THE OUTSKIRTS OF EL TIGRE,
VENEZUELA
Despite our exhaustion from yesterday’s pretty epic journey, none of us got a lot of sleep, owing to a rather unpleasant midnight interruption.
Until then, I had been sleeping soundly. I was quite content with my investment in an excellent blow-up sleeping mat, pillow, and sleeping bag (and being knackered probably helped).
Then, shortly after midnight, the sudden roar of engines jolted me awake. Sid sat up also as headlights tore through the dark fabric of our tent. I could hear raised voices shouting in Spanish, but the screech of tyres on scree and the whine of small motorbike engines drowned out their words.
Cautiously, I peered outside and saw several small motorbikes (a couple of dirt bikes and a handful of moped-like vehicles, by the looks of them). They weaved in and out of the carcasses of unbuilt houses and our invading tents.
The shouting grew louder, and, for the first time, I was thankful for the presence of del Vega and his men. One of them had been on guard but couldn’t stop the joyriders from scrambling into the building site, our home for the night. Now, though, they all scrambled from their tents, pulling on parts of their uniform and, more importantly, their guns. A couple of them shouted for us [scientists] to remain in our tents while del Vega and the others dealt with the invaders.
There was more shouting, followed by what sounded to me like youthful, rebellious laughter. It took several shots of del Vega’s weapon into the sky, scaring the hell out of Sid and me (and I presume the others), before the wannabe Hells Angels hightailed it back the way they had come.
Despite del Vega’s assurances that everything was now okay, judging by the conversations around our hastily eaten breakfast this morning, no one got back to sleep properly.
Eager to put our strange campsite behind us, we packed up the camp shortly after sunrise and hit the road again.
It was still a nearly five-hour drive to La Paragua and then over an hour by boat to get to the jungle lodge we were supposed to have made it to last night. And that was if we hit no further delays.
Delays or not, however, I could tell from McKinney’s demeanour that it would take an Act of God to stop her from pushing us on today. Sure enough, in the lead minibus, she set a gruelling pace, her Scottish brogue occasionally erupting over Juan’s radio to update us. Whereas yesterday we stopped every few hours for a toilet break and a leg stretch, today we raced south, stopping only for an emergency poo stop for some poor sod in the bus behind us with a dodgy belly.
We finally left the plains of Los Llanos behind us, cutting south down Route 16. At last, it felt like we were making progress. Two hours later, we caught our first glimpse of the vast expanse of the Orinoco River as we crossed the Angostura Suspension Bridge. According to Juan, the bridge spans one of the river’s narrowest points (in fact, Angostura is Spanish for ‘narrows’) but, nevertheless, is over 700 metres in length.
Skirting the outskirts of Ciudad Bolivar, we continued for almost another four hours down increasingly difficult roads. We eventually passed through the small village of La Paragua, last night’s planned stopover.
Route 16 ends here.
In fact, La Paragua is literally the end of the road. If you look at a map, all roads end here. From now on, there is nothing but jungle . . . unless you know where you’re looking.
It turns out our drivers did. We picked up a narrow track on the outskirts of town. Branches scraped along the minibuses’ flanks. At several points, del Vega and some of his men got off the lead bus, hacking the vegetation with machetes and clearing a path.
The jungle began to close in, swallowing us into its dark embrace. Sunlight flitted between the trees like some distant memory tickling your subconscious mind. The heat grew more intense, the humidity cloying and suffocating. Oddly, poor Juan seemed to suffer more from the heat than us foreigners. Still, the mood lightened when someone pumped a highly relevant Guns ‘N’ Roses song out of their Bluetooth speaker.
Welcome to the Jungle, indeed.
Eventually, we pulled into a tiny, nameless settlement occupied mainly by a pack of dogs which yapped and snarled at us as we stumbled from the minibuses. A shot in the air from del Vega’s gun sent them scattering faster than the Hells Angels.
“Well, I hope you enjoyed your last moments of aircon, people,” McKinney barked, hands on hips. Her khaki-coloured vest was so soaked in sweat that it clung to her bra-less chest, making us all feel rather uncomfortable (I’m pretty sure it’s a control thing of hers). “Because that’s it for six months,” she laughed.
I think all of us grimaced.
“The aircon was on?” I heard George, the Liverpudlian we had encountered in our hotel in Caracas, ask.
Working together, we emptied the three minibuses of all our belongings – tents, rucksacks and bags, food, water canisters, the lot. Then we formed a human chain to pass them from the buses, down a sandy slope to two motorised canoes waiting there with drivers.
The boats departed, loaded up with our gear and sitting low in the water. They proceeded cautiously upstream. Moments later, the minibuses also left, their drivers no doubt grateful to be escaping the humid hellhole they had deposited us in.
With nothing else to do, we hung around the strange abandoned settlement, swatting at the bugs that insisted on landing on our faces. A few people from the third bus, whose names I had not yet learnt, started to kick a ball around but very soon packed it away, crashed to the floor and glugged back their water bottles.
