Anyway there are a few sights in Ciudad Bolívar, including a Cathedral, which is next to the main square, in which a military ceremony of some kind was going on. There are also quite a few old colonial buildings in the historic centre, such as these arcaded houses alongside the river, although this one wasn't in such great shape (it looked like there'd been a fire).
The Orinoco River itself is another of the attractions. There were a lot of fisherman throwing in their nets and not seeming to catch very much, but drawing a big crowd anyway, some of whom you can see at the top of that photo. There are a couple more photos of the Orinoco here and below.
After seeing the sights on Tuesday, I booked myself on a 3-day/2-night trip to Angel Falls, leaving the following morning. As you may already know, the big attraction of Angel Falls is that it's the highest waterfall in the world, with a 979m drop from top to bottom. The falls are in an isolated location in Canaima National Park, which is inaccessible by road, and that meant that I had to fly. The flights from Ciudad Bolívar and back are probably the only flights that I'll take in my whole South America trip (obviously excluding the flights to and from South America).
Outside Ciudad Bolívar airport I saw the aeroplane of Jimmy Angel, who discovered Angel Falls by flying over it in this plane (and fairly obviously the falls are named after him). The aircraft in which we travelled to Canaima actually wasn't too dissimilar from Jimmy Angel's - it was a tiny 6-seater Cessna like this one. On the way out to Canaima, I got the co-pilot's seat, which didn't seem particularly safe, because all of the plane's controls were within my reach. In fact at one point I accidentally bashed one of the levers with my knee, but I don't think the pilot noticed, and it didn't seem to make any difference. This was my view from the front seat - note that the pilot is reading a newspaper rather than concentrating on flying the plane.
We made it safely to Canaima, where we stopped off briefly at the Tiuna Tours lodge to meet the rest of the group (eleven in total), most of whom had arrived the previous day. We then headed off again almost straightaway because we were due to spend that night at a camp near Angel Falls, which involved a five hour trip in a motorised canoe. The walk to the canoe took us past Laguna Canaima, which is a picturesque spot from which we could see four waterfalls. We were also able to get a close-up view of the right-hand waterfall, called Ucaima Falls (below).
From this spot we could also see a fairly perfect table mountain (known as a tepui in the indigenous Pemón language) in the distance. There are over a hundred tepuis in this region, which makes it a pretty unique landscape, and in fact Angel Falls itself drops from the top of one, Auyan Tepui.
It's currently the rainy season, so the river is particularly high at the moment, which made the journey in the canoe pretty eventful. Who needs to go white-water rafting when you can ride rapids (against the flow) in a motorised canoe? It took us about five attempts to get past one set of rapids, and we were taking on so much water that I was certain we were going to sink, but we did eventually make it through.
In the late afternoon we arrived at the camp, which was on a small island about 5km from Angel Falls. A short walk from the camp, we were able to get our first sighting of the falls, although we'd get a lot closer the following morning. We also had this view of another part of Auyun Tepui in the opposite direction. We then had a few hours' free time until dinner, which was a very tasty dish of chicken cooked on an open fire. It was particularly impressive considering it was pouring with rain the whole time the cooks were preparing the meal, and in fact it hardly stopped raining all night.
After spending a not particularly comfortable night sleeping in hammocks, we were up at 5am the following morning for the 3km hike to the Angel Falls viewpoint, which is the closest that we were able to get to the falls. Since our camp was the closest of all the camps to the falls, we were the first group to arrive, and the view was pretty spetacular, as I hope you can get some idea of in this photo. It seemed incredible that such a huge waterfall was flowing almost from the very top of a mountain. I tried to time how long the water takes to fall from the top to the bottom, but it was impossible because the water drops such a long distance that most of it either evaporates or turns into mist long before it reaches the bottom. And just to prove that I was there...
We spent about half an hour admiring the view, and then hiked back to the camp, packed up our stuff and travelled back in the canoe to the Tiuna Tours lodge in time for lunch. In the afternoon we went to another waterfall, Sapo Falls, which involved a short canoe trip and then a 20-minute walk. The walk wasn't much fun, because the area was infested with puri puri, which are horrible little bugs similar to mosquitoes, and I got bitten a lot. Anyway the attraction of Sapo Falls is that it's possible to walk behind the falls, allowing us to appreciate the sheer power of the waterfall. This is the view from the start of the path behind the falls - at this point I put my camera in a waterproof bag, because we were about to get absolutely soaked. At several places along the path there was so much spray that it was impossible to see anything at all, but we all made it through to the other side, where this was the view. We were then able to go for a bathe underneath the waterfall, which felt a bit like someone was dropping bricks on my head.
The following day I spent the morning lazing around, and after lunch I walked to Canaima airport with Laibond and Denise, a couple from Hong Kong that were in my group. It was there that we got a bit of a nasty shock, because Laibond discovered that around US$160 had been stolen from his wallet. I then checked my wallet too, and sure enough I found that I'd also had money stolen, but only 150Bs (£15) in my case, because fortunately I'd left most of my money in my big backpack in the hostel in Ciudad Bolívar. The money must have been taken when we went to Sapo Falls the previous afternoon - we'd left our rooms unlocked because we hadn't been given keys, and our guide had assured us that it was perfectly safe. Obviously it's not a big deal in my case, but it did leave a bit of a bad taste in the mouth, and Canaima was pretty much the last place I'd have expected something like that to happen.
After arriving back in Ciudad Bolívar, I headed to the hostel to pick up my belongings, and then I returned to the bus station to catch yet another overnight bus, this time to Santa Elena de Uairén, which is in the south-east corner of Venezuela, close to the border with Brazil. I'm going to recuperate here for a couple of days, because I've had a bit of a cold ever since that 24-hour bus journey from Mérida to Ciudad Bolívar, and I also have insect bites all over my body that are itching like crazy. I'm hoping both of those things will get better by Monday, because that's when I'm planning to start the 6-day hike to the top of Mount Roraima and back.
No comments:
Post a Comment