It’s a strange sensation waking from deep, deep sleep to find you’re sleeping
on empty air. The canvas ledge swayed gently above hundreds of yards of sky,
and the vast savanna beneath me stretched to Brazil and Guyana. Noisy green
parakeets chirped and squeaked in spindly trees, and a tiny hummingbird
levitated up to my face and hummed about a foot away from my eyes, moving
from one side to the other, returning again and again to check that I had
not been a dream. As thousands of swifts hawked for insects about the
cliffs, the wind through their wings made a swooping sound, like a huge
samurai sword slicing the air. It was the most beautiful thing I have ever
seen, made all the more extraordinary because no human being had ever seen
it before.
At the meeting of three countries – Guyana, Venezuela and Brazil – runs a
mountain range constructed of the oldest rock on the planet, the remnants of
an ancient sea bed laid down two billion years ago, before any form of life
was found on earth. Over time, the rock’s been eaten away, but towering
sandstone edifices remain, rising above the jungles like craggy fortresses –
the tepuis. Nineteenth-century explorers looked upon the unscalable peaks
and fantasised about what forgotten miracles might remain on top, inspiring
Arthur Conan Doyle to write The Lost World, in which pith-helmeted Professor
Challenger discovers a plateau atop Mount Roraima, with tyrannosaurs,
soaring pterodactyls and a bunch of savages who predictably proceed to
barbecue and sauté his team. Today, Mount Roraima and the surrounding Gran
Sabana region are part of the Canaima National Park, a World Heritage Site
larger than Wales. Roraima has a path to the top and offers adventurous
travellers a gateway into a world that’s even stranger than fiction;
festooned with bizarre windblown sand sculptures and unique plants and
animals.
Auyantepui, the tabletop mountain to the northwest, is visited regularly by
possibly the most spectacular scenic flight on earth, and adventure
companies organise treks to the base and top of Angel Falls, which tumble
more than 3,000 vertical feet from its summit. Yet, despite having what are
unquestionably some of the world’s most magnificent natural sites, the Gran
Sabana is still remarkably untouched. Most of the tepuis remain unclimbed
and, for adventurers, it is a place where you can still feel like an
explorer. As our Cessna swooped low over the forests and the vertical cliff
faces glowered down over us, it didn’t seem at all farfetched that their
summits would hide some forgotten worlds.
On your average alpine slope, the plants and animals change gradually as you
ascend through different altitude and climate zones. Here on the tepuis, the
hundreds, even thousands, of yards of vertical or overhanging rock mean that
plants and animals simply cannot travel between the base and summit. The
tops of the tepuis are islands, with the walls as oceans. Biologists have
discovered that almost every species they’ve found on certain summits is
endemic – found there and nowhere else on earth. As part of a strand of BBC
programmes, The Expeditions, we were attempting to be the first team to
summit a tepui named Upuigma. A Venezuelan, Captain Cordoza, tried in the
1940s and spent a month in an aborted attempt that never even reached the
rockface. If we could make the top, we would be in a rare environment that
had never before been explored by humans.
Journeys into the Gran Sabana all begin from the Venezuelan towns of Santa
Elena and Canaima. There are few roads through the rugged landscape, so from
these hubs, you generally walk, take small boats or charter planes to get to
the small villages among the tepuis. Our Cessna landed at the tiny village
of Yunek, inhabited by native Pemon people, who must be some of the luckiest
folk on earth. As we touched down on their football field (and promptly blew
their goalposts over with our backdraft), we found ourselves in a village
even Hollywood couldn’t draw.
The thatched roofs on their round mud huts were framed on one side by the
turrets of Acopan Tepui, a magnificent castle from an epic children’s story.
To the north lies the Chimanta Massif, which is truly, well, massive. You
could fit the whole of Detroit on its summit. And then, directly south, is
our mountain – Upuigma, with wee-laden concrete clouds skulking about its
vertical walls.
Some of the villages in the Gran Sabana have guesthouses for wandering
tourists to bunk in varying degrees of comfort, but travellers are welcomed
everywhere with exceptional hospitality. We pitched our hammocks in a
thatched hut, hosted by its current inhabitants, the world’s largest
community of cockroaches – and were they ever happy to see us! Two weeks
later, in the Hotel InterContinental, we walked into the posh lobby and a
squadron of shiny black roaches jumped out of my bags and legged it across
the marble, causing utter chaos among the guests in their finery.
