by Dennis James
There are two Warao families living near the beach in bamboo huts with thatched roofs. Naked children scramble up and down ladders, giggling. One hut is a platform raised on stilts with thatching and sheltering eaves. The other, closer to the beach, is little more than a shed at ground level. Both have smoldering fires under bamboo grills, smoking dozens of dressed fish. These families are completely isolated. There is no school for their children. They live off the grid.
The equatorial sun beats down like a hammer, and the occasional brief but torrential rain leaves us soaked. We cover our New York pallor with long sleeves and trousers and use plenty of sun-screen, but we get burned, anyway. Yet, we can’t complain. This is a riverain culture where people travel in boats, and the breeze is refreshing when we cruise at full throttle. The towering sunsets over the delta display colors throughout the red spectrum, from pink to tangerine.
We dock at an inn in the town of San Francisco de Guayo, where, a century ago, Capuchin monks established a school for the local Warao villagers. The school is still functioning. A resident nun greets us and shows us her “museum,” a room where she keeps crafts made by indigenous women. The pieces, carvings, basketry, toys, and woven hammocks are of the highest quality, the latter being prized throughout Venezuela. The electricity in the room is off, and the good Sister keeps up a rapid monologue while waving her flashlight. We buy two baskets, hardly able to see them because of the erratic source of illumination, but we are not disappointed. The hammocks are too bulky for us to take home. I try one out at the inn and have no trouble falling asleep.
The school is well maintained, but an adjacent Chavista housing development is clearly neglected, with front doors and shutters hanging off their hinges and floorboards missing. Money for repairs is simply not available.
We fly back to Caracas and on to Puerto Ayacucho, where Rodrigo, our guide and interpreter for the trip up the Orinoco, and Señor Hermoso, the local trip organizer, are waiting. They take us to a fishing supply store to buy some hooks and line as gifts for the Yanomami. The town is covered with posters and draped with banners of political parties seeking votes in the upcoming election. The government’s advertisements predominate. But there are long queues for such things as cleaning supplies, toilet paper, diapers, sanitary pads, cooking oil, and other necessities. Cash withdrawals from banks are limited to one day per week per person, with a maximum of thirty thousand bolívar (about fifty-four US dollars). These hardships speak louder than the posters.
Rodrigo is a young student from Merida, a university town in the Andean foothills. He works in a bookstore, teaches French, and freelances as a guide and interpreter—three jobs to barely make ends meet.
Señor Hermoso invites us to his home for a beer. His house is substantial and comfortably furnished with modern furniture and many appliances. He is a tall, portly man in his fifties who bustles his way through his business day, usually on the phone in his SUV.
The next day, the four of us drive to the port on the Orinoco where our boat is moored. The boat is about fifteen meters long and two meters wide, with a canopy that shelters half its length and provides an upper deck on which to tie down supplies and baggage. There is space for a makeshift kitchen and hooks for hanging hammocks to sleep or relax. The unsheltered front of the boat is filled with standing barrels of gasoline and motor oil.
There is a crew of two—León, the nominal captain, and Victor, the pilot. Neither speaks English. Rodrigo will share crew duties and translate for us. León is a lanky, garrulous man. I never see him in anything but surfer shorts and a T-shirt. He is also the cook. His breakfast arepas, cheese or meat in a pocket of fried dough, are outstanding, as is his tomato, onion, and red bean sauce for pasta.
León’s other job is to deal with the numerous National Guard checkpoints along the Orinoco—no small task. All commercial craft have to put in and submit to examination of passports, identification, and, at the discretion of the local commander, a search of the boat. This is purportedly to prevent smuggling of drugs, gasoline, and motor oil. Much of the Orinoco constitutes the border with Colombia, where cheap Venezuelan gas and oil can be sold at great profit.
In reality, these checkpoints are tollbooths for the National Guard Commanders. León negotiates a “donation” of gasoline or motor oil, which is siphoned by Guardsmen from our barrels into their jerry cans. They let us pass. At several checkpoints, we watch the jerry cans being loaded into a motorboat and sent on their way to Colombia. I question Rodrigo about our fuel supply.
