Lagniappe

 

 

 

John Gimlette :
Chavez and Venezuela's Lost World

Venezuela's president may be making waves, but beyond his capital, says John Gimlette, it's nature, not government, that rules.

Caracas is suffering one of the greatest hangovers in Latin American history. It's an impressive sight. At the height of a ski resort, a feast of old skyscrapers, statues, American cars and neon sprawls across the mountains.

The Orinoco gathers more water than any other river

Since the discovery of oil in the 1920s, almost three million Venezuelans, or one in 10 of the population, have clambered up here. For years, they spent wildly, played baseball and shopped in Miami. Then in 1994 the economy crashed, and all that's left are the fancy houses and almost three million colour TVs.

Now there's a new face among the peeling paint. He has meaty gaucho features and he's often depicted in his paratrooper's beret. To those now living in cardboard, President Hugo Chavez is a saviour, but to everyone else, he's the Arch Party Pooper.

Everywhere his banners proclaim the revolution. On our first evening, my wife, Jayne, and I watched his nightly TV show. He was still spouting slogans when we returned from dinner three hours later. Venezuela, he declares, will be the new Cuba.

Caraqueños seem to take all this in their stride. Their city is far too spectacular for them to let a war of words upset them. So the party goes on. People are just less flashy now. Although our hotel was as stylish as anything that went before (black uniforms and Perspex chairs), it was smaller and - even in its name (The Hotel) seemed to be courting obscurity. Others just party on, in their own little world.

Vendors ran in and out of the traffic selling alcopops. While the middle classes have simply shifted their activities into a parallel black market. But most self-contained of all were those of the Maria Lionza cult. They dashed across a six-lane highway to reach its central reservation and worship their idol, a voluptuous naked goddess astride a rampant tapir.

I was fascinated by this revolution fought in posters. It alone probably justifies a visit to Venezuela - although Americans don't think so. To them, the word "socialism" sounds like anthrax or an approaching storm. They have fled, taking with them a hefty chunk of the tourist trade. Back in 1912, thanks to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Venezuela achieved stardom as The Lost World. Was it now about to disappear for real?

I soon realised that, beyond Caracas, such human squabbles were dwarfed by nature. Columbus called Venezuela "the land of grace", and he hadn't even seen it from a plane. Few early explorers got beyond the stilted huts on the shore, and so it became "Venezuola", or "Little Venice".

From the air, though, it couldn't look more stupendous or less Venetian. Caracas shrank to a pinhead, and a great dome of green planet glowed upwards through the cloud. The sheer greenness of it all was bewildering - savanna, hot gassy jungle and cool mountain forest. Small wonder that so many little creatures had chosen to lose themselves in there. In terms of biodiversity, Venezuela ranks 17th in the world.

We stopped first at the Canaima lagoon. It was the perfect place to start, giving our fortnight the weird appeal of a journey back through time. We were in the heart of the Tepuys - flat-topped mountains like vast slabs of orogenic paving. Each is more than two billion years old, and while some were merely monumental, others were the size of the Isle of Wight. Then, in the wide corridors between, there is either dense armoured forest or strangely luminous prehistoric savanna. Steven Spielberg wisely recognised that it was already the perfect film set, and so it became Jurassic Park.

Better, almost, were the rivers. The Rio Carrao must have been the size of the Thames as it thundered down to our lodge. Then, at the last moment, it seemed to stumble on the edge of a cliff, before toppling over and exploding in the lagoon below. "Don't swim here," said the guides needlessly. Swim? Were we mad? The lagoon looked like an enormous washing machine, grinding up trees and boulders in its lethal final rinse.

But there was still plenty of scope for watery close encounters. Once, some Penóm Indians took us behind one of the waterfalls. Inside, a curtain of whisky-coloured water roared past at the rate of 80 tons a second, and yet orchids grew in the spray. Another time, we set off in a canoe with another Indian, called Charlie, in search of Angel Falls. It took all morning to throttle upstream through this storm of furious water. "Are there piranhas here?" I asked.

