Hi there,
When you are from Venezuela, there are two places that you must visit. One is Los Roques Archipelago and the other, Canaima National Park.
This national park is in Bolívar State and was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1994. It is 30,000 km² in size and reaches the border with Guyana and Brazil. Due to its size, it is considered the sixth largest national park in the world. Here we also find the Angel Falls, which is the highest waterfall in the world (1283mts.).
Canaima is special for being a nature reserve that has rocky plateaus, called tepuyes, that are millions of years old and are unique in the world. The best-known tepuyes are Mount Roraima, the highest and easiest to climb in the entire park, and Auyantepuy, the most visited because Angel Falls is located there.
The “Pemones”, an indigenous ethnic group, live in this area and occupy a large part of the southeast of the country.
I visited Canaima in April 2016, when I returned to Venezuela and went with my boyfriend. He is Spanish and I wanted him to see the most beautiful things in my country.
From Caracas you must take 2 planes, since, to go by car, it takes many hours. The feeling when you arrive to Canaima is that you are in another world, a world in which the jungle surrounds and devours you.
We went in low season, and we were the only tourists. We did the tours to the waterfalls and toured the lagoon by canoe. We saw Angel Falls from the plane because they told us that since there was not much water, the visit was not made by river.
From 5 in the afternoon, mosquitoes start to attack you, so you must be prepared. At night, that’s a festival of grasshoppers and bugs making a fuss.
Walking at night through those dirt streets without any lighting is something between fear and charm. Fear because I started to think that we were going see ghosts, and enchantment because the stars seemed so close as if you could touch them with your hands.
Another wonderful thing is that there is no crime. Nobody is going to rob you because tourism is what gives work to the people of Canaima. So, we left our bags and cameras on the shore of the lagoon, and we went for a walk and a quiet swim. One thing that would never occur to me to do in another country.
We also did many hikes of those that we went out for a walk aimlessly to see how far we got.
We saw quite a few things, but we still had a lot more to see, so we will have to return in the future.
In short, Canaima is a magical place. A place where nature is unspoiled and at its best, where mosquitoes are no strangers, where you can enjoy the darkness and silence, where you can forget about your cell phone because the signal doesn’t reach you at all. A place to disconnect from the rest of the world.
