Angel Falls and Devilish Folk

Preface

August 2009. It's nearly a year since I wrote this blog and in that time I've calmed down. I've also heard from quite a few people with comments both in agreement and disagreement about what I've written. Please bear in mind that when I wrote this, it came from the heart and at the time, I was pretty pissed off with my experience of the country, as will be apparant. Looking back, I could probably have used a less angry tone and realise, looking at it now, that what I've written could incite equally angry responses. For those that think our experience reflects badly on us, I would say that having travelled many other countries, I'd never been to a place where the atmosphere was so hostile. We met a lot of good people in Venezuela, but overwhelmingly, the attitude towards travellers was not a welcoming one. Of the many good people we met, the majorty would admit that greed, violence and attitudes towards non-South Americans were hostile.
Woops, I'm ranting again! The prupose of this preface is to explain that I won't apologise for the tone of this blog, but do feel the need to explain why it

Roraima
The one on the right. Roraima has positive energy, the other one is a baddie. Apparently.

is so angry. Now that I've done that, I hope you enjoy it for what it is...

PS. If you can't be bothered to read the whole thing, here's the abridged version: go to Angel Falls and Roraima and then leave.

Well, what a country of contrasts Venezuela is. Forget the beauty queens - they're nowhere to be seen (although the ladies here do tend to turn the head somewhat more than the belles of Carlisle). The beauty of Venezuela lies in its coastline and its incredible national parks, where for example, the alien landscape of Roraima and the stunning Angel Falls would blow anyone's socks off were they not firmly wedged into a sensible pair of sturdy walking boot. But far overriding Venezuela’s natural beauty is the ugliness of its society. There we go, I've said it. Sweeping statement time and no regrets. Society here stinks. An air of menace permeates every street corner, particularly at night; whilst by day, even the simple task of buying a bus ticket is seemingly too much effort for the ticket vendors, who, if they are anywhere to be seen, grunt disapprovingly at anyone who dares interrupt their TV time by asking for a ticket. It's a nation which supposedly despises the USA, yet everyone drives oversized American cars, worships at the counters of McDonalds and Domino's, utterly prostrates itself at the feet of the almighty Dollar, oh, and the national sport is baseball...make of that what you will. But its flaws lie deeper than this rampant hypocrisy. It’s most telling feature is that as a country, it’s both deadly and sinful. Every minute of every day, gluttony gorges on fast food, greed cruises in its free-fuel 4x4, wrath prowls the streets with a gun ready to rob anyone and everyone, while sloth looks on from his hammock, envy's eye follows the hated tourists and pride shines down from the posters of the maniac Chavez lining every street. Lust? Well, that's 9 Miss World's - we’ll give them that.

But it didn’t start off so bad. In fact, Santa Elena in the very south had a laid back, almost charming feel. It was small enough to potter everywhere we needed on foot, although not especially welcoming. Looking back, no hoteliers welcomed us with a smile, they just wanted to see the money, but that’s nothing new. And money was the theme here, as it would be for the whole of Venezuela. Because this country runs on two economies - the official rate and the black market rate. Usually this means that if you use an ATM, you will get about 2 Bolivars for your dollar, if you use the black market, you get around 4 Bolivars. But it’s not as shady as it sounds, with money changers openly dealing on the street. And so we joined in the fun, changing our dollars and Brazilian Real at the black maket rates, and even making a couple of money runs back into Brazil to the ATM just over the border, to get more Real to change. It was worth it, through it did leave us with a pile of cash big enough to fill a bath, especially after Jen got 1000 Bolivars in tens. We resisted the temptation to light cigars with flaming notes, preferring instead to offload it as quickly as possible and hope we had enough cash to cover the rest of the country.

At this stage we’d like to say a big hats off to Mr Hugo Chavez for creating such a f!”•$ed up system. This false economy creates so much disparity between the haves and have nots, that the latter (the majority) see nothing more worth living (and killing) for than the dollar and the material crap it promises. It has, in short, made people arseholes.

