The terrain outside the plane is mind-blowing; Gran Sabana got my approve. The tepuis are on all sides - the enigmatic flat-topped mountains that inspired Conan Doyle's dinosaur-hunting classic The Lost World.
A not-sober-looking local guide met me by my arrival and assigned me to the group: an Austrian couple and 2 stalwart Norwegian brothers. I probably will never stop to be surprised by the crazyness of some people; crazyness in a good way. That was 60-years-old couple from Austria, they got a sabbatical from work (just like me, lol) and decided to go explore the Caribbean. What would your 60-years-old parents/grandparents do in this case? Right. They would get 'all inclusive' cruise tour. But those Austrians were not of the 'normal' ones. They got a boat and crossed the Atlantic ocean within 3 weeks and by that day were boating from one island to another in the Caribbean for already 6 months. Just two of them on the freaking boat. They also told me that in the hippie times they got a small truck and drove all the way from Austri to India and back within a year or so through all Europe, Iran, Afganistan, Middle East and so on.. And I was like...I thought I'm crazy for what I'm doing now (that's at least what every single person says once they know about my trip)...but if they can happily travel in their 60s proving that you are never too old to travel, then I guess I have plenty of time for the rest of the world.
It was a 3-days tour. We got to Isla Anatoly on the first day to see and mostly to walk behind and under the Salto Sapito and Salto Sapo. Have you ever walked behind the waterfalls? Oh man...that's just unbelievibly incredible! You see all that tremendous amount of water first and the next moment you are behind it feeling the power of the waterfall! It can easily spread you over the rocks, and thats frightening.
Next day, after a 3 hours banana boat ride, with the stoned like asses we arrived at our jungle lodge. Another hour walk through the rainforest...
...and here we are.. the Angel Falls in it's glory. Powerful...that's the word for it. We stay there in silent for a good couple of minutes. The Pemon believe that the waterfall is alive; I could understand why then.
You can fascinatedly see the physics of the waterfall cascade. At the very top its descent, the waterfall sticks together in traditional style. Then it breaks up and becomes a series of separate white bits of water shooting to earth. Then there are ringlets. And then it turns to dust, foaming out in all directions, some of which never makes it to the bottom at all, but vanishes into air.
The allure of Angel Falls is not just that it is the world's highest waterfall and they 18 times loftier than Niagara Falls. It's also all that folklore that surrounds them. Jimmy Angel, a first world war pilot and a gold-hunter flew to Canaima in 1935 in his Cessna looking for the mythical city of El Dorado, but instead discovered the longest bit of vertical river on Earth. Angel crash-landed his plane on the summit of Auyantepui, near the plunge-point of the falls, then spent 12 days slashing his way back to civilisation through virgin rainforest. The island in the Canaima's lagoon, Isla Anatoly, was named after a Russian gold prospector, who settled on the island in search for some gold but became a local witchdoctor. The island was then inhabited by Tomas Bernal, a Peruvian from Ayacucho who bought it from Anatoly. When Tomas first arrived at Canaima he lived for almost 10 years as a hermit in a cave next to the Sapo Falls.
Next morning we woke up in the jungle to see THAT; I swear I cried.
/January 21-23, 2012/
1 comment:
beautiful pics
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