...during which I successfully avoided being eaten by alligators, piranhas, catfish, jaguars, snakes, natives and mosquitoes (mostly), dehydration, heat stroke, catching malaria, dengue, the runs or any other nasty diseases (AFAIK), capsize, air crash, falling out of a Landcruiser, and a variety of other hazards.

The first week of the holiday consisted of travelling by plane, bus and boat to the mouth of the Orinoco Delta, taking in the Cueva del Gauchero, the largest cave in Venezuela on the way. In the delta we spent a couple of days exploring the mangrove swamps in dugout canoes, night time Alligator spotting (also in the dugouts), meeting and trading with (ie. buying souvenirs at prices that seemed dirt cheap to us and probably extortionate to them) the local Warao Indians whilst staying in a traditional Warao stilt house and sleeping in hammocks. A stilt house in a swamp may not sound like the nicest place to stay but in fact the scenery is both fascinating and beautiful and the people were incredibly friendly, actually they seemed as fascinated by us as we were by them.

The second week was taken up with visiting Angel Falls. First of all we drove to Cuidad Bolivar where we flew to Kamarata on a 50 year old Dakota flying past Angel Falls on the way. from Kamarata we visited Kavac canyon where we walked, climbed and swam up the series of small waterfalls in the canyon to the waterfall at the head of the canyon. We then spent 4 days travelling by river in thirty foot motorized dugouts, negotiating some impossible looking rapids on the way, to a point where we could walk through the jungle to the base of the falls. Both the falls and the scenery around them are spectacular, 3000' mountains with flat tops and near vertical sides rising up out of the plane and usually partially enveloped in mist and cloud and with waterfalls cascading down from them. It's not hard to see why Conan Doyal was inspired by them to write "The Lost World". Apparently the top of the angel falls in the only fixed platform from which it possible jump and achieve terminal velocity before opening your parachute.

We were incredibly lucky with the weather, we only got rained on for a total of about two hours despite which the rivers were all well up making boat travel relatively easy. We were less fortunate with air travel with four out of five flights being delayed. The plane for the flight out arrived at heathrow four hours late and then sat there for another six hours while one of the engines was repaired, three of those hours was spent waiting for a part to be flown in from Spain! The flight the next day from Caracas to Cumana went without incident. the Dakota flight past the falls set off on time but landed back at Cuidad Bolivar about ten minutes later with one of the engines overheating and about to seize. Actually this worked out OK as the airline gave us a free tour of Cuidad Bolivar while another plane was flown in and the weather was perfect when we finally flew past the falls which it probably wouldn't have been had we got there earlier. The flight back from Canaima after seeing the falls was five hours late as the plane which should have collected us had to turn back shortly after leaving Caracas due to mechanical failure of some sort. However there are worse places to be stranded than the Canaima resort, even if the beer was expensive (80p for half a pint.) The flight back to the UK wasn't too bad, two and a quarter hours late taking off and only an hour and forty minutes late landing. When I finally got to Euston I discovered that a crash at Watford junction on Thursday had Stopped all Intercity services out of Euston, Fortunately by shear luck this only added about twenty minutes to the journey although it meant catching the local (packed and stopping at every station) train to Watford junction and then catching the Intercity from there.

Overall it was a fantastic holiday and I can thoroughly recommend both Explore Travel and Venezuela. The only problem now is finding somewhere to keep all the souvenirs, these include a Warao canoe paddle, a bow and arrow, a blowpipe, a stilt house, several baskets, and a hammock. (-:

That's it briefly, hopefully I will add more sometime soon, so come back and have another look later.