After half a day in Manaus, I caught an overnight sleeper bus up to the town of Boa Vista in the state of Roraima. From Boa Vista it was another bus, for two hours up to the Venezuela border.
By sunrise, it was apparent that there had been a big shift in vegetation type, from Amazon forest to savanna grasslands with palms lining watercourses. This savanna covers Roraima state as well as southeast Venezuela (the Gran Sabana) and southwest Guyana.
Every few kilometers, there would be a red earth road and entrance to a fazenda (farm). Supposedly these were for cattle, but I only spotted a handful of cows and heard later that these grasslands are unsuitable for ranching as the soils and thus the grasses are very acidic.
At this fazenda entrance, a family of farm-workers from the bus got off.
As we approached the border, hills rose up from the plains.
And there were Amerindian communities.
Then higher, the savanna was replaced by forest, but it was patchy and under pressure from clearance.
The following day, and my first in Venezuela, I caught a local bus out from Santa Helena to an Amerindian village called San Francisco, an hour down the road.
The scenery of the Gran Sabana, with golden hills, clear skies and far-off table-top mountains was idyllic, a great place for a landscape artist.
This is San Francisco, a village composed of identical government-built houses set out on a grid pattern: somewhat different from an organic Amerindian village, with a central chief's house and school, with other houses fanning out, interspersed with cassava fields.
On a three km walk down the road, I got a close-up view of Buriti Palms. Their nuts are used as vegetable ivory.
Leaves were being dried in the hot sun.
Eventually, they'd make a thatched roof like this.
From the bridge, I spotted the five metre tall Yuruani falls.
The view as I got closer.
And then below them, I bathed in turbulent pools eroded into red (jasper) rocks.
This was the view from up on the rocks.
On the way back to town, we were stopped at two army posts.
I hadn't taken my passport on this day-trip, and at each post there were problems with the young guards.
At the first stop, I was told I would either have to stay there all day, until my passport was fetched from town by the taxi driver, or I could do a favour and give the guard some cash. Machine gun by the window and wanting to get the hell out of there, I went for the second option and fumbled some notes into the hand that was inside the window.
Five km before town, the same thing happened, this time having to go into the back of a tent, take out all my possessions from my pocket, all my cards and cash from my wallet, get body searched and then asked how I could help solve this problem. It would be kind of me if I could give a present to the six guards, I was told. So, a bit more money was handed over, then the guard smiled and shook my hand! It all seemed so bizarre. Aggressive army guard who could get rid of me one minute, welcoming and smiling friend the next.
It was a bad experience, but not as bad as I heard later that night back at the hostel.
A German couple had been stripped naked, left by the side of the road and had all their money taken.
An Aussie was leaving Venezuela tomorrow and heading back to Colombia, having just had his backpack searched at the bus station, with money taken. He managed to rescue his camera, but was still red with anger and just wanted to leave the country.
It's a sad state of affairs. Young army guards, paid a wage of 120 Euros per month, look to supplement their income and you can kind of understand their recourse to desperate measures, when they can't pay for the basics.
Tourists are easy and prime targets, but the locals I spoke to are fed up too- they constantly have to pay to get out of small problems picked up by army guards- and many of them are paid no better than the guards themselves. They also said it would eventually scare tourists away from Venezuela.
It felt like a beautiful country falling apart and reminded me of Zimbabwe, a safe and outwardly weathy country which I visited in the mid 90s, and a disaster zone ten years later.
However I decided to stick around a bit longer. I'd come to see Mt Roraima and wasn't going to leave so easily.
