Canaima Climax
By Gretchen Belsie

We'd already lay on the beach, walked the streets of Caracas and trekked through the Andes by foot and mule, so what possibly could we do as a grand finale? Order up a couple charter planes, head for the jungle and try our hand at eco-tourism.

In many ways, ecotourism resembles an Abroad. It walks the fuzzy line between entertainment and education, sun and scholarship. And one is never sure, going into the experience, how it will turn out. Will the guide bore us or thrill us, point out pictures of butterflies or fill our stomachs with them in some unforgettable Kodak moment? We would find out in Canaima.

Our destination looked exotic enough, like something out of a James Bond movie. Imagine a green flatland interrupted by palm trees, wide rivers, thrashing waterfalls and dozens of table-top mountains swooping 1,000 meters almost straight up. Look closer and you can see the occasional indigenous hut, dugout canoe (made from a tree trunk but sporting a Japanese outboard motor) and an impressive list of fauna with venom, scales, sharp teeth and claws. More about that later.

Our home base to observe all this was Jungle Rudy's Camp Ucaima, an offbeat resort in southeastern Venezuela that counts among its former guests Robert De Niro, King of Spain Juan Carlos and Prince Charles. Getting there is half the fun.

After landing at the makeshift Canaima airport (one all-purpose, thatched-roof building that houses a tiny snack bar and a handful of bead vendors), we entered the national park. It's a huge place, relatively unspoiled and home to Angel Falls, the tallest waterfall in the world. Once inside the park, we climbed aboard safari-style Toyota land cruisers for a 15-minute drive on rutted washboard dirt roads, then clambered into long narrow boats for a 10-minute cruise upriver. The students were entranced before we even arrived.

Jungle Rudy's blends the indigenous and European. International flags representing the homeland of each of us snapped in the breeze to greet us (United States, France, Germany, but someone had forgotten to put out the Canadian flag). At the camp mess hall, an open-air pavilion with thatched roof, our guides offered us a pleasant fruit drink. It seemed very civilized, even with the desiccated animal pelts, trapped years ago in the surrounding bush, decorating the walls. But strange shapes darting out of the corner of my eye told me we had crossed over into the wild.

A baby boar skittered along the front yard, trailing behind the camp manager who had recently adopted him. An anteater the size of a basset hound not only checked us out but climbed up the legs of two female students. Somewhere in the river lurked a three-foot-long anaconda!

Harmless, the guide assured us, because it's too small to bite anybody. But I left the swimming to Laurent just the same.

The accommodations at Jungle Rudy's were pleasant, though not mosquito-proof. Outside each stucco and thatched-roof room hung a hammock for afternoon drowsing, reading or just lizard watching. Inside, the rooms were spartan and tidy in a European-style way and the walls were decorated with locally made baskets, spears or dart guns. Each guest is provided with a candle -- a necessity for late-night reading because after 10:30 p.m. or so, the camp's generators are shut off until morning and the visitor is plunged into a darkness broken only by the magnificent display of stars visible from the outdoor hammocks. We were off to a good start but would our four-day finale live up to our expectations?

The next day in Canaima, we opted for the day-long jaunt to Kavak, a tiny indigenous community that is the stepping off point for a grand adventure. To get there, we had to board our chartered planes again, fly about 40 minutes, land on an unpaved(!) runway then take off walking in the hot sun. The hike took us through grassy fields, past a small swollen river that invited all manner of splashing and rock diving, and on to the caverns themselves. The best way to describe Kavak is to call it a narrow and vertical black chasm of rock with a river flowing through the bottom. Sometimes, the current is so strong that the adventurer must use ropes attached to the rock face to pull himself along. The river opens unexpectedly at the end to reveal a large grotto pierced by sunlight and one very large crashing waterfall. The swimmer's-eye view is so spectacular it looks almost unreal. The perspective spirals upward, leaving one woozy and bedazzled by the color and the cascade of falling droplets. The group splashed about for a long time, daring each other with this and that and releasing all the pent-up emotion of the concluding days in Merida.

Back at camp that night, the cook provided us with large family-style pans of tasty Swiss steak with abundant rice on the side. Later on, our guide whispered that the meat really wasn't beef -- it was thinly sliced flank of tapir. I'm still not sure I believe him, but after that comment, I regarded with some suspicion the stroganoff served the next night. Of course, the students seemed not to care. After all, they already had sampled live termites on arrival to the Camp Ucaima grounds, courtesy of our guide.

Our second day in camp, we toured the small community of Canaima (back by the airport) by foot -- a low-key undertaking that left us all parched -- and raised again THE question in the minds of the students: "Are we going to do something cool today??"

Answer: a visit to an authentic indigenous community upriver for a cultural exchange. Our guide led us to Mayupa, a place he visits when in Canaima to bring clothing for the children and to pick up and drop off mail. The village, inhabited by Pemon Indians, was a National Geographic photo spread come to life. The chief greeted us cordially and presented to us the children from the two families who live in Mayupa, (un)dressed for the occasion and sporting loincloths and strands of beads crisscrossed on their chests. Their faces were decorated with a watery red paint made from the blossoms of a tree planted in their yard. The Prin students -- blond, or freckled, or with cayenne-red hair, and dressed in the latest Abercrombie and Fitch threads -- had their faces painted too as a sign of being welcomed into the tribe.

We toured the few open-air huts, learned about the process of converting fire ants into an edible hot sauce (delicious when served on a dried yucca chip!) and had a demonstration by the chief of the proper use of a blow gun. The students leaped at the invitation to test out the chief's hand- made weapons, and later bought as many as they could manage.

As the sun was beginning to set over the thatched roofs, Laurent and I unveiled our final food coup of the Abroad: nine packages of graham crackers, seven bags of marshmallows and about ten bars of chocolate. Let the s'mores fest begin!

(Director's note: A gentle word to the s'mores afficionado who ventures to the South American continent: bring marshmallows with you! For three weeks in Merida, Laurent and I had pounded the pavement, scoured candy shops and taken cabs to remote Chinese grocery stores reputed to stock the obscure jet-puffed confections. I came close once when I explained to a young stock boy what I was looking for. "At this point, I'd even take marshmallow fluff in a jar." "We have that," he assured me, and then led me to a shelf and pointed proudly to a wildly-overpriced can of Pillsbury frosting! We finally managed to obtain the crucial ingredient by begging the charter pilot to find us some in Caracas and bring them to Canaima. Mission accomplished -- forget the price.)

The chief and several of the tribesmen had generously carved roasting sticks for us with machetes and presented them to us. (I learned later that these were sticks to be re-used for dart guns.) The students took over, cramming multiple marshmallows on a stick and proudly showing the indigenous children how to hold the toasting wand just so to achieve that illusive golden-brown skin on the prized marshmallows. Mayupa's youngest citizens caught right on to the game and even enjoyed the inevitable flaming stack of sugar blobs. They were delighted with the s'mores concoctions and ate as many as they could in the time provided, washing them all down with classic Coca-Cola that we had brought along in a cooler. It was an unforgettable moment, though one punctuated with the pricking of conscience as we offered a banquet of cultural imperialism out in the Venezuelan bush.

Students are sometimes hard to read. After our final morning of splashing in a lake and crossing under a waterfall, I thought they'd enjoyed the trek. On the flight back to Caracas, one of the more skeptical Abroaders vouchsafed: "After Canaima, I know I've got to come back here soon."

Suddenly, the dozens of mosquito bites didn't matter anymore.