If you live in an ugly city...

A few years ago when I was traveling through Germany, I stopped for a night at a friend's place in Hannover.  Like many German cities, Hannover was completely razed during the war. Unfortunately, the rebuilding process was swift and lacking in imagination. It's not exactly an ugly city, but it's certainly charmless.

He told me, in his thick East German accent (he had moved from Dresden), that one nice thing about living in a city such as Hannover was that when people come to visit you, it's because they want to see you, not the city. Imagine you live in Paris, and your friends want to come see you every month. It's entirely possible that you are the only reason they are coming. Or perhaps not.

I was reminded of that as we traveled from city to city in Colombia and Venezuela. Colombia has its fair share of ugly and charmless cities, with Barranquilla claiming the top prize. Venezuela, on the other hand, has at least seven cities competing in the Ugliest City in the World Competition, every year...Maracaibo, San Felix, and Valencia come to mind. But during our time here, we've made lots of friends in every place we've visited, including in the above-named cities. So I'm hoping they realize that when we visit, they are the only reason we go.

So now we live in small village called Mushaisa, which, like Hannover, is certainly not ugly, but lacks a bit of charm and can get a bit boring.  But if you come visit this place, I'll know why you came.

Roraima Part 3 : Tony and the Lost Group

Here's part 1 of the story : Path to the Summit
Here's part 2 of the story : The Lost World

The morning came, the rain dried up, and we packed our things. After saying our goodbyes to James' group, we hopscotched from rock to rock in the direction of the flattish rocks to find Tony and our group.  The rocks were empty.  Our group, missing.  In our minds, there were three possibilities for their absence.  The first, the group, knowing that they were slow hikers, decided to start hiking down the afternoon before.  The second, the group, knowing that they were slow hikers, decided to leave very early that morning.  These two theories were immediately laughed at and rejected.  The third theory was that they had found a new, higher spot during the flood. We would certainly see them that night at the campsite.

So we started down the mountain in the midst of some heavy mist.  It was going to be a long day of hiking, needing to cover the two days' hiking distance (luckily, downhill) and needing to cross two rivers.  Pauline and I were two of the stronger hikers in the whole bunch...which included about one hundred hikers from Venezeula, Brazil, and some random Europeans.  With the exception of on top of Roraima, all hundred hikers camped in the same place each night.  By now, nearly every hiker knew Tony's name and face.  Pauline and I generally arrived early, then mingled with the others...the questions eventually arose : "Who's your guide ?",  "Where is he ?",  and "Seriously, it's been hours, are they walking backwards ?"


We arrived in the early afternoon. James, the sunburned Englishman was just behind us. We ate lunch, went swimming in the river, cleaned our clothes, then like usual, we found other groups to talk to us. We were the orphans of the camp.  No group, no guide, and now we didn't even have a tent.  We were homeless orphans.

From the camp, you could see the hikers come down a hill before crossing the river at the base of the camp. So we watched them come down for several hours.  Here come the Brazilians.  Now, here comes the large woman who leaves every morning a five am. Oh, here come the neck-to-ankle spandex group.  Wait a minute, is that Tony ?  No, no, false alarm, just a pudgy Venezuelan. The sun went down as the last hikers reached the top of the hill.  Every hiker had arrived by six o'clock.  Our guys, carrying our tent, didn't. We slept without our tent in our sleeping bags with the ants under a thatch roof pavilion.

In the morning, on our last day of hiking, we returned to the National Park outpost, where we waited to be taken by our 4x4 driver, who we had already paid.  He flatly refused to go without the group.  Without getting paid extra.  "Everything costs."  We tried to explain that our group was perhaps a full day behind us, but he wouldn't budge. Other drivers offered to take us down for exhoribtant rates as well.  We talked to everyone, pleaded even.

We stopped worrying about our own group started fretting about how to get home again. It was a long day's hot hike back down to San Francisco, and once there, we still had at least two or three days to cross the country and return to our little corner of Colombia. We continue pleading.  Finally it paid off:  the Brazilian group offered to leave us at San Francisco for no cost. Obrigado !

Once in San Francisco, our fretting continued, how were we going to get back North? The only busses headed North started on the Brazilian border and those busses were all full of the hundred hikers plus random travelers.  What to do ? So we hitched.  The first driver we met offered to take us the twelve hours in the back of his pickup truck along the scenic highway to Ciudad Guayana in the center of the country.  He even had a niece studying at the colegio where we worked !  We stayed the night in the city, and were lucky enough to get the last available seats on a bus to Maracaibo, cartographically millimeters from our home.  Seventy-two hours after finishing the hike, we had reached home again.


And we never saw Tony or the group again. (But a week later, we heard that they has survived !)

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

Roraima Part 1 : Path to the Summit

Between Christmas Eve and the second of January, we spent all but one night camping on some tropical beach along the Venezuelan coast or on a nearby island.  We had had our fill of R & R and were ready for some adventure.

We had previously been in contact with Selene, a friend of a friend, who lived in Maracay.  She was organizing a 6-day trek up and down Mount Roraima, way down on the Venezuelan border with Brazil and Guyana.  The mountain is a tepui (also spelled tepuy), which is how the local table mountains slash mesas slash plateaus are called.  These tables are so large and tall that several of the world's tallest waterfalls are found in this little corner of Venezuela.

