Waking early, we left our stuff at the hotel
(we would return the same way and pick it up later) and headed for
the northern-most point on Roraima – La Proa. We were still walking
through cloud, but once in a while the sun would shine through and
we'd get a great view of the rocky landscape, stretching out in every
direction. Walking without our bags we struck a lively pace which
suited both me and Vova fine. Omar, our indigenous guide, probably
thought it was snail pace. Either way we quickly passed the
Triple-Point into Brazil and arrived at a sunken lake, one of the
sights on the way to La Proa. Vova managed to get some photos before
the cloud rolled in after which we walked down into a little valley,
the floor of which was littered with crystals. At this point,
something one of the researchers for the film “Up” from Pixar
Studios had said came back to me. It was something like “The things
we saw on Roraima were so crazy that in the film, we had to tone some
of them down just to make it believable”.
After another bit of hefty hiking we reached la
Proa. Unsurprisingly it was cloudy and we weren't rewarded with a
picture-perfect view of Brazil, but peering over the edge of the
cliff into a vast cloudy nothingness with no sense of how high up we
were was an enchanting experience nonetheless.
The rest of the day we spent retracing our
steps back to our very first hotel which we reached with a few hours
of daylight to spare. After we'd set up camp I still had some
strength left in my legs and was about to badger Omar to take us for
more exploration. Then cloud cleared, opening up the sky right in
front of us and we were treated to a delicious view of miles and
miles of rolling hills of the Gran Sabana below. My drab meal of
bread, sardines and mayonnaise tasted delicious and I don't think
I've ever eaten in a more spectacular setting. Vova, crazy Russian
that he is, had already run out of food by this point and assured me
that he would be fine without. “My body will adapt” he told me.
Fortunately Omar went and managed to wrangle him some cooked pasta
and half a loaf of bread from some other guides nearby. We went to
bed exhausted but happy – we'd done more or less 2 days hiking in 1
day and had seen a great deal of this crazy landscape.
No comments:
Post a Comment