The first arsehole we met probably wasn’t too fussed about the money, he was just an arsehole working in a cafe, probably for incredibly low wages thanks to the official rate of exchange. Maybe he was having a bad day, maybe coping with three customers at once was too much for him, but the snarl we received on requesting a sandwich seemed a smidge unnecessary, especially at 8am. So when he slammed a paper plate on the counter when Ant requested another coffee, it shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise to see his disgruntled customer lean over the counter and shout at him ‘Cual es tu cowcow!?’ Well, maybe it should, since this was a phrase Ant was taught in Peru and which probably has no meaning whatsoever in Venezuela given that it’s the lyrics to a song. Still, if it in anyway portrayed the message ‘Oi matey boy, what’s you f!”$%%g problem?’, then it did the job. Eventually the coffee was served by a more willing staff member.

But this bit’s meant to be about the good part of Venezuela, and there was a good bit, a great bit, in fact. Through a combination of a hustler-extraordinaire named Fransisco (who was actually a nice guy), and a very charming man called Roberto, we arranged a six day trek to Roraima - a spectacular table top mountain which straddles the borders of Venezuela, Brazil and Guayana. And with Roberto’s Mystic Tours, we were enlightened about the fact that Roraima is a hotspot for UFO activity with hundreds of sightings of strange, mysterious goings on. Unbeknownst to Ant, the mere mention of alien encounters was already tapping into Jen's as-yet undiscovered capacity for seeking out the weird and the wonderful, and we were soon to bear witness to her extraordinary powers. There was nothing untoward in the beginning, as we set out towards the mountain with three days to reach the top and a rolling plain in-between us and it. The going was good to firm, scorching in places, but with a schedule to only walk the mornings before the rain set in, it was never difficult and certainly not enough to induce any group hallucinations which might have been attributed to what we witnessed that very first night. Maybe it was because Robertos’s words were still orbiting our brains, but what we saw once the sun fell from the sky was enough to zap away most of our scepticism. For high above us, on the right flank of Roraima, a diamond-shaped set of lights caught our attention as it rose higher and higher above the mountain. It might have been stars, but it was moving up too quickly. It looked like a telephone tower, but there are no towers on the top of Roraima. It´s almost crucifix shape could have signalled the second coming....who knows? We certainly didn’t as we stood for half an hour watching the lights slowly rise above the mountain. As Patrick Moore might say, ‘blimey’. The sky on that particular night was certainly moving in mysterious ways and it had us transfixed. Were it not for the aching in our necks from craning up at the lights, we might have been there all night, but instead we left the lights there and retired to our tents hoping that no doe-eyed fella would wake us in the night and request us to take them to our leader. Christ, thinking about it, if they made that request in Venezuela they might get taken to Hugo Chavez who would either offer them free fuel or try and nationalise their planet! No, we woke up with no strange scars, no evidence of anal probes, and certainly no gaps in our memories after a pretty conscious night attempting to sleep on the solid, bumpy ground.

Still scratching our heads (at this stage through confusion rather than a lack of hygiene), we plodded on towards the great lump of rock, setting up camp just before a downpour at the foot of the mountain. But as night fell once more, so too did our expectations for another sighting. And lo and behold it wasn’t long before Jen, who by now was pushing for a role on the X Files team, was pointing at another bright light high in the sky, beckoning us all to consider what this new apparition might be. We all craned our necks once more, and sure enough, shining and shimmering much brighter than any stars, was another light. What could this one be? Is it a UFO? Have they finally come to take us away? With a tut at her imbecility, Jen’s question was answered by a Spanish hiker: ‘That is the Northern Star’. And with that, we were all humbled and no doubt written off as cretins by the Spanish group. Funnily enough, that more or less brought an end to our UFO spotting. Partly because no one dared speculate any more on strange lights, and partly because the sky gave way to a bank of cloud from there on in. By the following morning, the spectacular roof of Roraima was hidden just above a bank of cloud as we scaled its sides and emerged into an altogether alien world at the top - minus the aliens. Something like an early Dr Who set, the top of Roraima was a world of peculiarly shaped rocks and boggy lagoons, shrouded in cloud and impossible for the untrained tourist to fathom where they’d just come from and where they were going to. Thankfully we had Roger, our dependable guide, who led us safely to our ‘hotel’, a dry half-cave under the ledge of a large rock, where we would shelter from the rain for much of our stay at the top. Not that the rain and the cloud detracted from the experience. In fact, it added to an already other-worldly ambiance, and the way in which the cloud drifted across the landscape, revealing and just as quickly hiding ancient rock formations, mutated by millennia of wind and rain, led us to believe, just as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had, that we might well be wandering across a lost world where dinosaurs still roam. But like the aliens, the dinosaurs failed to emerge.