And this little corner is full of tepuis, all of them of Sagan proportions in age, which makes them some of the oldest rocks on Earth.  And as the land between them eroded away, they formed little islands of rock within the savannah jungle.  And like on Hawaii or Madagascar, life on each rock island evolved in its own unique way...

So back to the story : We spent two days crossing Venezuela in buses, but most of the time we were standing in lines.  You see, in every bus station that we've entered in Venezuela, they tell us that tickets can't be purchased the day before your trip.  So if you want to catch the night bus from Ciudad Guayana to the Gran Sabana, you'd have to get in line in the morning.  So we lined up at 7h30, half an hour before the ticket vendors opened for the day.  At least two or three dozen others had arrived before us.  It was going to be close.  So we split up.  Venezuela, which has nationalized most industries, has for some reason left the chaotic bus industry to its own devices.  So you have nine bus companies all plying the same routes.  So I went off searching for another line with a high bus capacity/line length ratio.  But all the lines were long and sinuous.  And you never knew if the guy in front of you was traveling alone or bringing his brood of nine kids.  We crossed our fingers and waited.  When I was one place away from the window, Pauline came running over with a big smile, "Don't buy the tickets !  I got 'em."

And with tranquil minds, we spent the day in the city knowing we had a spot.  That night, we returned and hopped on the refrigerated bus that would finally deliver us to San Francisco, a small village 12 hours away, near the start of the trek.  Stepping off the bus, we met Tony, our Pemon guide, that Selene had independently contacted and contracted.  Most trekkers hire their guides and porters through expensive agencies and pay several times the price we did, so we were quite happy that Selene had found Tony.  We spent the day packing our sacks, awaiting the rest of the group, and visiting the village.

San Francisco is one hundred percent Pemon (the local indigenous group) and one hundred percent Seventh Day Adventist, at least in this village.  I had always thought that the SDAs were non-smoking, non-drinking vegetarian Protestants (I have since read that this is more of a recommendation than a requirement).  My first impressions included lots of meat and cigarettes and murals of Pemon gods and legends.  Recommendation : considered and rejected !  But everyone had nice matching colorful houses, provided for by the SDA church.  It seemed to me that the missionaries here are trading houses for an underwhelming acceptance of their beliefs.  Yucca Christianity.

Later that day, we met the others in the group : Selene, Angelo, Ricardo, Carlos, Maru, and Luis, all friendly and young-ish and seemingly fit. Seemingly. The next morning, we were off in a 4x4 to the start of the trek, a National Park office far from the highway.


The first day's views were great, the hike unextraordinary; there were maybe one or two short inclines during the day.  Pauline and I reached the top of the biggest hill first.  Within 20 minutes, all but one or two of the group had reached that local summit.  Tony, the guide, had still not arrived and was probably helping Selene who must have been having difficulty.  But after another 20 minutes, we realized that Tony was no fitter than Selene, who was indeed struggling.  Tony, dragging his feet and hanging his head, looked near death.  Seconds after reaching the top, Tony lit a cigarette and filled his oxygen-starved lungs with smoke.  This was going to be a long hike.  For him.

After waiting on the tops of other small hills, we decided to stop waiting for our stragglers.  We walked straight to the campsite and set up our tent.  There we waited and waited.

It was here at the first camp that we learned what the other trekkers had paid for.  Porters were everywhere, busy as the local leaf-cutter ants, unloading the leaning towers of supplies on their backs....setting up tents, cooking food, and creating exclusive toilet tents.  And one by one, the other (not out group) trekkers moseyed into camp carrying a daypack full of water and snacks and a camera and found the tents assembled, the food cooked, and the shithole dug.

Our group arrived last of all, but I shouldn't blame them; they actually had to carry their own gear. So, logically enough, they then decided that they would all get an early start in the morning.  Good idea !  We (Pauline and I) were up by six with the sun, ready to go at seven.  Most of the group was still sleeping, and those that were awake were groggy, pajama-ed and far from ready.  So we waited.  By eight o'clock, we left impatiently.  The reason for our impatience was twofold.  The Southern Venezuelan sun is brutal at midday, and we wanted to get most of hiking done before then.  Also, the campsites were generally too small for all of the tents of all of the hikers.  A late arrival meant camping far from camp or next to the toilets or worse.

As we departed, we saw Tony's head just emerging from his tent, weak as a newborn baby.  The second day's hike was much much tougher ( = better), involved two river crossing, and the views only got better.  We made good time and arrived at the new campsite below the tepui's cliffs in the early afternoon.  Most of the other groups had left by seven or earlier, and many arrived before us.  There we waited another five to six hours before we recognized any of our gang.  The good part of it all was that we met lots of other groups in those six hours.  In a sense of hiker solidarity, all the other hikers also seemed to be waiting and rooting for Tony and the others, faithfully guiding us from the rear.

This time, they said, they're going to start early in the morning.  For real.  Carlos was the only who wasn't kidding.  He was ready by seven, and the three of us began the third day of hiking, which was the shortest but toughest, 100% ascent, often requiring the hands, passing under waterfalls, across shaky bridges, and within a shoe width of a vertical cliff shrouded in fog.

But before midday, we had made it.  We were on top with James, the sunburned Englishman, eating lunch with the sun shining on our faces.  For a few minutes we were the only four to have arrived.  And the sights were all ours.

Here's part 2 of the story : The Lost World