10/13/01 | On the river

Wareo village along the Macareo

Columbus gave Venezuela its name -- "Little Venice" -- inspired by a stilt village in Lake Maricaibo, but the sobriquet is equally apt here in the Orinoco Delta. The only "roads" through this swampy jungle are the rivers, and although it seems to us we're in the wildnerness, we're actually on, if not a superhighway, at least a major thoroughfare. Long, low pirogues, their bows curved upward just like Venetian gondolas, power up and down the river carrying goods from Tucupita, the capital city of the region, over 100 river miles away. We pass "villages", collections of three or four huts on stilts at the river's edge, and the native Wareo wave and paddle over in their dugout canoes to trade with us, or just to stare at the funny pale people in the silly boats. The Wareo -- "canoe people" -- are the second largest indigenous tribe in Venezuela. They speak their own language, although a few speak a little Spanish, and live in these waterways pretty much the same way they did thousands of years ago. They fish, they gather fruits, they trade with passers-by.

Mornings, we motor upriver, our progress slowed by the 2-3 knot current. The water is a thick yellow-brown sludge with about 2 inches of visibility, so the prospect of swimming is unappealing even without considering the piranha, the alligators, and the possibility of contracting cholera. (Needless to say we filled our water tanks before entering the river. Our watermaker would choke on this stuff, "too thick to drink and too thin to plow".) From the cockpit we watch the green jungle scroll by.

We try to anchor early so we can explore the caños (side streams) by dinghy. Our first day of travel on the river brought us to Caño Cojuma; the main river was 70 feet deep at the junction with the side stream, and we didn't want to look for shallower water to anchor in at the far side of the river, so Britt and I took the point and nosed right up into the narrow caño. It turned out to be adequately deep for navigation and adequately shallow for anchoring, so we continued upstream, the other boats following, until I failed to see an overhanging tree and was rewarded with a shower of leaves and branches all over the deck. We all jockeyed our boats around (like maneuvering in a tight marina!) and anchored bow-and-stern, then dropped the dinks for an afternoon of poking around.

The dinghies let us explore the waterways in a more intimate way than the big boats, getting us into tiny side streams which are sometimes no more than less dense spots in the vegetation. We head in a ways, then kill the engine and either row or drift with the current. We look, and more importantly, we listen. The noises of the jungle rise around us.

The variety of bird calls astonish us. There are chirps, whistles, and trills, but also cackles and whoops, bleats and screeches. We hear the susurrus of insects, the grunting of frogs, and every so often an unearthly growl which makes me think of a herd of stampeding 600-pound wild hogs, but which is probably the call of howler monkeys. With the engine off, we follow our ears, listening and looking.

In Trinidad we tried to find a bird book for this area, but came up dry, so we don't actually know the real names of the birds we've been seeing. There's the "yellow-butt" bird, black with a bright yellow midsection, which builds these incredible two-foot long basket-like nests which dangle from the treetops like strange fruit. The "punk turkey" looks like a turkey with a mohawk, and squawks like a rap singer on acid. We've seen a huge bird with a glossy black throat and a topknot like a quail's, a reddish-brown hawk with black wingtips and a white head, an oversized hummingbird with a curving beak, and numerous orange-and-blue parrots. We seem to have moved out of the range of the scarlet ibis; after the great red flocks of the first few days, we haven't seen one since.

There are numerous brightly-colored butterflies as well. Large ones with vivid sky-blue wings, tiny lacy white ones, yellow ones, orange ones, red-and-black striped ones. Dragonflies, too, seem to come in a rainbow of hues. They buzz over and perch on our dinghy as we drift by. Britt likes to watch for the spiders, which come in sizes from fingernail to dinnerplate; I just watch to make sure they don't jump on me, as one did in the Caño Cojuma. (Talk about your unearthly noises -- I think my scream scared even the howler monkeys!)

In the water we see mysterious bubbles from time to time, and an occasional school of small fish. If we are lucky we hear a whuffing of air in time to see a dolphin's back break the water. The dolphins here are blocky-looking with a double fin and a pink belly. They seem less playful than ocean dolphins, but they do come over to the sailboats to check us out. The only other mammal we've seen out here are monkeys, spindly grey-furred monkeys in one caño and chunky brown monkeys in another. They travel in the treetops, swinging from branch to branch, grabbing bright red berries for lunch on the run. Once we spotted a monkey swimming across the river, doing the monkey paddle, I guess.

In the late afternoon we gather on one boat or another for an early cocktail hour. No sitting out on deck watching a lazy sunset; we have to be below, screens up and secure, before the malaria mosquitos descend en masse at dusk. Fortunately there aren't many biting insects which bother us during the day other than big black flies which come into the cockpit and aim right for our feet. At night the breezes quit, so we turn our fans on, drowning out the music of the jungle, and dream of monkeys and parrots.