The only downside to the gloom was our inability to peer over the cliff edges into the enormous abyss below, although Ant would argue that this was a good thing. If words could describe the size of the cliff over which were perched most of our group’s legs while Ant winced several metres away, they would almost certainly be swear words and there’s no place for them in this blog.

Shit. That’s what we’d probably have seen if we could have seen anything over the edges of Roraima. Hundreds of little white specks of toilet paper marking out the ground below us like flakes of dandruff on the collars of campsites. Why the custodians of the camp sites hadn’t got round to digging toilets was a question that constantly baffled us as we stepped gingerly through the minefields going to and coming from the mountain top. As we later found out, the answer is probably that Venezuelans love their money too much to throw it away on things like sanitation. That would be pissing it up against the wall, so to speak. Why build a bog when you can spend the money on beer? But fortunately, there wasn’t the same problem on the top of Roraima where if you needed a big one, you took a plastic bag and a handful of lime, and filled it accordingly. Not so good for the porters who carried the ‘chocolate’ back down the hill, but a rare display of respect for the environment - something we’d seen little of elsewhere in South America.

After a day and a half atop Roraima, it was time to head back down - a knee jarring day and a half which proved much more painful than the ascent. No signs of aliens on the way back down, with the only flying objects being a shit load of sand flies nibbling away at any exposed flesh they could access. Rapidly, the plains unfurled themselves back under our feet, and before long Roraima was a large speck in the distance once more. It had been a fairly gentle six days’ walking, but we deserved a beer nonetheless. Six days without a beer deserves a beer, let alone the walking. And as it turned out, that’s what the porters were thinking too. In the couple of hours it took us to clean up, drop off laundry and check the odd email, the porters had taken themselves, and their tips, and got themselves astoundingly drunk on incredibly weak larger. We found them in a bar, slurring at the wives who they see one evening a week between trips, dribbling, fumbling and generally missing their mouths with their beer bottles. It really was quite an impressive display.

We failed to get quite such a lash on since we had yet more excitement the following morning - a flight in a wibbly wobbly little Cessna plane, further up the national park to Angel Falls. We’d desperately wanted to make this flight over the park, rather than a less interesting bus journey around the park. But the few ales we’d had still made their presence felt as our little plane bumped along the runway, then bumped over lots of invisible holes in the sky. But the fear and the nausea were worth it for the spectacular views of intense forests and winding rivers not far below our little plane. In fact, when it looked like we might smash into a table mountain piercing the forest below with a small puff of smoke, we pootled along the sides of it, seemingly close enough to touch. After an hour of terror and wonder in equal parts, we drifted towards a runway where lay the wreckage of a plane just like ours, in two pieces, both looking very scorched. But, unlike that plane, we landed on our wheels, much to our relief.

We’d dropped out of the sky at a small town called Caniama, where we could still enjoy the pleasure of walking around without the fear of being shot. But the Venezuelan hospitality - being greeted like an unwelcome piece of shit that has just landed on your nose - was in full flow at the Tuina Camp where we quickly learnt not to ask irritating questions like ‘what’s the plan for the next couple of days?’

The plan was, as it turns out, to potter round some local waterfalls before taking a boat up to Salto Angel (Angel Falls) the following day. And so that’s what we did. By this stage, we’d tagged on to a group who were on a tour from England, and so we immersed ourselves in questioning them on the latest goings-on in Corrie and other such worldly issues. Such conversations clashed somewhat with the spectacular trip to the falls, five hours in a boat fighting against the flow of the low water river, flanked by towering table mountains, each offering its own high-rise waterfall which would be spectacular in its own right were it not for its lofty neighbour nearby. And sure enough, long after our bottoms had lost all their nerve endings against the wooden seats of the boat, there emerged round the corner the spectacular sight of the world’s highest waterfall. Massive would be one way of describing it. So massive that the water didn’t actually fall all the way down in one go, dissipating into a wafty cloud about half way down its 979 metres.