“Not to worry,” he says, “We always plan ahead to make sure we have enough extra for the tolls. In Venezuela, we don’t have enough clean water, but we can take a shower in oil.”
Victor, the pilot, is the Mark Twain of the Orinoco. He has lived on the river all his life. He knows nearly everyone and, more important, every sandbar, snag, and shoal in the river. This knowledge is critical, because we are in the dry season and the water is low. Victor is short and very strong. Whenever we look at him, he is smiling.
Like the Mississippi, the Orinoco is an opaque caramel color. Unlike the Mississippi, it is not yet heavily polluted. Where the Orinoco meets one of its blackwater tributaries, a clear line appears on the surface of the water with caffe latte on one side and black tea on the other. The Orinoco is warm. The tributary is cold.
We follow Humboldt’s route from the Orinoco to the Autana River. The land is wild and unspoiled. Peaks called cerros rise three to four hundred meters, straight up from the green sea of the rain forest canopy. The cerros have nearly flat tops with dark red corrugated sides that turn blood orange in the sunset. They are volcanic plugs, eons old, the cooled molten lava that remained standing as the surrounding land eroded away. Lava rock lies everywhere, from school bus–sized boulders thrown thousands of feet by the exploding volcanoes to undulating acres of rough black lava stone, marking the path of the fiery flow after the eruption. Upstream, lava stone constricts the river, resulting in stretches of white-water rapids, the passage sometimes narrowing to a funnel or chute, the river then a monstrous fire hose, spume roaring through a stone window.
Cerro Autana
Throughout our journey, pristine sandy beaches provide places to eat, swim, or camp. Meals consist of plantains, pasta, vegetables, and occasionally freshly caught fish. We sleep in a tent on cots that are rigged with their own mosquito netting. This foils the mosquitoes but not the puri-puri, a minuscule insect that burrows through the netting and inflicts a tiny bite that looks like a pencil marking. By the end of the trip, I can connect enough dots on my legs and feet to form a dragon tattoo. Fortunately, the puri-puri are not malarial.
In his diaries, Humboldt described a place on a bend of the river, with a view of Cerro Autana. His description and his sketches match that of one of our campsites. The river slows as it turns and forms a clear, cold pool that we quickly take advantage of to cool off, wash up, and swim. Several families live in this paradisiacal setting. They maintain a thatched-roof, open-sided shelter for visitors to sleep under, and we set up our cots and hammocks in this breezy shed. We share our dinner with the resident families.
A boy in his early teens, Lewis, somewhat limited socially, takes a shine to Barbara and me. He speaks little Spanish and no English. He follows us around, polite and deferential. Despite his limitations, he figures out how to set up our mosquito netting, something we and Rodrigo are struggling to do. He also gives us a figure of a bird and other objects he has constructed from palm leaves, complicated pieces that resemble origami. Just before dinner, with the whole crowd at one big table, Lewis brings us coronas (crowns), also cleverly fashioned from palm leaf. We wear them that night and the next morning, when we say good-bye.
We return to the Orinoco to search for the Yanomami. León has heard that there is a large Yanomami village named Meri off the Casiquiare River. Somewhere along our route is the path leading from the river to the village. León hopes he can find someone who knows where that path is. The Casiquiare, which
connects the Orinoco and Amazon basins, was first mapped by Humboldt. This river is unusual in that its current reverses direction depending on the timing of heavy rains in each basin.
We settle into a long boat ride with few stops. The Casiquiare is broad, most of the time in excess of a kilometer. The view never changes—an obsidian expanse of water with a border of intense green, above which cottony clouds build slowly into iron-gray thunderheads. Victor sometimes swings close to shore to avoid midstream shallows, and we get a better look at the forest. We see plenty of flora but no fauna—no thirsty jaguars, sweaty tapirs, or toothy caimans. The hours crawl by and the ride becomes exhausting. It rains every day, sometimes in torrents.
