The Huey swings low over the treetops, its downdraft blasting at the canopy of the Amazon rainforest. Sprawling for thousands of miles in all directions is an endless ocean of green, broken only by the snaking meander of the Rio de Sangre – the Blood River. But even this mighty watercourse, a river we have followed for the last nine days, fades. It shrinks as the smaller rivers and streams that feed it disappear the closer we get to its source.
That source? The mighty though enigmatic table mountain known as Sarisariñama . . . our destination; our home for the next six months.
But first, we have to get there in one piece.
EN ROUTE TO SARISARINAMA,
Venezuela
I was surprised by the relaxed vibe around what remained of our camp this morning. Of the forty-seven scientists heading for the UNESCO expedition on Sarisariñama, only twelve of us remained at Carimara, along with two Bolivarian Militiamen. The others have all shipped out over the last three days.
After breakfast, we packed away our tents, made use of the dismal showers in the town’s only motel, and then waited for our pickup.
Nathan Raine, the expedition’s helicopter pilot, arrived nearly an hour late. He looked like he was nursing a hangover (not an attribute you want to see in the man tasked with flying you over the rainforest). We bundled into one of the two Toyota Land Cruisers he brought along, then headed down the potholed track out of town, cutting through a brief stretch of forest to Willy’s Airfield. Once again, we laughed at the phallus-crossed-with-an-aircraft adorning the field’s signage.
We drove along what I’m pretty sure is the actual runway (not sure about the health and safety implications of that!) and passed several small planes parked somewhat haphazardly. This certainly was no Heathrow.
Willy, the airfield’s owner/operator, greeted us, though I use the word ‘greeted’ generously. It was little more than a grunt. Raine later explained that Willy was a former Viking, which apparently is the colloquial name for Iceland’s Special Forces unit. For some reason, he seemed to think this was a sufficient explanation for the man’s gruffness.
We loaded our kit onto a waiting helicopter which Raine confirmed was an old Huey that had seen action in Vietnam. For reasons beyond me, this made the American proud. Then we all scrambled on board, strapped ourselves into the hold and, with mounting excitement, the chopper’s engine’s started up, and its rotors began to spin.
Nineteen days after leaving Britain, Sid and I, along with Nadia and several new friends, were finally making the last leg of our journey to Sarisariñama.
The Huey took to the sky, and Raine pirouetted it around. The ugly scab of Carimara flashed past, and then we were off, racing away from that last vestige of civilisation (if one can call it that).
We headed roughly southwest from Carimara, following the course of the Rio de Sangre to the frothing cauldron of Devil’s Blood Falls, which we visited yesterday. Rising higher, we saw the hideous scar of scorched and deforested land of the gold mine that our guide, Rodrigo, had told us about yesterday. It went on for miles and miles, an ugly mass of brown, red and yellow stained pits, now filled with polluted water, laced with deadly mercury from the gold extraction process.
In this day and age of satellite surveillance or, hell, even Google Earth, I find it hard to believe the Venezuelan government didn’t know about such an operation. The sad truth is that they likely turned a blind eye for a cut of the profits, a case repeated throughout Amazonia.
“You know, a large part of the demand for gold driving these mines throughout the Amazon,” Raine said over the Huey’s radio, “is for cell phone manufacturing.”
Well, if I wasn’t feeling guilty just for being part of the species reaping such devastation across the emerald jewel of South America, I was now feeling personally guilty as I took photos of the destruction . . . on my mobile phone!
Thankfully leaving the gold mine behind, we continued deeper into the heart of the rainforest, the emerald carpet now stretched out beneath us, untainted (to the naked eye) by humankind.
Now, we pass mountain ranges, plateaus, magnificent waterfalls, and gaping chasms. The noise of our propellers catches the attention of some of the jungle’s higher life forms, breaking into the grooming patterns of monkeys and scattering flocks of brightly coloured parrots.
Then, the cocky American pilot calls over the intercom – “You guys up for a bit of fun?”
All we can think to do is shrug and agree, without any idea what he has in mind. And then he throws the chopper from side to side, banking sharply, twisting and spinning the aircraft in ways that stretch the laws of physics to their limits. We hold on to whatever handholds we find, letting out an odd combination of terrified shrieks and adrenaline-fuelled laughter.
Raine is unabashedly, unashamedly showing off his considerable piloting skill.
As tumultuous clouds gather to the south, purple and menacing, he drops the Huey into a nosedive which catapults my stomach into my throat. Then he pulls up sharply, flying only meters above the uneven canopy of the Amazon. The green ocean whips by beneath us in a blur as Raine pushes the engines to their maximum of one hundred and thirty miles per hour.
The storm hits us violently, the sudden downpour hammering against the metal skin of the helicopter. The rain falls so intensely that it obscures our view even with the Huey’s wipers on full. But Raine does not decrease his speed. He keeps ploughing ahead, thundering through the vortex whirling around us, battling to control the aircraft in the buffeting wind, even as its skids whip by precariously close to the canopy.