A forty minute walk led us nearer to the foot of the falls, where we ‘ooood’ and ‘aaaaaahhd’ like spectators at a fireworks display, then we scrambled nearer still to a pool below the falls where we could swim in the icy waters and look up at the cascade above us. It was an experience which exceeded expectations, thinking that we were numbed by such sights, but finding ourselves agog at the sheer scale of the waters’ plummet. We were taken in, captivated, call it what you will, and thoroughly satisfied. It had been an expensive excursion, but well worth it.

But that was to be the end of Venezuela in terms of it´s beauty as we were about to experience the real Venezuela. The Venezuela that you meet when you’re not wrapped in the cotton wool safety of trips and excursions.

Another Cessna flight (much less frightening as we were experts by this stage), took us north to Cuidad Bolivar on the banks of the Orinoco River. Beautiful as it sounds, the banks of the Orinoco are not somewhere you want to be after dark. Oblivious at this stage, we headed out with some girls we’d met in Canaima and after a meal we headed back to our hostel. About thirty seconds later we were stopped by a group of locals shocked to see us out. Their advice was simple: get a cab, even if it’s just 100 yards to your hostel. We duly obliged and took a cab the 100 yards to our hostel. Forewarned now, we asked in our hostel and sure enough we were told that stepping out after dark is verging on suicidal. Still, we were safely back and thought that we’d be okay if we got out of Cuidad Bolivar and headed to the coast. (‘Everybody’s happy by the sea!’). We went to the bus station where no one wanted to sell us tickets for a bus or even tell us when the next bus would be. So we got a collectivo for the four hour drive up to Puerto La Cruz and our first sighting of the northern coast of South America and the Caribbean Sea.

Puerto La Cruz is an expensive town in an expensive country, and so we were limited to the cheapest hotel on the strip, the kind of place you walk into imagining you might never come out of. It was stinking hot and dripping with water from the air con units which dribbled water all over the uneven floors leading to our dingy room. But the highlight wasn’t the room, or the decor. This hotel was memorable for its cleaners, who we found rummaging (definitely not cleaning) in our room when we came back from breakfast the following morning. Anyone reading this would assume that you would simply report this to the manager and the cleaners would be reprimanded or sacked. Not in Venezuela. We knew by this stage that there’s no point reporting thieving cleaners in places like this, and so we contented ourselves with the knowledge that we’d caught them before they got anything. And quickly left.

We left for what we hoped would be the more secure surrounds of Santa Fe, a little further along the coast. But when we found out that Santa Fe - a small fishing village - has had twenty murders in the past eleven months, we began to notice a theme. All the hostels were guarded by massive fences and usually massive dogs. Everything we’d read and all the people we met told us not to go out at after dark. And when we ate at a restaurant 30 metres from our hostel, the lady owner said she’d watch us walk back to make sure we got there safely. It was only 30 metres! We were beginning to get the hint that Venezuela’s not the safest of countries and in turn began to feel uneasy everywhere we went. The culmination of this came one night when we heard noises outside our room. Looking into the garden, we saw two shadows pass our window and for the next couple of hours heard smashes and bangs which sounded, in the circumstances, like people breaking into the rooms one by one. Surely it would be our turn soon. Feeling threatened outside was one thing, but lying in bed anticipating people coming in is quite another, especially with the knowledge that everyone here carries a gun. We lay and waited, and listened. And Ant fell asleep, leaving Jen to worry and worry and worry all night. But no one broke in. Dawn came, and with it, relief and an opportunity to tell the owner about our restless night. In a manner that was meant to provide assurance, he told us that a big group of guests had arrived, and because they often attract unwanted attention, he patrols the grounds all night with his shotgun. That was meant to assure us, but it kind of backfired. Were we supposed to feel better about the fact that he needs to do a night patrol with a large gun to protect his guests? But by day there was the lure of the beaches and the islands, and it shouldn’t go unsaid that in daylight, this place was nearly paradise. We were on the edge of the Mochima National Park, and with it, beautiful white sand beaches, islands, coral, dolphins and sun. It was almost enough to make you forget the guns, robberies, fences and crime. We’d had a wonderful day´s boat trip the previous day and decided to be brave, put our faith in Eduardo’s security techniques, enjoy the beaches for one more day and night. And it was worth it, we survived!

