Venezuela’s ‘Lost World’

In his 1912 book, “The Lost World,” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle describes a stretch of open savannah in southeastern Venezuela, a land speckled with tabletop mountains billions of years old where “the ordinary laws of nature are suspended” and prehistoric creatures still roam. By most estimations, Conan Doyle was inspired by Venezuela’s Gran Sabana, a rolling, grassy highland--beautiful, empty and silent, and until recently, virtually inaccessible by land.

Today, 7.5 million acres of the Gran Sabana make up Canaima National Park in the state of Bolivar, the world’s sixth-largest national park with its savannah, jungle, rivers and waterfalls. One of the falls, Salto Angel, or Angel Falls, is the world’s highest--16 times the height of Niagara.

My flight from Caracas touches down in the village of Canaima, where the airport is a hut with no walls, just a roof over a counter and some long wooden benches. Guides in safari shorts greet us, clipboards in hand and walkie-talkies attached with Velcro to multipocketed safari vests. It is all very official and efficient, not what I expected in the Venezuelan outback.

One of the guides approaches me. He is in his early 20s, smooth-skinned and high-cheekboned. A tag on his shirt says “Angel”--for the waterfall, I think, but it turns out to be his name. Angel directs me to a booth where I pay a fee of about $7 to the national park. Then he leads me to a train of little cars linked to a Jeep by an iron hook. Two women already sit inside. Edith, a smiling Southern widow of about 60, tells me how her husband never liked to travel, and that since he’s been gone she’s seen half the world. Norma is a few years younger than Edith and is Venezuelan. I hear the trace of an accent, though Norma has lived the last 30-plus years in the United States, married to Edith’s nephew. These women look deceptively like demure grandmothers, but in the jungles later today they will be the first to strip down to bathing suits and immerse themselves in the streams we pass that have short waterfalls cascading like veils.

Four Italian men pile into the Jeep, squeezing us in with overstuffed duffel bags. They are in their early 20s and wear dark glasses, single earrings, flashy white smiles. They speak no English and little Spanish, but in our excitement at having arrived in this strange land, we manage to banter together as the Jeep bumps over a dusty road.

The place has a synthetic, Disneyland feel . . . “and this is ‘Outback Land.’ ” It’s probably the safari-garb uniforms of the guides who met the plane, the little car we’re riding in that’s painted with camouflage spots, the Jeep that pulls us along like an amusement-park ride.

We stop at a small box of a building, cement painted light green. This is where Norma, Edith and I all happen to be staying. It is the economy end of the accommodations that make up the sprawling Campamento Canaima, a tourist community that is home base for most excursions on the savannah. (More expensive quarters are available, mostly stylized straw huts and stucco cabins. All Campamento visitors share meals on a large patio with restaurant/bar.)

*

I am here for 24 hours, just long enough to get a taste of the place before I have to fly back to the States. I’ve been visiting friends in Caracas who insisted I leave them to make this trip--something that shouldn’t be missed, they said. In the morning I will see Salto Angel, but today, after settling in my room, there is time for an excursion in the national park. I climb into another train of little cars linked like sausages, where Angel, Norma, Edith and the Italians already sit. The Jeep bumps on a red clay road out of the Campamento, and we ride about 15 minutes to a wide expanse of savannah.

What lies before us stuns me: four tabletop mountains, enormous and looming in the distance. This is no land in Disney. The tabletops are called tepuis, the Pemon Indian word for “mountain.” The Pemon are the traditional inhabitants of this land. Angel names aloud each mountain: Kurun, the deer; Kursari, the vulture; Kuravaina, the Indian with white hair; Mani, the breast (shaped exactly so).

Only a handful of tepuis have been investigated. More than 2 billion years old, the tepuis are sandstone remnants of a thick layer of Precambrian sediments that gradually eroded, leaving these rock precipices. Isolated from each other and from the ground below for millions of years, they have been called little ecological islands, each with its own unique flora and fauna.

Angel says many of the plants are carnivorous, and I picture a sea of Venus’ flytraps gaping at the air, awaiting passing creatures. Standing here, warm wind whistling near my ear, I think how this place does feel like the Lost World. It is indeed a world lost to most of civilization. Yet in its lostness also saved from the destructive hand of humankind.

Leaving the tepuis behind, we ride to the River Carrao, where we climb into a motorized canoe.

Strange how you can sense an impending, sudden drop in a body of water. The river gurgles and boils over sharp rocks, and I begin to understand how it got the name Carrao--which means “betrayer.” Just before the Carrao pulls us over a waterfall, Angel turns the canoe to shore.

We follow him through the jungle, going we know not where. I think of the pumas, jaguars and ocelots I’ve heard roam this national park.

We reach a small falls, about the height of a one-story building but full of bubbly, cascading water. Its angle and pressure is so perfect that it reminds me precisely of a faux waterfall in Disneyland. Norma and Edith strip down to bathing suits, inspiring the rest of us. We walk into the bracing iciness and try to stand beneath the falls, but the water’s force nearly knocks us over. The rocks are slippery under our feet; all we can do is crouch beneath the falls. We slip on clothes over wet bathing suits and walk through jungle to the falls we are here to see, the Yuri. Lying in the middle of the Carrao, it is the short falls we almost went over before Angel grounded the canoe upriver. I think how close we came, and how we surely would have been bounced out of that canoe like hot popcorn kernels. The Yuri is two levels, and violent; it stretches the width of the river. Its cascade is like yellow beer being poured from a barrel, the color created by tannins that abound in the local trees and plants.

A beach downriver has tan, granular sand and rust-colored rocks that are lightweight and porous. The river is cold this late February day--although the air temperature is in the 80s--but Norma and Edith jump in anyway.

