... read more

I was born in Caracas, Venezuela so going to see Angel Falls has always been a dream of mine. I went to Canaima with my family in the summer of 2003 on a package tour. We took a small plane from Ciudad Bolivar to Kavak. Getting off the noisy plane to the stunning silence of Kavak was a surreal experience. Kavak is a camp that sits at the base of Auyentepui. I was happy just sitting and watching the clouds swirl around the top of the cliff. Definitely bring lots of mosquito repellent if you ever come here though! Our guides took us on a walk and we waded through a cave to a waterfall. This was really an amazing experience for my family and I and it really felt like the vacation had arrived. The ... read more

A bit of a backdated issue this time as I´m really in Manaus...yes, on the real Amazon...(in fact its not on the Amazon but thats another story!)but more of that later! Where to begin?...and this will be abbreviated as its exy here and uncomfortable...but for you, hey, gotta do it. Got the bikes 20,000 km service in Caracas...Andrès, our man in BMW organised everything fantastically, new tyres courtesy of Herr Florian at Continental, Germany...the BMW guys did the fuel filters as well so hopefully that sorted my probs.....some cockup communications notwithstanding we were led out of Caracas by the beautiful and so charming Zulya, ex-diplomat wife, girlfriend of the BMW mechanic who was formerly a cop!..it can´t get any better than this...down the autopista, stop for gas, abso torrential downpour, makes Darwin tropical storms look like ... read more

2So we set off Cuidad Boliviar via Valencia for our Angel Falls and Roriama trips, the 10 hour bus ride to valencia was quite a rough one due to poor quality and windy roads so after a quick read of our bible (Footprint guide to Venezeula) we decided that we would catch the 2.30 bus instead of jumping straight on to another bus for a further 10 hours and visit the Plaza Bolivar as iguanas and sloths roamed the park, except when we got there the sloths and iguanas had been replaced by drunks and squirrels, other than that Valencia is a run down non touristy place, that felt quite threatening first thing in the morning, but once the place filled up we relized we had become a bit of an attraction for the locals as ... read more