In spite of the threatening mood gripping us tighter and tighter with every day we spent in Venezuela, we had been holding out for a trip to Los Roques, an archepielo somewhere in the sea north of Caracas. Los Roques is pricey and doesn’t usually feature in backpackers’ plans, but we also hoped it would provide some respite from the dangerous air everywhere else. And even though it would be a budget spunker, we decided that if we could wangle a way of paying for it so we paid black market rates, we could just about afford it. And so we allowed ourselves to leave the beaches of Santa Fe with the promise of better things to come and headed reluctantly back into Puerto Lopez, and a different hotel. Predictably, we then spent two days banging our heads against brick walls (by day), while tour operators displayed astounding inabilities to sell us their tours, even though we were practically waving the money in front of their faces. The phrase ‘why does everything have to be so difficult?’ has never been used so much. In the end, we plummed for Isla Margarita and left Los Roques in the hands of the gods. Meanwhile, we also realised that with Jen´s birthday approaching and only a limited stash of cash, it was going to be a quiet one. But we can’t complain really. Margarita, in spite of being Venezuela’s answer to Magaluf, was pleasant enough, and allowed us the chance to hang out on some more beaches, with a slightly less, though nonetheless present, feeling of menace in the evenings. We saw in Jen’s birthday to the tune of car alarms being triggered by the vibrations of boom boxes in other cars passing by, and we numbed the irritation of the previous week or so with too many Caiprinhas. And then D-day.

We’d decided that we’d had enough of Venezuela; of it’s violence; of the fact that everyone’s out to swindle you; of the ludicrous fact that if you took money out of an ATM you were effectively paying double the market rate for everything. We’d booked a flight from Margarita to Caracas (we didn’t want to spend a minute longer on the roads than we had to) and got to the airport to find that our reservation was no longer valid. Aaaarrrgggghhhhhhhhhhh!!!! But by now we were determined. We worked the airline desks and wangled some seats on a plane, which predated flight itself. Then as we felt certain we were entering the jaws of death on our ancient flying machine, we considered the irony that we would now die by plummeting into the Caribbean Sea in an attempt to escape the violence. But we made it to Caracas, and we still retained a glimmer of hope that one tour operator might have the news that we could got to Los Roques and put all the crap behind us. But when we got there, no news, and no one answered the phone in their office. That was it. Time to go. With virtually the last of our black market cash, we bought tickets to Maracaibo from where we would have to go by road to Columbia. Whatever it took, we wanted to get out of Venezuela. As we waited for our flight, Jen checked her emails and saw the news that we had been waiting for - and for which it was now too late. The operator could get us to Los Roques the following day. Oh, the irony! Oh, the frustration! Oh, if only they picked up their phone when we tried to call! But it was too late; we had bought our ticket to Maracaibo. Sometimes you just have to see the funny side.

Predictably, Maracaibo was difficult. A policeman at the airport warned us to avoid the dodgy taxis and we then went and stepped right into one. The hotel we were aiming for no longer existed and the one that we found was so massively overpriced we could have cried. But we were just glad to be leaving. The following day we hopped in a collectivo with a German guy called Chris and a Columbian guy without the right papers, and negotiated our way through umpteen roadblocks to the promised land, Columbia. We had shelved plans to visit several places in Venezuela and cut short our time there by two weeks. All because everything was either difficult, or dangerous or both.

And what a shame. A country with so much natural beauty was for us and almost everyone else we met, rotten to the core. And it occurred to us as we were crossing the border, being goaded by yet more officials, how much like Orwell’s Animal Farm this country is. Dictatorship disguised as socialism, the masses being ruled over and suppressed by the greedy pigs at the top, led by the colonel, Chavez - the piggish pig of the lot! Good riddance, Venezuela.

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