Waterfalls and Tepuis

This chaosisation is proving to be fickle phenomenon, one minute I'm sat on a Caribbean beach and the next thing I know I'm living in a cave on top of a mountain. I'd never even heard of Roraima before I arrived in Venezuela, but three days later there I was setting out across the Gran Sabana intent on scaling its 2,800m.

Opinion was divided as to how exactly Roraima and the other tepuis in the area were formed. The geologist in our group spouted some frankly fanciful story about sandstone erosion, only to be swiftly put in his place by our guide who explained that they were originally all part of a large tree trunk which was cut down by some unspecified animals who were jealous that they couldn't climb to the top to get the special fruit that grew there. Either way they're huge monoliths surrounded by rolling countryside which meant that the two days required to reach the base were fairly easy and the third spent climbing it more taxing. Still, as Monday mornings go I'll take climbing through the world's second highest waterfall in the pissing rain over most alternatives.

We had hoped that when we got to the top we'd be above the clouds, but 'twas not to be. On the plus side I finally found a use for that jumper I'd been carrying around all this time, yet despite that I had a strange, long forgotten, feeling which I initially struggled to identify, I felt cold.

Our second day as troglodytes was far more rewarding, the weather cleared and we were able to appreciate just how spectacular a landscape it was, a mixture of boulders, pools, endemic species and precipitous drops. The undoubted highlight being the 1km sheer drop overlooking the border with Guyana.

It was all downhill after that, back to the starting point and a night bus back to Ciudad Bolivar. There we attempted to have a night out, but were thwarted by the fact that in a city of over 300,000 inhabitants only five people actually go out on a Friday night, and two of them are lunatics who feign friendship but threaten to explode into violence at any moment.

The next day we boarded a very small plane on the first leg of our journey to Angel Falls. I had imagined they were so called because they're often shrouded in clouds where angels might live, or because they're as high as the heavens. In fact their name is simply down to their serendipitous discovery by an American pilot called Jimmy Angel, would that all eponymous explorers were so aptly named.

Our plane took us as far as Canaima from where it was a bottom numbing six hour boat ride to the base of the falls, broken only by the occasional need for us to get out and push the canoe up some rapids. As we bathed at the bottom rather than climbing to the top my second consecutive waterfall Monday was less taxing than the first, but no less spectacular: 900m of falling water which has largely turned to mist by the time it gets to the bottom, followed by several terraces of shorter cascades culminating in a refreshingly cool pool. Jimmy certainly knew a good waterfall when he saw one.

And I know a good beach when I see one, and I hadn't seen one for quite some time so, following an unavoidable night in Ciudad Bolivar, we nipped up to the Caribbean again for a couple of days before spending 24 hours travelling to Merida. It was on these journeys that I realised just how welcoming the Venezuelan people had been to me. Along many roadsides and daubed on walls throughout the towns were messages extolling me, either simply with the message “Si” or sometimes with “Vota Si.” Some even said “Si con Chavez” which was overstepping the mark a bit as I've not yet decided where I stand on that thorny issue, but nonetheless the effort they went to to make me welcome was appreciated, back home you'd only really see that sort of thing during an election campaign.

And now, having spent the weekend in the more interesting, but still slightly disappointing, surroundings of Merida we are once again to quit the city for the countryside on a four day Anaconda hunting expedition and after that Columbia beckons.

Ciao

Don Simon.

Photos at: www.don-simon.smugmug.com/gallery/7817469_GNyAD#506258052_Fr6kQ