It was nearly two hours before the boats returned, and we scrambled down the sandy slope to the river. Sid and I, it turned out, were lucky and managed to get a seat.
One of the drivers explained to McKinney and del Vega that the river was too low to take a full complement in each boat. Those of our group who hadn’t made it down the slope yet had to wait another two hours for them to return.
We headed off, speeding down the river. It wasn’t especially big or wide, and the jungle formed an impenetrable barrier on either side. Yet the sun bore down on us in the middle of the channel despite the boat’s canopy.
About an hour later, we crunched into a gravel and sand beach and clambered out. We scrambled up a steep embankment to the most welcome sight my eyes have ever seen – a man holding a tray of Zulia, condensation dripping down the bottles. Behind him lay a scattering of wooden huts with roofs made of river reads. The jungle canopy hung all around the eco-lodge, limp and motionless. That is until a small furry creature came bounding through the branches and crashed into the middle of our bedraggled group.
The Canadian man handing out beer to our thirsty mob introduced himself as Tom, the founder of the Río de Sangre Ecolodge. His furry companion was Mona, a 2-year-old woolly monkey. He had rescued her from under a bridge near La Paragua, where she had been tied to a rock and left to drown. Bringing her back to the lodge, he’d nursed her and released her back into the rainforest, but she had never left.
Mona instantly became the star of the show as Tom led us into the main lodge. It was a wooden structure with long tables down the centre as though he was hosting a medieval banquet. A balcony overlooked the river, adorned with hammocks and wicker armchairs.
Mona was right at home in the lodge, using her tail as a fifth limb to swing from our arms and climb up our legs, unabashedly jumping from person to person.
“The world’s biggest flirt,” Tom called her. I could see why, especially when he tickled her under the chin, causing her to roll around on the floor, emitting an excited noise that I can only describe as laughter. Indeed, I think we all have fallen for the cheeky primate.
Once the boats returned with the second half of our party, Tom’s team showed us our accommodations. Most of the group shared two large dormitories off the main lodge. But some of us, Sid and I included, were led through the grounds, across a little wooden footbridge to a group of wooden verandas. Tom’s team had set up tents on these, raised off the floor, with proper mattresses and sheets (rather than the sleeping mats and bags we had grown accustomed to over the last couple of evenings).
We showered and freshened up (the showers are located in the centre of the compound in a shack divided into quarters, nothing but a saloon-type swinging door protecting one’s modesty). Then we gathered for a tour of the grounds.
Tom led us through his little corner of Eden, encircled by lush rainforest. The eco-lodge is a well-manicured ‘garden’ in a clearing, a series of paths and other wooden bridges spanning streams and walkways leading past ponds. Large, colourful flowers exude eye-watering perfumes. Small birds flitter about while brightly coloured parrots flash through the sky. Monkeys and other animals hoot and call from the canopy.
While offering facilities for tourists as part of a drive towards ecotourism (something Venezuela is drastically behind on compared to neighbouring countries), that is not the primary purpose of Rio de Sangre. Instead, Tom, a former UN Peacekeeper, set up the Rio de Sangre Foundation to introduce conservation techniques to the area.
Like much of the Amazon, the Rio de Sangre area (Rio de Sangre means ‘Blood River,’ owing to the reddish colour of the water) has been butchered by loggers, oil companies, and gold diggers for decades. Native inhabitants, often ignorant of the global issues of deforestation and in desperate need of money for modern health care and, increasingly (and sadly), modern lifestyles, have naively sold thousands of trees for $10 apiece. At the same time, the loggers make hundreds of dollars from the same.
Over the last ten years, the Rio de Sangre Foundation has bought and protected large portions of the rainforest. In addition to teaching the local communities the importance of the trees to the regional and global environment, the lodge also provides jobs for some of them as guides, guards, cooks, cleaners, maintenance workers, and canoeists. Tom hopes to remove their need to sell the trees they own by giving these people a regular income to assimilate into and maintain a more modern lifestyle. When loggers have approached local people, the foundation has given them up to 10 times the offered amount to keep the tree and an ongoing ‘maintenance grant’ to protect and maintain the surrounding area.
That night we sat in the main lodge and ate a meal of vegetables wrapped in filo pastry. Darkness descended, but the heat did not relent. The only light came from a handful of candles, a single solar-powered lamp, the stars and the waxing moon. From beautiful moths to ugly flying cockroach-like creatures, all manner of bugs fluttered, skittered and flew about the flames.
Eventually, we headed off to bed, traversing the jungle grounds by the light of our head-torches and performing a check of our tent for any unwanted guests. Then we lay there, listening to the buzzing and clicking of unknown insects playing their Midnight Orchestra, lulling us off to sleep.
Ten days after leaving England, we had finally made it to the Amazon Rainforest.