Angel Falls sits at the heart of an unforgettable landscape. Emer Massey, from Co Kildare, describes visiting last year
IMAGINE BENBULBIN, the mystical tabletop mountain of Co Sligo. Double or treble its size. Then imagine a landscape filled with giants like Benbulbin, marching across the horizon. Crown their flat summits with elaborate and mysterious shapes, ruined Camelots, fallen Alhambras, their colours shifting and changing with the wild, thunderous skies. Now put yourself in a dugout canoe, riding a swift and turbulent river through this landscape, and you have an idea of our boat journey up the Carroa River to the base of Angel Falls, the world's highest waterfall.
For me that four and a half hour boat journey is one of the great river trips of the world. It followed a bouncy flight, of about an hour, in a five-seater aircraft from Ciudad Bolivar to the village of Canaima, in Venezuela's Canaima National Park. Not for the faint-hearted, the journey is the only way to get close to Angel Falls.
The Lost World, written in 1912 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, describes a world of dinosaurs and ape men existing millions of years ago. The book is based on this area.
The tabletop mountains, which are known as tepuis, are the remnants of gradually eroding sediments dating back more than two billion years. Essentially, they are huge rock islands that have been isolated by the passage of time. They rise close to 1,000m above the riverbed and the lush countryside below.
Because of their isolation each mountain has developed its own plant life. It's not difficult to imagine that the plains at the top of the tepuis could have been the haunts of dinosaurs.
My feelings starting the river trip were a cocktail of terror, exultation and exhaustion. Caracas, the capital city, had been a steamy nightmare of mugged tour mates, noise and surly locals. In Ciudad Bolivar, the regional capital, our tour guide, Terry, had organised a barbecue with his friends rather than let us explore another dangerous city by ourselves.
The barbecue was held on a pretty lake shore some distance from the city, where each of at least 500 families had set up a gazebo, then revved up their cars' gargantuan speakers and blasted the beach with salsa, merengue and reggaeton.
The noise was indescribable and inescapable, and it left me wondering why on earth I was taking this trip, which had promised a unique experience in grass-roots travel.
All changed when we reached Canaima. Taking only sleeping gear for one night, we stepped into our narrow motorised canoe. It carried just 15 people, sitting mainly two abreast.
Hitting rapids and sometimes rocks, we travelled upstream, getting closer and closer to the giant tepuis. The countryside was empty, a wilderness of waving grasses and flowers.
We broke our journey where a small waterfall splashed into a deep, still pool, and swam, glorying in the coolness of the water.
Back to the canoe, and now it seemed that the battlemented tepuis were crowding the sky. Lightning flashed in the distance, and we got our first glimpse of Angel Falls.
Known in Venezuela as Salto Angel, the falls spill from the heart-shaped Auyantepui mountain. Because the summits of the tepuis are flat and wide, they collect water at the top, and it has to overflow somewhere. The plain at the top of Auyantepui is one of the largest around, covering 700sq km, and this explains why so much water gushes over side of Auyantepui. It falls 807m, which is 16 times the height of Niagara, hits a shelf and falls again for a further 172m.
Our first glimpse was of a single ribbon of white water spilling down into drifting clouds from a sheer rock face.
We slept that night in hammocks in an open camp on the bank of the river, directly under the falls. The discomfort of the hammocks, combined with the whine of mosquitoes trying to penetrate our nets, meant that our slumbers were far from easy, but we woke to the sound of birdsong, the music of the water and the sheer thrill of seeing the falls above us.
At 7.30am we took a 90-minute hike up through thick jungle to a pool at the base of the falls, where one can swim. Few experiences can compare to floating in that pristine water, looking up at the falls steaming and misting way overhead, then taking in the enormous power of the smaller fall right beside us and, finally, bobbing around to look out from the pool over the amazing sweep of countryside beneath us.
I could have stayed there for hours, and we were fortunate to be the only group in the pool at that time. Other groups started to arrive later, and it was time to leave.
Go there
Emer Massey travelled to Angel Falls with GAP Adventures (
www.gapadventures.com). She booked a KLM flight to Caracas through Trailfinders (
www.trailfinders.ie).
Her 15-day tour also included a two-day trip to the Great Plain, three days with the Warao people in the Orinoco Basin and two days on a Caribbean beach.
Angel Falls can almost dry up between January and May. It is at its most spectacular in August and September, but clouds can obscure the view.