Roraima Part 2 : The Lost World

Here's part 1 of the story : Path to the Summit

The clouds cleared, the sun shone.  There we were, on top of a rock, billions of years old, just me, Pauline, Carlos, and James, the sunburned Englishman.  We saw a landscape unlike any other, at times jagged, at times smooth and rounded.  It remained, however, always rocky and generally soilless.  The few plants we saw were forced to etch out their existences in the poor soil of the cracks and depressions.  Many of the plants, unable to eek out an honest living solely with photosynthesis, supplemented their nutrient salary with some stray insects.


As the hours passed by on top, the other hikers trickled by.  We figured that we had better start looking for a campsite before they were all filled.  So Carlos and Pauline took the tents and went off to find a suitable spot.  I stayed behind to wait for our group.  Two hours later, Carlos and Pauline returned.  They had scouted two spots; one was on a flattish rock (quite rare up there) and the other was in a wedge under a ledge...too short to stand, too short to put up the tent, but just fine for sitting and sleeping.  Needless to say, when the returned from their expedition, they found me alone.  Still waiting.

Just after they arrived, the rain came down, increasing in intensity.  By five in the afternoon, it was torrential, and we all took refuge under some overhanging rocks.  We, meaning Pauline, Carlos, and I, and a few porters from other groups were the only ones there, hiding at the entrance to this Lost World.  All the other groups had arrived and moved on to their camping spots.





After six o'clock, half of our group had reached the top.  Carlos shepherded them over the slippery rocks and through the ravines to the tents on the flattish rocks.  The flattish rocks were slightly concave and were starting to fill up with rainwater.  When Tony and the stragglers finally limped to the top, twenty minutes later, Pauline and I guided them to the tents, then decided that we felt much better sleeping under the ledge, without our tent.  Tony, unable to open his own tent in the downpour, was more than willing to squat ours.  Under the ledge, we found the group of James, the sunburned Englishman.  In addition to being a sunburned Englishman, James was also a beef cattle farmer.

James' motely group was mostly Venezuelan, plus the Pemon guide and his family, a hypochondriac French couple, and hardy James himself. The guide whispered to us the reason it was raining: someone had yelled on the mountain.  Yes, it's true, a few happy hikers had howled at the mid-afternoon clouds upon summitting. For the Pemon, this natural outburst of emotion sparks the daily downpours, in the the same way that noise can effect an avalanche.
I wonder how they explain this phenomenon; who is the God of the gaps, now that the Pemon have replaced the abandoned Pemon deities with a Seventh Day Adventist Yahweh...?


He then whispered all the places the group could go tomorrow...up to the highest point on the mountain, over to swimming hole, to the crystal valley, or all the way to the three-border point, connecting Venezuela, Brazil, and Guyana.  This last trip would last eight hours and encompass all the other sites minus the highpoint.  James' group unanimously decided to hike the big hike.  We were envious.

In the morning we sought out our lazy group.  We were full of excitement to start exploring the plateau; they were full of aches and grumbles.  They had elected to have a calm day...just wandering in the vicinity of the campsite on the flattish rock.  We were aghast.  Disappointed, again.

Since our group wasn't interested in the big hike, we'd just find ourselves another group.  The guide of the first group we found agreed to take us...for a fee.  "Everything costs," he told us.  Rankled, we ignored the jackass and  continued our search for a sympathetic guide (walking in the direction of the triple point) when we stumbled upon sunburned James again and his whispering guide.  The group happily invited us in; the guide a bit more reluctantly so.  We were going to hike the big hike !  I would have yelled, but that probably would have upset the guide and god(s).



Off we went, passing incredibly incredible rock formations, slowly molded one grain at a time by the wind and water...each one more intricate and bizarre than the last.  After more than three hours, we reached the toilet bowl, which is probably not the Pemon word for it.  It was a hole in the rock, with a small cascade pouring into it, and down inside, a gently churning rusty lake.  My first question : "Can we go swimming in there?"  Yes, yes you can, right after lunch.  After lunch, the guide, his two daughters, and I bouldered along smooth boulders, vaulted across abysses, trudged through the mud, and squeezed through a slot canyon to reach the lake below.  It's a swimming hole that I'll remember for decades to come.


Soon after, we reached the triple point, which corresponded to the halfway marker of the hike.  We turned back through the valley of crystals, a small area littered in small quartz.  Just then, the clouds turned black and started approaching.  Did a new arrival just yell at the clouds ?  We sped up a bit, but to no avail, the rain hit us a few minutes later, and we spent the next three and a half hours drenched slogging through the puddles.  If there were amazing sights to be seen along this half of the route, we sure missed them.  Just before sundown, we reached our ledge again, wet, cold, and miserable.  It was well worth it.











And here part 3 of the story : Tony and the Lost Group