I spent 2 weeks in Venezuela, from October 29 to November 12. I flew from Indy to Chicago to Miami to Caracas, following this route in reverse coming back. While in the country we flew on a 727, a DC-3 and a 6-seater Cessna. We boated to Angel Falls, highest water falls in the world, and hiked to the top of Mount Auyantepui, the tepui Angel Falls comes off.
The Pemon indians are the people who live in the region we were traveling in. Our boatmen on the river and our porters/guides on the mountain were Pemon. Almost every night we received a "bedtime story", one of the Pemon's myths about the origins of things around them, the animals, fire, the moon, ... At the end of this report, I've included one of their stories about how the firefly got it's light.
A tepui (ta pooie) is a table top mountain in Venezuela of which there are 116 major ones. Tepui is the Pemon indian word for house. The Pemon believe that these are the places where the spirits live. Auyantepui is one of the larger tepuis with an area of about 400 square miles. The sheer walls make it look almost impossible to be able to get to the top without a major rock climbing effort.
For the first part of the trip we traveled in a motorized 30 foot dugout canoe. The one canoe held the seven of us, our leader, the three boatmen and all of our food and gear for the 4 days on the river. We stayed in shelters with thatched roofs where we slept in hammocks. The rainy season was just ending so the rivers we were on were high. This made for an easy ride because we could ride over rapids which the boats would have to be dragged up if the water were lower.
Angel Falls was impressive. We could see the falls from the shelter we stayed at along the river. We then hiked about an hour to the main viewing point of the falls near the base. We hiked back there the next morning so that we could see the falls in both afternoon and morning light.
It is hard to get a good perspective on the falls. While they're over 3200 feet high, the height is hard to appreciate because there are few references to give a proper sense of size. The falls are just one drop; there are no cascades on the way down. About half way down the water turns to mist. The base is just a constant, heavy rain rather than water crashing down. The wind creates swirls of mist which can spirl upward a short distance before resuming the fall to the bottom.
Angel Falls was named for the person who discovered them in the 1930's, Jimmy Angel. He was a bush pilot and one story is that he crashed his plane on the top of Auyantepui and discovered the route down that we took up. Another part of this story is that another person cleared a landing site on top for him and that his crash was an insurance scam.
Another person who explored the tepuis and especially Weitepui (way tepui), was Alexander Limey. Weitepui is a small but very symmetrical tepui that we boated around on our way from Angel Falls to the trailhead for our hike. Alexander Limey believed that little green people lived on it. In looking for them, a cave he was going to explore would raise 50 feet up the cliff, a trench would appear between him and where he wanted to explore, and other mysterious happenings kept him from contacting them. Every time he would get close to where they lived on the tepui, he would black out and awaken at the base of it.
Angel Falls comes off the north side of Auyantepui. We went up the south side to get to the top. Since this tepui is 400 square miles, when we were on top, we were quite a ways from the falls. The top isn't perfectly flat but has valleys, hills and its own ecosystem.
The route up was fairly difficult. It took three days to get to the top and each day involved some fairly steep sections. It was sweaty, wet, muddy work. When the hike started, we were under way less than 5 minutes when we had to wade across a river. We'd been told that there were only 12 or 15 of these to cross this day and that it was pointless to try to keep our boots and socks dry. We waded across wearing our boots and mine never dried out until I got home. At least we were able to keep one set of socks, shoes and clothes dry for camp every evening.
All of the steep sections required a lot of concentration. It would have been fairly easy to slip and get injured. On the final day going to the top, there were even sections with fixed ropes to help you up. I would have signed up for this trip long ago if I had realized that it wasn't just a simple hike to the top. While non-technical, it was a challenging and interesting climb.
Here is the Pemon myth on how the firefly got its light:
A firefly was flying around and was spotted by a raspberry bush. The bush fell in love with the firefly. It told the firefly this but the firefly didn't return its love because the raspberry bush was brown and ugly.
The firefly went away on a trip and when it came back it saw the bush again which was now green and beautiful. It fell in love with the bush but the bush spurned it because it had been rejected earlier. The firefly asked the bush how it became so beautiful. The bush explained that there had been a fire which burned off all its leaves. Then the rains came and the leaves grew back green and beautiful.
The firefly thought that it could become beautiful and the bush would fall in love with it if it flew through a fire. The firefly found a campfire and flew through it. However it felt terrible pain as it caught fire and it started beating the fire out. The only problem was that its arms were too short and it couldn't reach its behind. Which is where the firefly got its fire.
Although we never saw any, we were in a region where there were many poisonous snakes. I asked why there weren't any horses in the area and the answer was that poisonous snakes had killed them all when an attempt had been made to introduce them.
The title of this report comes from a story we heard about snakes. In learning about precautions to take, someone commented that they were glad they wouldn't be in the lead as we hiked along the trails. The story is that the first person along the trail wakes the snake up, the second person makes it angry and the third person gets bitten
