Venezuela: Going with Orinoco flow

Venezuela's Angel Falls are the world's tallest. Photo / AP

My new prized possession is a blowpipe, intricately handwoven, unassuming and deadly. A man sold it to me a few weeks ago on the banks of the Carrao River in the tangled green heart of Venezuela where these pipes are still used for hunting.

This isn't just a line put out for tourists: I know the indigenous

Pemon people in Auyantepui really do use blowpipes because when I was wandering off the jungle path one day I found a sort of lean, mean cocktail stick lodged in the soil. What was it? A blow dart that had missed its prey. A sight unchanged for around 4000 years.

I saw a sleepy sloth sunbathing. I saw holy mountains wreathed in mist. I didn't see a proper hot shower for 14 days, but I did walk behind the Salto el Sapo waterfall where the torrent made it dark as twilight. I saw a Pemon woman cooking with termites.

"They taste," said our guide, "like electricity."

It was an intense two-week voyage through four terrains: delta, jungle, savannah and mountain.

On landing, our group of 16 was met by Douglas, a Brit based in Venezuela since the 1980s. "Welcome to Caracas, where the murder rate is about 50 every weekend."

Our jet-lagged faces fell a little as we looked out of the minibus window across the deadlocked traffic. Cable car pylons stretched across the slums, unfinished.

"Erm, would we be a target? Being tourists?" stammered one of our number, an American.

"In Caracas, everyone is a target," said Douglas darkly. Willingly, then, we left early the next morning, flying over the Caribbean sea via Maturin to the little river port of Volcan, where we boarded motorised canoes and sped for seven hours down the Orinoco River to its delta.

It was some journey - we were sun-baked at first, then rain-sodden, breeze-whipped and finally night-blinded. When we arrived after dark at our destination, a local Warao Indian palafito home built on stilts, and stepped tottering on to the wooden pontoon, we must have looked like a brigade of huge, helpless bats, blinking and flapping our plastic rain coats.

We slept in one open dormitory of hammocks. We went to bed strangers but woke up fellow foot soldiers after a night of muttering, kicking, snoring, belching and sleep-grumbling. Breakfast - scrambled eggs, watermelon and stodgy arepas or corn cakes - saw some lively debriefing.

"Who was that snoring?"

"Grunting, more like!"

"It came from your direction ..."

Our other guide Hanneke, a Venezuelan of Dutch descent, stepped in with the plain truth: "It was a pig foraging under the floorboards. More jam, anyone? It's guava."

Such trips live or die by their guides and Hanneke was brilliant, tough ("What do you mean, will there be air con? Of course not!"), warm ("My dear, have you got your sun lotion on?") and a fount of knowledge about our hosts, the Warao Indians.

She guided us round their peaceful wooden villages, timeless except for a Hello Kitty towel here and a solar-powered satellite dish there. Their reed homes have no walls, but they have Dallas on television. Hanneke helped us to communicate further than shy waves and smiles.

Late into the night, well, until about 10pm when the generator cut out, she would pass around the white rum and tell us Warao creation myths, or talk politics - the national fascination.

After three nights in the delta and a trip to swim off the wide sandy shore of the Atlantic, we journeyed back to Volcan, speeding past the old Catholic mission.

Kamarata, our next stop, is inaccessible by road. So we flew there in Cessnas, tiny one-engined five-seater planes that traversed steadily over the Guri dam, then swooped marvellously over Angel Falls, the highest waterfall in the world. We then dived down to land, passing nonchalantly at the last minute over an old crashed plane rotting on the side of the runway.

Motoring upriver to Angel Falls, we stopped to visit one isolated home woven from reeds and untouched by modernity.

The lady of the house, a hut woven from reeds, was tightening a press to squeeze the cyanide off a yukka plant, making comanche (hot chilli sauce - the one the termites go in).

She graciously offered us tiny, delicious bananas and lemons from the Eden of her back garden, and as we moved on upriver we wondered what we had given her in return, except for an eyeful of hulking, sunburned Westerners.

But Hanneke made sure a fair deal was struck. She is a tour guide to us but a friend to the Pemon. The lady we visited had recently lost her husband so Hanneke brought her a framed photograph of him. Tourism like this could easily go wrong, but here it felt right.

We spent four nights in jungle shelters along the Carrao, Churun and Akanan rivers. In the morning we bathed in the tea-black river, at night we swung next to one another with mosquito nets as our only privacy. No room for vanity here. I had filthy nails, wet feet, mosquitoes ate me alive and I didn't look in the mirror for three days.

Daily treats such as the (extra) trek to the glorious Kavak Canyon (nature's stateliest Jacuzzi) and the jungle march to get a better view of Angel Falls were much nicer memories to keep in my head.

Finally, we arrived at the outstanding natural beauty spot of Canaima, a lagoon fed by six hypnotic waterfalls. Once a popular Venezuelan holiday destination, it is eerily deserted. The national airline Avensa, which flew there daily from Caracas, doesn't offer the route any more, and the grand hotel complex called Campamento Hoturvensa that overlooks the lagoon operates with a skeleton staff. "Canaima" means "place of mischief" and local stories bear this out. When some previous management reputedly failed to pay the Pemon staff properly some years ago, on October 12 (the Day of Indigenous Resistance) the roof of the hotel restaurant mysteriously caught fire.

Canaima is symbolic of tourism in Venezuela - huge natural potential, but deeply dysfunctional. Wherever we went we learned to expect some fresh adventure: motorboats breaking down, a national coffee shortage or political unrest. When we arrived in the hot plains of Los Llanos the pay-off was an amazing abundance of wildlife - storks, tiger herons, vermilion flycatchers, capybara, spectacled caiman and turtles basking on rocks.

The final ethnic group we encountered was German. High in the mountains of Aragua, west of Caracas, a colony of Black Forest emigres lived undisturbed in Colonia La Tovar from 1834 to 1960. They are still here today still wearing dirndls, dancing and cooking strudel. One night here made a surreal ending to a demanding but life-enriching trip.

- INDEPENDENT