The Lost World

South America » Venezuela
April 27th 2009

Published: April 27th 2009

Edit Blog Post

Donny

The Journey Upriver to Angel Falls

I could easily have been disappointed with Venezuela because I had dreamed of going there for so long, my expectations were very high. However, I left Venezuela (initially illegally but that’s another story) feeling enormously satisfied.

It was a strange feeling because I’ve been to a lot of remote and exotic places but I just could not believe I was there, at Angel Falls.

I can’t remember when I first had the desire to travel. I think it was when I was about ten or eleven. The country that always stood at the top of my wishlist, though I can’t exactly remember why, was Venezuela.

One reason must have been from reading, and greatly enjoying, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. If you aren’t familiar with the book, it tells the story of a 19th expedition to the top of one of Venezuela’s many table topped mountains, where an isolated world of dinosaurs and other long since extinct stuff has been living happily but ferociously since the dawn of time. Despite being totally absorbed in the book, it wasn’t enough. I really wanted to go there and see the pterodactyls.

Another reason why Venezuela held such

Angel Falls

The vertical drop is one metre higher than Sca Fell, Englands highest mountain. Quite impressive no?

an appeal was Angel Falls. This is going to sound very geeky but when I was kid I was really in to facts. Particularly geography facts. Longest river in the world, deepest ocean, driest desert, etc. It’s the reason I’m now pretty good at the blue questions on Trivial Pursuit. One fact that never failed to impress me was “highest waterfall in the world with a drop of 979m: Angel Falls, Venezuela”.

The final reason could be the most significant. I believe the name of a country greatly influences its appeal to travellers. To a ten year old in South Yorkshire I don’t think there is a more exotically sounding country as Venezuela. We don’t have any places around Doncaster with V’s or Z’s in, or A’s at the end. Venezuela or Cleethorpes? If you have never been to either then going on the name alone, which would you rather visit?

The plan for 2009 was to return to Latin America and find another English teaching job. The country I chose to enact this plan was Colombia. But instead of going directly to Colombia, why not squeeze in a bit of travelling on the way. What I really

Local Boatman in front of Salto Hacha

Canaima Lagoon

wanted to do, and had been planning last year, was to fly to French Guiana (not too costly from Paris), travel through Suriname and Guyana into Venezuela, then cross into Colombia to start working. Very few people seem to visit the three Latin American anomalies, collectively known as the Guianas, which as any frequent reader of my blogs will know, this is reason enough for me to want to go there. However, the Guianas are expensive countries to travel in at the best of times and seeing as the pound has dropped so much in value, I think the Guianas will have to wait. Therefore Venezuela became my first destination.

The trip started really well. As the airport taxi arrived to pick me up from a Clapham house party at 3.30am “Where are you off?” was the shout from randoms in the house, expecting a reply like “Fabric” or “For a kebab”. When I answered with “Venezuela” I think they thought I was talking about some new afterclub they hadn’t heard of. The taxi driver was Eritrean, the first one I have ever met. During the 45 minute journey to Heathrow we solved all of the world’s problems. A

Toucan

I actually took this photo while on the lost city trek in Colombia but seen as I am not going to write a blog about that I'll stick this photo here.

potentially flight disqualifying amount of alcohol perhaps made our solutions sound more promising than they actually were.

A short hop to Frankfurt, followed by time for a bit of brekky, then almost eleven hours to Caracas. I had to run the gauntlet of the enthusiastic black market money changers trying to take advantage of tourists unaware of the daily increasing rates (2 Bolivars to $1 in the banks, 5 Bolivars to $1 on the street), then dodge the taxi drivers:
“Taxi my friend?”
“No thanks I’ll take the bus.”
“There isn’t a bus.”
“Yes there is.”
“The bus is too dangerous for foreigners.”
“I thought you said there wasn’t a bus?”
To their credit, after realising that I was willing and intending to take the oh so dangerous bus, they became genuinely friendly giving me advice about places to go and what to do.