"Yep," said Charlie. "But they're all vegetarian." We settled back to enjoy the fury. Above us, the great ramparts of the Tepuys gathered in the sky. Some had seldom - if ever - been climbed. Others looked like cathedrals, coliseums, trilbys, Steptoe's teeth or Thunderbird HQ.

Then, just when things couldn't get any more improbable, the falls appeared. Jimmie Angel almost crashed his plane when he discovered them in 1935. As he said, it was like a river pouring out of the sky. Nor was this some fiddly mountain trickle, but a proper torrent, gushing grandly out of the summit. From there, however, it was less sure of itself, and, finding nothing beneath, it fluttered apart and whirled into a void, falling three times the height of the Eiffel Tower. It took us an hour to climb to the base of falls, only to find it in no mood for photographs. The spray had formed a mini-hurricane that was now ripping through the forest.

Our next stop seemed to bring us only marginally nearer the present.

The people of the Orinoco Delta, the Warao, are perhaps the earliest inhabitants of Latin America. They probably gave humankind its first dugout canoe, and they'll probably give it its last. There are now 30,000 of them living a watery life in a beautiful swamp the size of Switzerland. We stopped in a stilted village and offered them a bag of our toddler's clothes. They accepted the gifts shyly and without words, offering in return a cup of edible grubs.

The Orinoco is repentant here. Having barged through the country, gathering up more water than any other river in the world, it now flattens out and divides into channels, each as calm as a pond. We spent our first evening bobbing along on its mirrored surface, fishing for piranhas. The guide mixed Cuba Libres and a dolphin appeared, making long slow hoops in the water as if it were swimming in silver.

Our jungle home, the Orinoco Delta Lodge, played a discreet role in this. At first, it had the feeling of a forgotten upriver refuge and was hardly visible at all among the salad. Nature had reclaimed the paintwork, and the staff were all Palestinian, Czech or Warao. But they knew their monkeys, and the food was the best we would have. What's more, the wildlife didn't seem to notice the lodge. Bats and kingfishers flew in and out, and there was always a toucan in the thatch. Once, when Jayne was reading in the bar, she turned around to find an enormous tapir peering over her shoulder.

Finally, we drove north, leaving behind the half-lost world. The explorer Alexander von Humboldt first crossed these lush mountains in 1799. His most dramatic discovery, a cave almost seven miles deep called Guácharo, has hardly changed. It's still the cathedral home of 18,000 guácharos - or oil birds - and despite the grandeur, it smells like a chicken shed. It's also the home of some rare blind crabs and mice, making it a little Lost World of its own.

Beyond Guácharo, generations of conquistadors and immigrants have made a garden of the landscape. We stayed at a cosy German-run chocolate farm called Hacienda Bukare and visited an Italian coffee plantation, some hot mud springs, and Caripe, a village famous for its giant radishes. Then, finally, we reached the sea and the port of Rio Caribe, which looks like Marbella circa 1530. That night, we celebrated our delivery with an internet session and fresh roast fish on the beach.

Venezuelans here seem unfazed by the rumbles from Caracas, and the party's still in full swing. During our travels we met a man with five girlfriends, and a retired major with an orthodontic brace. Being beautiful in this beautiful land is still as important as ever. That, I suppose, is just what happens when the New World meets the Lost.

Most people fall for Venezuela in the end; for those who don't, there's always "aphrodisiac tea", which is sold in the airport café.

Venezuela Basics

Gimlette travelled with Audley Travel (01993 838 000, www.audleytravel.com). Its 10-night trip to Canaima, Orinoco and the Paria Peninsula costs from £2,095 per person including all flights, transfers, accommodation and excursions from Orinoco and Waku Lodge. A night at The Hotel, Caracas (www.thehotel.com.ve), costs about £140.

Further reading: Venezuela (Insight Guides, £16.99).

 

John Gimlette is the author of At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig and Theatre of Fish. Petroleumworld does not necessarily share these views.

Editor's note: This commentary was originally published by telegraph.co.uk, on 10/20/2007. Petroleumworld reprint this article in the interest of our readers. Petroleumworld does not necessarily share these views.

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Petroleumworld News 10/23/07

Copyright© 2007 John Gimlette . All rights reserved.

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