We are now in a family-run tourist camp, sleeping in hammocks, sharing very few toilets and hose pipes for showers which are routinely also home to large frogs, crickets, bats and anything else that can crawl or fly into the outdoor facilities.
We reached Los Llanos in south western Venezuela after coming down out of the Andes after another drive of too many hours, stopping to see caiman eyes glinting at torch lights in the dark. The dirt road towards the end had grown sticky with the rains and would have halted Magaly the truck in her tracks so we took 4x4s to the Finca.
In the couple of days we have here we are lapping up the vast grassland habitat which supports a variety of birdlife including storks, herons, egrets, jacanas, kingfishers, vultures, quails, hawks, falcons, ospreys, cardinals, swallows, finches and so many more. We even managed to find red macaws.
The roads are built by scooping out the earth and piling it alongside, leaving long deep pools in the fields alongside the roads. These in turn fill with water during the wet season and support strong populations of turtles, caimans, fish, capybaras and anacondas. We were lucky to come across a small group of locals excitedly probing a roadside pond. We stopped and our guide Alan, Finca owner Nicandrew and crew poked and prodded at the pond weeds and grass with sticks, disturbing a very large anaconda. Our first glimpse was as it swam on the surface around the legs of the catching crew before it disappeared into the weeds again. A second, smaller anaconda was soon pulled, tail first, from the pond and brought up for us to touch and see, and some had it wrapped around their necks and arms for photos. I was occupied with a baby caiman the crew brought up, it was small enough to fit in my palm and its little barks weren’t loud enough to summon an adult to come and rescue him. I put him back in the water, marveling at the fact he and his siblings haven’t become anaconda food, all animals living side by side.
The second anaconda brought to the shore was a massive specimen, over 3.5 metres and so strong it took four men to hold her up. As she lay in the grass, sometimes making half an effort to lunge at onlookers, when she lay still we could see her breathing, her girth rising and expanding then relaxing and contracting slowly. We made way for her to find her way back to the water and with an air of nonchalance she meandered back to the water, taking her time and seemingly not worried about us at all. We were definitely more afraid of her than she of us.
The nearby river is home to red-belly pirañas which are surprisingly easy to catch on a short hand line with a little chicken. The catch for the first group was around 23, one of which was sacrificed to use as bait – pirañas are cannibals, another sacrificed to see a hawk in action grab it out of the water and another to show how fast they eat – a whole fish, on a line, thrown in to the river and in about ten seconds pulled back in to reveal only the shell of a head, even the eyeballs were gone. With the 20 or so caught by the next group, they became lunch the following day, cleaned and scaled, still whole with slits down the side and deep fried. Full of bones, not a lot of meat and still glaring with mouths open to reveal menacing razor teeth, I can’t say they really make for an appealing main meal.
A major highlight was boating alongside a pod of Amazonian pink river dolphins, an increasingly rare sight. Sharing characteristics with their ocean-dwelling brothers, they checked us out when they came up for air, diving and bobbing around the boat, even the young calf. They have shorter dorsal fins as they don’t need to get up quite the same speed as those in the oceans and their light pink and grey skin is mottled and shiny. It was an awesome sight and we all sounded like we were watching fireworks with our oohs and aaahhs 🙂