We walk back through the jungle. We’ve been away from camp about two hours, and we are getting dehydrated. In the canoe, Angel unveils a cooler of bottled water. As we arrive at the Campamento, the sun is setting behind us, casting an even redder glow on the clay ground.

Inside my room I collapse on the bed. The corrugated ceiling above me is turquoise plastic, and a small fan oscillates from it, three blades turning inside a black wire cage. I lie there thinking of morning, when I will fly to Salto Angel.

Salto in Spanish means both “jump” and “fall.” Will I see where angels have fallen, I wonder? Or where, even, angels jump? But the air is dry, the temperature of skin, and the warmth and the fan’s whirring finally send me to dream.

*

Angel Falls actually got its name from Jimmie Angel, an American bush pilot who stumbled upon it in 1937. Searching for gold, he landed his four-seater plane atop the boggy surface of the tepui from which the falls spills. When he tried to take off again, the plane wouldn’t budge. Angel, his wife, and two companions descended a mile of vertical cliff and walked for 11 days to civilization.

At 3,230 feet, the falls has the world’s highest uninterrupted vertical drop of 2,663 feet. Our flight will take us between cliffs, close enough to the falls for a good view, though I wonder how much we’ll be able to see. It’s now near the end of the dry season, which lasts until April.

The rainy season will bring the fullest cascade of water (August and September are most spectacular), whereas now, I am told, at most we will see a long, thin string of water. The rainy season has its drawbacks too, however. Then the falls is hard to view, often covered by clouds and rain mist, and the flight can be uncomfortably bumpy in driving rain.

Flying is not the only way to see Angel Falls, but with only a 24-hour stay, it is my only option, and it was included in the package price I paid for the trip. A four-seater plane sits on the runway at Campamento Canaima with spindly, doe-like legs, swaying with each gust of wind. I assume we’ll be flying in one of those but am told that, instead, we’ll fly with the Venezuelan airline Servivensa, on a 25-seater jet we just watched come in for a landing.

As it approached the runway, both engines were cut well before the plane touched ground, the nose and wing propellers coming to a dead halt, straight up and down. It looked utterly perilous, though a pilot standing near me on the tarmac said it was a routine way to land on so short a runway.

I begin to walk, reluctantly, up the stairs of the Servivensa when Norma and Edith arrive, reassuring presences. The plane takes off with a deafening roar, and soon we’re flying between mountaintops, jagged and dark with overgrowth, like ancient ruins. The view from the plane is layered, a parfait dessert: Far below glows the light green of vegetation, then rose-colored rock, then black mountain peak, topped by a great daub of clouds, like whipped cream.

Then we see Angel Falls; it is one long, thin stream of water. If Jimmie Angel had found it in dry season like this, would he have guessed even that it was a waterfall, much less the highest?

Angel spills from the tepui with the largest surface area of them all--280 square miles--called Auyantepui, meaning Mountain of the God of Evil in the Pemon language. The falls cascades into Can~on del Diablo, Devil’s Canyon. We fly by, watching water pour from the top of the mountain, beginning as a stream then falling to the base in slow motion, water tumbling over itself, billowing and spraying mist that encircles its own stream before disappearing into jungle.

We leave the cliffs and the waterfall and fly over an area called the Sabana de Maiupi, with its island-like patches of green spotting a sea of brown earth. The part of the Lost World where falling angels spill from the lip of the God of Evil into Devil’s Canyon is behind us now.

The jet comes in for a landing. The pilot cuts the engines and all is silent for one second, two. . . . The next sound is wheels kissing tarmac.

McCauley is a Cambridge, Mass.-based freelance writer, and editor of “Travelers’ Tales: Spain” (O’Reilly & Associates) and the forthcoming “Travelers’ Tales: Women in the Wild.”

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GUIDEBOOK

Venezuelan Venue

Getting there: From L.A. to Caracas, there’s connecting service only, on American, United and Mexicana airlines; round-trip fares on Mexicana begin at about $690, on United and American about $835.

Booking a tour: Book ahead through either a U.S. travel agent or Venezuelan tour packager. Among operators who serve the Gran Sabana:

Tara Tours, 6595 NW 36th St., Ste. 306A, Miami, FL 33166; telephone (800) 327-0080, fax (305) 871-0417. Cost per person, double occupancy, on three-day, two-night trip (accommodation at Avensa Jungle Lodge, all meals, one lagoon trip, flight over Angel Falls): $649, not including round-trip air fare from U.S. and Caracas-Canaima (about $144).

Mountain Travel-Sobek, 6420 Fairmount Ave., El Cerrito, CA 94530; tel. (510) 527-8100, fax (510) 525-7710, e-mail: info@mtsobek.com. Cost per person, double occupancy, seven nights camping, seven nights in hotels/lodges, including a trek up tepui Auyantepui and canoeing upriver to Angel Falls): $2,395, plus $490 charter flight.

Avensa (national airline) packages, Avenida Urdaneta, Esquina La Ibarra, Planta Abajo, Caracas; tel. 011-58-2-907-8000. Cost per person, double occupancy, on three-day, two-night trip (includes round-trip air fare from Caracas, accommodations and all meals at Campamento Canaima, a river canoe outing, flight to view Angel Falls): $725.

Canaima Tours, No. 18, Urb. Aribana, Calle 8, Alta Vista, Puerto Ordaz, Venezuela; tel. 011-58-86-625-560, fax 011-58-86-620-559. Cost per person, double occupancy, for three-day, two-night trip (includes accommodations and meals, river excursion, flight over Angel Falls but not air fare from Caracas): $350.

For more information: Embassy of Venezuela, Tourist Information, 1099 30th St. NW, Washington, DC 20007; tel. (202) 342-6847, fax (202) 342-6820.