The bus isn’t dangerous at all, it’s the destination. Central Caracas is not a place to be alone and foreign, with all your gear, after dark. It was now dark. I had promised my new taxi driver pals that I would get out of the bus and straight into a taxi to take me

Salto Sapo

Another of the falls around the glorious Canaima Lagoon.

to the bus station. However, two even newer pals who shared the airport bus told me that taxis are very expensive in Venezuela so they would both take me to another bus heading for the bus station. I had to stand on the next bus but a seated lady kindly offered to hold my rucksack. I’ll admit to being slightly nervous prior to this crossing of Caracas, given the city’s reputation, but I only had heart-warming experiences reminding why I wished to make this continent home once more.

A bit of a wait in the bus station then I boarded an overnight bus to Ciudad Bolivar in the centre of this vast country. Now, most of South America’s long distance bus companies are known for their love of air-con. In Venezuela this is taken to extremes. It was comparable to my mid-winter Serbian overnight train journey (see the last blog). Above my tracky top I had to wear a fleece with the hood up and the strings pulled so tight to leave unprotected only my by now blue nose in order to breathe. Off the bus to a dark, deserted bus station where after some eye-rubbing and jogging on

Behind Salto Sapo

This is where The Last of the Mohicans was filmed.

the spot a man appeared asking if I wanted to go to Angel Falls, he had a plane in a couple of hours. After so long without sleep I agreed to everything and allowed myself to be carried to the little airport and seated in a tiny four seater plane, alongside the pilot, who started to read the paper as soon as we were four feet off the ground. In fact he did so little during the 45 minute flight that I’m convinced the plane was controlled by someone on the ground. The plane was certainly not much bigger than a remote control one.

Fortunately there are no roads into the Belgium sized Canaima National Park (Venezuela’s Parima Tapirapecó National Park is even bigger). Fortunately because it means you have to take this glorious flight. The farmland soon gives way to savannah and eventually you begin to see the famous flat-topped mountains or “tepuis” to use the Pemon word (the Pemon are the local indigenous people). Your altitude never goes above a few hundred metres so the views are wonderful. But the highlight is the last few minutes as the little Cessna swoops down over Canaima Lagoon with its

Saltos Golondrina y Ucaima

Canaima Lagoon

white sand beach and seven perfect waterfalls.

To get to Angel Falls, named not after a heavenly being but after Jimmy Angel, an American pilot who crash landed onto the Tepui in 1937 while looking for gold (how would he find it from a plane?), it is a further 7 hours upriver in a long narrow wooden speedboat. The journey is mesmerising. You skim along bouncing off rocks, getting soaked by the tea coloured water as you take the rapids at full speed so as not to get stuck, and gradually the Tepuis begin to close in around you. The river gets narrower as the jungle reaches in from either side and behind the trees the strange mountains soar vertically above you. Countless waterfalls tumble off the table tops, many of them several hundred metres high that elsewhere would be tourist attractions in their own right. Here they are just some amongst many. Lots of them aren’t even named.

A sad but inevitable truth about travelling, is that the more places you go, and the more truly awesome things you see, the less awestruck you become when you see something new. For example when my mum first saw

Angel Falls

This was the view from the river where we camped. I just sat and gazed for hours.

zebras in Kenya she was almost in tears but I hadn’t given them a second glance. Or the Guayabo National Monument in Costa Rica is definitely pretty and interesting but after seeing Machu Picchu or Tikal it was hard to get overly excited by Costa Rica’s most famous ruins. I think if you get so numbed to such sites then it’s time to go home and sit in an office for forty hours a week to rekindle your passions. Angel Falls however was different. I don’t wish to sound like a travel bore but I have got around in my time, and seen some very cool stuff, including some very impressive waterfalls, notably Victoria Falls and Iguazu. Once we reached the first viewpoint of Salto Angel, after the little jungle trek from the river, I forgot that I had ever been anywhere. I was absolutely speechless. Our group sat in silence for a good hour developing sore necks while gazing upwards at the spectacular scene. Except for the glamorous Polish family draping themselves over the rocks whose trip seemed to be a continuous photoshoot. I don’t have the literary talent to describe the view so I won’t try. Even the

Crossing the Gran Sabana

The first and last days of the trek are long hot slogs over rolling grasslands.

million photos I took don’t do it justice.

