Monte Roraima: The Descent

What a day this was! Very costly to our knees, quadriceps and calves I must say! The route to and from the top Roraima was mostly a roughly 60degree incline, with easier pistes and some harder climbing wall ones. We descended in about half the time it took us to hike up the unique monster mountain, but in some ways, ascension was mas facil. One very sketchy slant covered by loose rocks and boulders required great care, especially since it was on the side of a steep mountain drop and was slippery due to the heavy spray from the overhead waterfall. Thankfully there were no accidents, but sooner or later, every one of us stumbled on large stones or exposed tree roots on the easier terrains. Much further down in the Gran Sabana, closer to where we camped on the first night, the strong flow of the river swept nobody downstream whilst wading through knee-deep, remarkably! We set up our final camp here and shared, yet again, delicious food before Beneton and his team supplied us with awesome t-shirts displaying a map of Venezuela and the text “I didit”. We had to love them! They were fantastic souvenirs to receive before turning in for the night.
I guess walking back across the undulations of the Gran Sabana the next day counts as the descent too, in a way, and this was the most difficult day of all. Waking up and putting on our new “I didit” tees placed the psychology into our heads that we had finished the trek and that this was just a light 3 hour walk back to meet the jeeps. We had forgotten about the steep ups and downs and with our legs being slightly done in from the day before, it proved a bit of a challenge. We all came through though and it was so thrilling at the end to see our new friends satisfied with their accomplishment of their dreams. We stopped for a delicious lunch of BBQ chicken (straight from the churrascaria!), rice and salad, in the tiny village of San Francisco de Yuruani. This was delicious, but the cooks on Beneton’s team were also wonderful and they whipped up full-marks food like this every day, so it wasn’t like we had been deprived of good quality food like this, it was just great sitting on a table together back in civilisation. Drinks were in order, but not before a long shower, to spend the evening congratulating each other and exchanging contacts. We’ve formed some great friendships here and we’ll be staying in contact for sure! If any of you are reading this, thanks for a fantastic time on the trek!

Monte Roraima: Exploring the Tepuy

The Lost World on top of the table mountain was very extraterrestrial and is like nowhere else on Planet Earth. On the big day of grande exploracion, Jon sets his sights on walking through the infinite-looking rock formations, with Michela (the infamous Italian!), Yuichi and Seyha (The jolly Japanese duo) and our great Guyanese guide, Beneton. Without Beneton, we would have got lost very quickly as there are no distinguishing landmarks on the merciless 200+km2 surface. Sure there are some rocky features, such as the ‘Flying Turtle’ and the ‘Maverick’ and do you remember the Moai statues we were observing on Easter Island? There was the odd naturally occurring Moai look-alike here and there, complete with their stone hats. But these few rock formations would no way be enough for us to find our way back to camp later. As well as these marvels, there were entire glittering quartz crystal valleys, which mystically illuminated themselves using the tiny amount of sunlight that was penetrating the thick cloud cover. It was like being on another planet!













Meanwhile, we were heading to Beneton’s country, Guyana, and also to Brazil. To be more precise, we were in search of the ‘Triple Point’ frontier marker, which separates Venezuela, Guyana and Brazil, and we couldn’t help but climb the large bollard just to be in three countries at once!

Venezuelan people don’t really see it that way as on their maps they have a large extra chunk that overlaps with the Guyanese territory which they call the “Zona de Reclamacion”. In fact, they feel so strongly about this that some Venezuelan with a lot of spare time on his hands took the trouble to climb Monte Roraima, just to remove the plaque from the Guyana side of the monument. In the rest of the world, Guyana has the right to this land and that border is officially shared by the three countries. And as Beneton said himself, “It’s not the plaque that’s important, it’s the land.”

Climbing Monte Roraima

Another story better told in pictures! Admittedly it was easier than we thought, though that may have been facilitated by the continuous stops to take spectacular pictures of the most beautiful mountain that we’ve ever climbed. Most of our team felt the same and the group met up sooner or later along the way, but there was Bruno (from Berlin, who studies the anthropology of the Pemon people in the area of the Gran Sabana) who is ‘der koenig der Roraima’ (the king of Roraima). Since it’s pretty much on his doorstep, he has climbed it four times now and has done the picture taking thing already, so he hikes it fairly regularly to keep fit (and what better way?). He really has the fitness of a young athlete and this is evident by the fact that he ascended it in 2hrs:10mins, as he revealed over our rewarding beers. Go Bruno! The rest of the team were fantastic companeiros all the way up and the interesting conversations we had seemed to take our minds off the gradient!

Why not pop back to this page soon, when we have managed to upload some thrilling shots?
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And only 2 weeks later, here they are!

Haben Sie na baba si gyza gesehen?

