Roraima

May 28, 2010

Location: Roraima, Gran Sabana, Venezuela

By: Alicia Harney

Big day ahead today. We are heading out to triple point and we have been told it will be a nine hour round trip. I’m sure that is an exaggeration though because we have come in under time on each of our stations. We had a good breakfast with egg and bollos and set off about 8am. The walk is so fast paced and we are clambering over boulders and jumping from rock to rock. It’s quite fun and exciting but very very tiring! After only about an hour I was shattered! As were most others. We had to keep the pace up to see it and be back before dark but Magali found it extremely difficult and uncomfortable and got quite upset at one point. We seen even more rock formations, jumped the swamp in the Roraima Valley, admired the crystal heads in the Penus Valley (yes the penis valley!) and finally made it to the midpoint in the quartz Crystal Valley to have lunch. The valley is incredible, more crystal than I have ever seen! After my salad, which we ate on crystal thrones, I had a snoozle on a crystal bed. Perfect!

Good Morning Roraima! 

We carried on for about another hour or so before we reached triple point. This is the only point on the mountain that is shared with Brazil and Guyana! It’s really just a small pyramid marker in the rocks to mark the border! The Guyana border is disputed and the Venezuelans took the plaque that acknowledges it.
On the way back we stopped at a large hole in the rock, filled with the water from the water fall. Jokingly I asked if this was where we were to swim: yep!! So we changed and I plucked up the courage to take the plunge! The water was so cold but refreshing and when standing under the waterfall you could feel the heat that had been gathered while flowing over the rocks. The problem now was getting out! We had to swim through a cave and then scramble over treacherous rocks. The jumping in was the easy part!!
For the walk home we went with Ellius, the porter, at porter speed! It felt like we ran home! We got back about an hour sooner than everyone else! It was tough work! But while we were waiting on dinner we went to the edge of the mountain to look over the cliff. It was beautiful! And it really made us appreciate how high we had climbed and how far we have travelled from day one! It’s all downhill from here!!

Update 17/3/10
Conor and I watched the new Disney/Pixar movie “Up” tonight and as you may or may not know it is based on the sights at Roraima! Watching it brought back floods of memories and I wanted to add them to this blog!
The fictional name in the movie is Paradise Falls, and it’s where Arthur Conan Doyle, when he wasn’t writing about Sherlock Holmes, placed his 1912 story “The Lost World,” about scientists attacked by dinosaurs and ape men in a land cut off from the rest of the world. It is quite clear why both adventures were set here! This flat-topped mountain, 9,200 feet tall, is encircled by cliffs that shoot straight up 1,300 feet or more. In Doyle’s book, nothing can climb to the top, and nothing can climb down (obviously he didn´t have Marisol as a guide).
The result of all that isolation: an abundance of plants and animals found nowhere else in the world, including a tiny black frog so primitive that it hasn’t yet learned to hop but, when threatened, baffles its enemies by turning itself into a ball and rolling off the rocks. And there are flowers that can’t get enough nourishment from the thin soil so they entice insects to sip their nectar, then trap and devour them. In my research I also found out that the small streams that we crossed are impassable without warning and preparation during wet season.

The wall of Roraima, where grassland gives way to jungle beneath that monstrous vertical rock wall is as tall as the Empire State Building. With hindsight, I realise that the word “awesome” is no cliché. On top, the reward was immediate: a strange, misshapen, eerie world. I was struck by how much blackness there was — black earth, black bogs, and of course the wee black frogs! There was even a black hole - of silence. It was a climate of extremes, an unremitting struggle between the blazing sun and the wet northeastern trade winds that filled the two-mile gap to the next mountain with dense cloud. A view stretching to the horizon changed in the blink of an eye to impenetrable fog. Although nearly on the Equator, this place can be bitterly cold at night. With darkness falling by 6:30 p.m. each of our two nights, only sharp rocks for a seat and mist swirling everywhere, and with no fire to sit around - there’s no wood in sight - we turned in early, and looking back it is easy to see how the slight rustling sound caused by the wind becomes indistinguishable from what a huge curved beak might sound like as it searches for an appetizer of frog legs and an entree of human flesh. We were not turned into a banquet for an undiscovered monstor but there is a feast at Roraima. A feast of the imagination!