As we trekked into our peak, the forest path would occasionally be crossed by
a tumbling tea-brown stream, its tannic waters as sweet as Evian.
Sapphire-throated hummingbirds flashed about us, wings purring,
inquisitively investigating these strange, sunburnt invaders into their
usually quiet world.
We spent four days actually climbing the rock walls of Upuigma, the lead
shared between myself and climbing supremos John Arran and Ivan Calderon.
Over the savanna far below, rainstorms moved like whimsical ghosts in a
celestial holding pattern, one behind the other, the billowing curtain of
their stormhead chasing up the slopes towards us. It was a remarkable sight:
you could see each isolated storm moving across the otherwise sunny savanna,
then, minutes before it hit you, the calm skies would whip into strong wind
and you would be engulfed in clouds. It was like having a grandstand seat at
a game of the weather gods. We ate boil-in-the-bag food hung in our
harnesses, shivering in the cold in our sweaty climbing smalls while
fretting to erect portaledges to sleep on.
For the uninitiated, a portaledge is a sheet of canvas strung tight over a
rectangle of metal poles and hung from a vertical or overhanging rock face
by a spider’s web of straps. You sleep on the ledge, still wearing your
harness, as the thing tips and sways alarmingly every time you move. Indeed,
one morning, as Keith the cameraman was still snoring, another team member
got out to relieve himself, and the whole thing tipped upside down, pitching
Keith off into space while still in his sleeping bag. Not a great way to
wake up.
Later in the day, we were starting to get really high, climbing exhilaratingly
well and fast. Leaves we inadvertently kicked up were caught on the updraft
raging up the face and spun magically about us, ever upwards, helicoptering
and dancing like a prop from American Beauty. When a group of
battle-hardened climbers stand in awe at the sight of a dancing leaf, you
know you’re in a very special place. Imagine going up to the top floor of
the Empire State Building, throwing open a window and going out onto the
sill, and you’ve about got the idea. Well, except that that would only
account for the actual rock. With the steep skirts of the mountain rolling
down to the savanna, we were actually well over 3,000ft up, as high above
the plains as a glider would fly.
Though extraordinarily hard, with exposure and height that made the head spin
and the guts lurch into your throat, it was some of the most perfect
climbing in the world. John led on, under a dramatic ceiling. There was
nothing for the feet, but a grippy shelf underneath the roof for the hands,
I tried to emulate John’s elegant example, crabbing sideways, lunging for a
fragile layback, then near doing the splits to find a nubbin of a foothold
half a walnut high.
Dropping down again, then, fingers and forearms burning with lactic acid,
holding on by the fingers of one hand. My whole body started to shake with
an exaggerated shiver of strain, my feet slipping from their braced position
on the featureless slab, spraying sweat and saliva with every angry puff,
like a Fat Fighter doing a 100yd dash.
Just hours later, we finally hauled ourselves up onto the jungle that clung to
the summit: magical moss forest, with lava-coloured mushrooms blooming amid
the pineapple tops of gargantuan bromeliads and carboniferous ferns.
Confused hummingbirds buzzed like bees around our faces, frogs unknown to
science burped and quacked in the puddles, tracks in the sand told of as yet
undiscovered creatures and falcons screamed indignantly from the skies. This
really was the Lost World.
Travel details: Last Frontiers (01296 653000, www.lastfrontiers.com)
can tailor-make itineraries throughout Venezuela and the region. A 14-day
trip, including a three-night overland journey to the area around Roraima, a
four-night boat trip to the base of Angel Falls, two nights in a comfortable
lodge on the banks of the Canaima lagoon and a beach break on the Caribbean
coast, at Rio Caribe, starts at £2,869pp. The price includes flights from
Heathrow to Caracas with Iberia (via Madrid), all transfers, full-board on
the Gran Sabana and river-trip sectors and B&B at other locations. Other
operators include Journey Latin America (020 8747 8315, www.journeylatinamerica.co.uk),
Nomadic Thoughts (020 7604 4408, www.nomadicthoughts.com)
and Sunvil (020 8758 4774, www.sunvil.co.uk).
— Venom by Steve Backshall is published by New Holland on Thursday at
£24.99. It is available for £22.49, inc p&p, from The Sunday
Times BooksFirst (0870 165 8585). The BBC’s Expeditions series will be
broadcast next spring