All it would take, I realise, is a single giant tree standing out above the rest, and it would all be over. But Raine welcomes the danger. He isn’t a man to live a comfortable, safe lifestyle. He thrives on peril, on knowing that any moment could be his last.
While my knuckles turn white, gripping onto a handhold, I also realise that, if I’m honest, I’m a little envious of that attitude.
Raine lives for the moment. I hate that about him.
After forty minutes of flying precariously fast, albeit in a straight line, I spot the river again. Following the contours of the land, it had swept away from us in a long loop, but now, Raine matches its course. He drops us down into the narrow chasm the churning reddish-brown water has cut through the trees.
The rain continues to pound down, rippling in the water and swelling the river so that it bursts its banks and floods the surrounding jungle. Yet, still, we race along the river’s undulating course, following its sinuous twists and turns. We bank left and then right until Karen, one of our German companions, lets out a shriek of terror. A solid wall of rock materialises from out of the bank of a low-lying cloud.
Raine never misses a beat. Never panics. Never swears. Never breaks a swear.
Instead, he pulls up hard on the Huey’s control stick, and the helicopter responds in kind, arching back and shooting, nose first, almost vertically up the side of the immense wall of rock. The Huey barrels its way into the clouds, and inky blackness roils over us. For a moment, all I can hear is my rapid breathing, the thudding of my own heart.
Then, we burst out above the storm clouds with an almost triumphant flourish. Bright sunlight glares down at us, and Raine, ever so calmly, pulls on his mirrored aviator sunglasses. The Huey continues to climb until the pilot eases up on the controls, levels us out and slows us to a hover.
“Welcome,” the American says, looking oh-so-proud of his display of machoism, “to Sarisariñama.”
And, with those words, I realise we have finally made it.
Sarisariñama Basecamp,
Venezuela
Wreathed amidst a halo of cloud, the summit of Sarisariñama looked like an emerald island floating above the earth.
With an area of almost three hundred and fifty square miles, the topography of the table mountain’s summit is startlingly flat, affording us a stunning view of the entire site.
Meaning ‘House of the Gods’, there are one hundred and fifteen ‘tepuis’ scattered across La Gran Sabana, the vast area of southern Venezuela bordering Brazil and Guyana.
The remnants of a great sandstone plateau eroded in distant pre-history, the isolated monadnocks now give the illusion of jutting out of the earth. They are some of the most ancient and unspoiled places on earth, giving rise to numerous legends among the Indian tribes who live far below. They also inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous novel ‘The Lost World.’
Beyond their antiquity and formation process, there is little uniformity to the vast ‘islands of the rainforest’. Each is home to an endemic, unique ecosystem as far removed from one another as from the rainforest far below.
Auyantepui is the largest, with a surface area of almost five hundred miles. It is home to Angel Falls, the highest waterfall in the world.
Mount Roraima forms the border between Venezuela, Brazil and Guyana.
Matawi is also known as Kukenán, the Place of the Dead; a cave runs the entire way through the heart of Autana, from one side to the other.
But numerous features set Sarisariñama apart from all the others.
It has four almost perfectly circular sinkholes, one of which is over a thousand feet wide and harbours an ecosystem unique even from its summit. Our position high above the mountain gave us an incredible view of the vast dark holes that burrow almost a thousand feet down into the isolated island of rock.
Besides the recent discovery of artificial tunnels burrowing through the mountain, Sarisariñama is unique. Its summit is choked by thick jungle, with trees climbing almost eighty feet into the oxygen-thin sky. This jungle environment has given birth to a far richer diversity of life, much of it endemic, than the sparsely vegetated summits of its neighbours. It also gives it a startling emerald green colour against the azure blue sky.
Indeed, cut off, hundreds of miles from civilisation, Sarisariñama hung below us like the Garden of Eden.
After making a slow flyover of the table mountain, Raine headed towards the UNESCO basecamp, a collection of canvas structures fluttering in the helicopter’s downdraft as he set us down in a neighbouring clearing.
McKinney was there to greet us, though her greeting was only mildly more interested in our presence (or mine at least) than Viking Willy’s had been.
She gave us a whistle-stop tour of the basecamp, showed us where to rig up our tents, and then vanished, leaving us to our own devices for the rest of the day. It was necessary, she explained, that we take it easy to allow us to acclimatise to the thin air. I’ll admit that putting our tent up was much harder work than it should have been.
The late afternoon sunlight was intense – and I mean intense – even compared to what we had become accustomed to. We were above the clouds, with no cover, not even any haze to dilute the golden rays. Yet, as the sun began to set, the air grew cold, and I enjoyed the sensation of a fleece sweater against my skin for the first time in nearly twenty days.
We ate in the camp’s mess tent where McKinney made a toast – now we had all arrived, it was time to get to work.