Safari, Venezuelan style
Trip Start
Nov 29, 2007
1
6
12
Trip End
Dec 30, 2007
Barinas,
Venezuela
Thursday, December 13, 2007
Supposedly the best place to see wildlife in Venezuela, the Llanos was a disappointment. It teems with wading birds, and there are countless caimans and besides that we saw red howler monkeys (beautiful), lots of iguanas and an anteater. It was nice but well short of spectacular and I wouldn't rush back to do the same thing again. To be fair, though, it was not the best time of year, and our guide was not great.
We did the standard trip. Stay at San Vincente on the banks of the Apure and cruise up the river. Then spotting the next morning in truck and on foot, before an afternoon cruise up to a finca, where we were not even introduced to the family that fed and housed us. Cruise home the next morning, and relocate to Arassari's gorgeous facilities on the banks of the Aseca, where I would have been happy to stay a week
Anaconda in water
. (This trip doesn't get you into the big stations where you can actually get into the fields, but which are far too expensive.)The Llanos is a large area of flat land devoted to farming, but sufficiently inefficiently so that much wildlife survives. Apparently less ever year though, as Venezuela has not really heeded the call of the wild and more than one person has told me that Venezuelans think that everything is for hunting. In the wet season it becomes almost a wetland, drying to arid plains in summer. We were there at the start of the dry season when the animals are still fairly well dispersed.
So what did we see? Many wading birds, which it would bore you to read about but the most spectacular being the scarlet ibises and pink spoonbills, lots of vultures, including the striking red and yellow headed king vulture, black collared (fishing) hawks, fish eagles (osprey), many handsome kingfishers, crested caracaras etc . The most interesting for me was the hoatzin - a handsome large brown bird with a crest and blue eye shadow - which I have read about and thought lived only in the Amazon. These birds are sometimes discussed as analogues for how the early dinosaur-birds may have lived. One interesting feature is that the young have hooks on the wings which they use, for instance, to clamber back into the tree when they fall in the river (and diving from the nest is how they escape predators)
Anaconda on land
. There were dozens of them. The book says they have an unpleasant smell, which may be a useful survival feature in a country that likes to hunt ...We did find a beautiful anteater who Camilo assured us had a damaged shoulder and would soon die. So we captured the poor fellow, who certainly did not put up much of a fight, and brought him back to town where a doctor gave him a clean bill of health, after removing a tick from the sore shoulder. He was such a nice, patient animal and reminded me a great deal of a good natured dog. They have these great bushy tails which they flop over themselves when they sleep, and a very sweet long snout.
We also found some river dolphins, which are bigger than I had thought, growing to 160kg, and we saw some captive capybaras, the world's largest rodent which gets to 60kg.
I already mentioned the red howlers, although we weren't given much opportunity to observe them. They are beautiful, particularly when the sun strikes them and sets their fur aglow.
We pointlessly killed some piranhas, which are beautiful fish with an orange belly, and which I am assured Hollywood has not exaggerated
Anteater
. We found a small, two meter, anaconda who seemed quite sluggish and sat around in two inches of water waiting to be captured. He had a few scars apparently from piranhas. He returned to shore not far from where we were fishing for piranhas and I had a nice close look at him. After watching him for a while, he changed direction and came right at me, slipping by not six inches from my feet. I could hear the soft scraping of snake over sand. Much as I like snakes in theory, I still had to fight an impulse to get out of this snake's way (yes, it was a pretty weak impulse, easily stifled, but surprising in me nonetheless).
When I put that list together I am not sure why I was disappointed. What was I expecting? Jaguars and ocelots? Of course not, though every brochure claims that you might see such crowd pleasers. I don't know why I felt flat at the end, unless it was just that we spent a lot of time driving past animals without getting to really look at them, the anaconda being a rule-proving exception.
We finished with a fun morning inner-tubing down the Asecas, through some pretty entertaining rapids. The water here is very clear and a lovely temperature, as we had found out the night before in the beautiful swimming hole
Birds and crocs
. Like I said, we could happily have stayed a week. However, we had made plans that could not be altered so we left that afternoon and had the tour drop us in Barinas to catch our bus to Ciudad Bolivar. This had seemed an excellent idea at the time because staying in Barinas would save us half a day on a bus, and a lot of backtracking. When we got to the station at around 3.30 we discovered that the bus left at midnight, rather later than had been suggested when we made our plans, so we had a fair bit of time to kill. We killed an hour or so at an internet place unsuccessfully trying to load some photos on to a cd, and then patiently waited at the bus station. This is something every traveler to Central/Sth America should try at some point. Bus stations are very busy places and quite chaotic, and they are full of people shouting the destination of a particular bus. I think they must be paid a commission for every one who gets on because they are very persistent in announcing the destination, which in Venezuela usually seems to be Valencia. I am very sick of Valencia, but it seems that all roads lead there (ours did en route to Coro). They have a particular style of call, which often makes it hard to make out the destination, rapidly repeating the name three times so that the syllables all run together, and sometimes throwing in some other random noises as well.
Caiman and butterfly
Well, we passed the time until midnight happily enough - me reading a book about a mother whose children become child soldiers in Liberia; Nancy one about the mother of a child who goes on a Columbine like rampage - and were especially careful to be at our platform early and to verify that every bus leaving was going somewhere we didn't want to go. Nevertheless, as 12.30 and then 1.00 rolled over, we couldn't help wondering whether we had somehow misunderstood. You can't help second guessing in these situations, especially when your grasp of the language and process is fragile. But the bus did arrive finally, at 2 am. It had no room left for luggage, on account of the absurdly small hold that this massive bus has, despite the valiant efforts of one man hanging from the top of the hold (bizarrely located about 1.5 m off the ground)and kicking the luggage further in. On these buses they won't even let you take a day pack on with you, so we weren't sure how this could be resolved. The solution was the stairwell down to the driver which was packed with bags. Although we manged to secure our cold weather gear this time, fully appreciating the arctic conditions we would encounter, our food was buried under other packs. A long, hungry vigil beckoned, endurable only by the hibernation made so attractive by the temperature.
To cut a long, unnecessary, story short, we arrived in Ciudad Bolivar at 4.30 pm, 25 hours after getting to the terminal at Barinas. Door to door, it did not take us that long to get from Auckland to Mexico City.