We didn’t quite expect to hear such an insulting phrase from Brani, the future president of Bulgaria, and at the time we thought that his beautiful wife to be, Polly, was equally shocked. Don’t be fooled! She is just as much of a minx and she wasn’t shy at all, but was only held back by a sore throat or cold. Mr Bulgaria lives in Germany and has done so from a very young age, which explains his brilliant German language skills, but also an amazing standard of English due to the fact that they learn our language from about the age of ten, maybe younger still. Having moved from Bulgaria with his family, he has remained very much in touch with his mother tongue, so basically we had a tri-lingual genius on the team! He couldn’t help but sometimes mix his Bulgarian into his German sentences. Can you help us to decipher the title of this blog, “Haben Sie na baba si gyza gesehen?” We can get some from our German, and of course we know the Bulgarian part too (they are our first Bulgarian words!!!) but maybe it’s best, and more fun if you work this one out on your own. It may be difficult in ‘Google Translator’ though because Bulgarians actually write in Cyrillic. “Haben Sie… gesehen?” means “Have you seen…?”
“… na baba si gyza…” is a completely different kettle of fish!

Treking the Gran Sabana

Following the tight squeeze into the jeep, our Speedy Gonzalez driver tore through the gentle undulating hills of the Gran Sabana like there was no tomorrow. It would have been more enjoyable had we not been feeling a little queasy. A ride like that should never be undertaken on an empty stomach, and Jon felt a lot better after taking up Francisco’s (an awesome Argentinean from Buenos Aires) offer of a square or two of his chocolate. Each of the “small” blocks were like a whole bar and the milk chocolate taste and silky texture was simply divine! Once in Paraitepuy, we had arrived at our starting point for the trek towards Roraima and were immediately hit by the warm and somewhat dusty air of the surroundings. We had also heard bad stories about hungry swarms of mosquitoes and even smaller and subtler puri-puri, so of course the occasional wasp and small fruit flies weren’t going unnoticed either. Our guide, Beneton, whipped up a light lunch of delicious ham and cheese sandwiches to pump us full of energy for the forward march. The distant view of Monte Roraima and his neighbour, Kukenan Tepuy, was marvellous and clouds blanketed themselves around the mountains and in between, whilst leaving the extensive savannah completely clear. The grassy hills and valleys were varying in shades of greens and light-yellow, and also patches of jet black due to controlled burning like we saw in Burma last year, plus high coppices hid very well the loud insect life and the sharply screeching ducks. The first day was very enjoyable and a bit of a doddle, since crossing the streams merely involved short strides from stone to stone and we ran at the massive, steep hills with determination. In all honesty, however, we hadn’t used up any of our battery power by this time as it was only day one. For even the best of us, this was shortly about to change as the true ascent of the target Tepuy neared.

The Lost World: Monte Roraima

Well, it must be said that this was to be one of the trip’s greatest highlights. It was at a very young age that Jon became introduced to a film version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous novel, ‘The Lost World’. He would sit with his brother, Rich, and they would both stare silently into the box, watching in fascination as the team of scientists in the plot, who are in search of the world’s last dinosaurs, become stranded on top of the high Plateau that protrudes gigantically from the dense jungle below. Even more hair-raising for us were the brutal, blood-curdling, roars of the monstrous beasts and the sound of the large trees falling down as they barged through them threateningly. A couple of months ago, a young trekker injured himself on top of the plateau and the emergency helicopter was called to the rescue in order to save him the painful descent on foot. Unlike in the novel, it was the fault of the inexperienced pilot that we could catch a whiff of kerosene, as he crashed into some of the irregular rock formations that dominate the plateau’s moonlike landscape. The dinosaurs that we saw didn’t obliterate any flying machines, but they were larger than we expected and the seemed to roam slowly and in single file on top of the Tepuy (table mountain).

It was only recently that we heard of Roraima and up until this point, we thought that such a film location was entirely fictional. Doyle did get his inspiration from this mountain, and how couldn’t he? This dream of visiting the Lost World became reawakened in Jon’s mind and this resulted in the team being led on an expedition of discovery, with fantastic guides and porters, and an intrepid bunch of interesting international backpackers from a variety of backgrounds. Couldn’t have been better and we shall now reveal!

Pizza Hormiga!

The night before we set off on our mammoth mountaineering expedition, we went with Bruno, an eminent German anthropologist, for a bite of pizza and plenty of Venezuelan cervezas! He suggested that in order to get into the local spirit of the indigenous Pemon Indians, we try a pizza anointed with their favourite spicy sauce, Cumachi. Have you ever eaten ants before? Well, us neither, but these little critters come in a smoky chilli sauce which is crunchy and packs a mighty punch!