Those of you who are still with me will have noticed that I’ve just been waffling on about Jimmy’s waterfall. However, given the title of this blog, my intention was tell you about climbing Mount Roraima. I’ll try to keep it brief.

Straddling three countries, Mount Roraima sits in the extreme southeast of Venezuela, the extreme north of Brazil, and the extreme southwest of Guyana. Though Chavez would explain it differently because he claims for Venezuela approximately 145000km2 of Guyana. That’s 60%!o(MISSING)f the country, including the bit on top of Roraima. This long running dispute explains the lack of an overland border crossing between the two countries much to the annoyance of travellers (well actually just me).

Roraima is the highest of the Tepuis, indeed it is Guyana’s highest mountain (not according to Hugo), and the supposed inspiration for Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. These reasons inevitably led to my attempt to climb it.

The trek is not difficult and it is wonderful. One of the best I have ever done.

Following a bumpy journey in a cramped Landover, the trek begins at the

Our Destination Looming Ominously Ahead

Roraima is on the right and the slightly lower Kukenan is to the left.

Pemon village of Paraitepui. An inspection takes place by the national park officials who log all of your food to ensure no packaging is left on the mountain. The first day you must cross the Gran Sabana. The rolling grasslands and huge skies are beautiful and when the cloud clears you get tantalising views of Roraima and Kukenan seemingly incredibly far in the distance.

The quality of the views is aided by a lack of human intervention in the land. Usually there would be power lines or a road spoiling a nice photograph. But here I was confused by the absolute lack of anything. Where were the people, the villages, the farms, or the cattle munching there way across the plains? It turns out that the land here is anything but rich. The poor soils cannot support anything but the tough inedible grasses. A combination of incredibly old rocks (formed approximately two billion years ago) and high rainfall means that the useful minerals (and there were never many in quartzite) have long since been leached away.

The second day is tougher. As you climb to the base of the huge cliffs the terrain changes from grasslands to slippery

Sharing Breakfast Tang with Mount Kukenan

jungle. Groups on a six day trip spend the night here but our group, two Brits, a Dane, an Ozzie and an American, deemed ourselves sufficiently fit/tight to do the trip in five. Thus in the afternoon we had to tackle “The Ramp”. Early explorers who first saw Roraima proclaimed the top to be completely inaccessible. It wasn’t until 1884 that the ledge cutting across and up the 500m vertical cliffs was finally reached and climbed. It is tiring but short and quickly you reach the eerie plateau.

You spend two chilly nights on the top, sleeping in comfortable sandy bottomed “hotels”. These overhangs provide shelter from the common afternoon rains up top. The “hotels” are close to deep pools fit for drinking and bathing. Similarly the campsites on the way up are located beside rivers. Therefore, unlike on many previous longish treks where I have felt constantly grubby, on Roraima you can give yourself a scrub morning, noon and night should you so wish. Also I never went thirsty.

Exploration of the huge flat summit is fascinating. The scenery is bizarre. Weird and wonderful rock formations, shaped by aeons of wind and rain, reflected in perfectly still

The Vertical Cliffs of Roraima

and crystal clear pools. One is supposed to resemble a bear eating ice-cream, another a flying turtle. I saw many that looked like dinosaurs but maybe I just had The Lost World going around in my head. There is no soil up there just carpets of brilliant white quartz crystals. Pocket them and you are in for a hefty fine when you are searched on the way out. Many of the few plants on the tops of the tepuis are endemic and don’t even exist on neighbouring tepuis. Some of these are carnivorous, although it is difficult to see what they find to eat. People often refer to the tops of the tepuis as “islands in the sky”. This definition perfectly describes the view as the fog rolls across the savannah and only the flat tepui tops are visible poking up through a sea of cloud.

It was a strange feeling because I’ve been to a lot of remote and exotic places but I just could not believe I was there, in the lost world. This came less than a week after I could not believe that I was looking at Angel Falls. This idea of travelling to places