Despite drinking vast quantities of water, I suffer a couple of bouts of dizziness brought on by dehydration. Fortunately, both spells occur while we are moored, waiting for the National Guard to finish siphoning our gasoline, and I’m able to get a quick saline IV at the local clinics—for free. One clinic is staffed by a Cuban doctor who is spending two years in Venezuela in connection with a program sponsored by the Cuban government. He is eager to practice his English and sits with us for an hour while the saline drips. He is delighted that we have visited Cuba.
Although the clinic has supplies for the saline drip, it is short on everything else, the doctor says.
One late afternoon, we come upon a dramatic split rock rising out of the water. It marks Capibara, a small settlement on the riverbank, with a school, soccer field, and power generator.
A young man named Andrew acts as the village “historian.” Somehow, Andrew’s uncle came into possession of the village, and Andrew is now the only surviving relative willing to live in this isolated spot. He says the community is much diminished from its heyday in the early twentieth century as a German-owned rubber plantation. The foundations of the abandoned home sites can still be found on a bluff overlooking the river. There is a graveyard deep in the forest where rubber workers are buried with their possessions. Treasure hunters are attracted by the rumor that the owner of the plantation was buried with gold pieces, though none have yet been found.
Humboldt’s split rock
According to Andrew, Humboldt, too, had stayed in Capibara, mentioning the split rock in his journal. Andrew shows us a flat king-sized lava stone on which the explorer sat and updated the journal. And so it is—and so do I.
The shelter in which we set up our cots has a door, but no walls.
There are only a few days left to find the Yanomami and spend some time with them. We stop at a sleepy river village, and León goes in search of a guide. He returns alone. Barbara and I are afraid that this path we are seeking does not exist.
At a fork in the river is the nearly deserted resort of Nigal, noted for its dazzling snow-white sand. The place looks like a Soviet gulag in winter. But it is merely a sad collection of guesthouses with no guests. León renews his search for a guide and this time returns with a young Yanomami, Nelson, who lives in Nigal. Nelson, a strapping young man, knows how to get to Meri. He comes aboard and we move on.
After a few kilometers, Nelson waves Victor over to the right bank where there is a short, dilapidated dock and some beached dugout canoes nearly hidden by the overhanging foliage. “This is the path,” he says.
We tie up, disembark, and start to walk. Victor stays with the boat. The path is muddy, passing through thick forest for a few hundred meters or so, then emerging into an open area bearing the blackened stubs characteristic of slash-and-burn agriculture. León and Nelson lead the way. We lose sight of them for a while, but they return before we descend into full-blown panic. There is no breeze or shade, and the heat and humidity are suffocating. A solitary old man stands in a barren field as we walk past, smiling and holding a two-meter spear. We wade through streams almost as deep as Barbara’s waist and clamber over brush piles that tear at our wet clothes. After an hour, we see what must be the village. It is unlike anything we have ever seen or imagined.
Instead of the usual arrangement of huts around or near a commons, there is a single structure—a stadium-sized oval palisade of bamboo trunks, curved inward to provide sheltering eaves on the inside. The wall encompasses the villagers’ living space. There are openings at each end of the oval, one to allow access to the gardens, the scorched fields, and a small stream, and the other for use as an outdoor toilet. Outsiders can neither enter nor leave without the chief’s permission. The whole palisade is called a shabono. We enter through a small designated opening in the stockade.
The individual family quarters are defined by the three-meter distance between the support posts and, other than for the occasional hanging blanket, are open to the world. The middle of the compound is a common area of about eighty by forty meters. This shabono is three years old, and the villagers are still working to complete it. Eventually the bamboo rots, or the game runs out, and the Yanomami move to a different location and build another shabono.
We find a bustling community. In the commons, bare-breasted women hang wash to dry, and naked children play. Skinny brown dogs make a racket, nip at one another, and whine as the children hit them with sticks. At one end of the common area, women chat and grind manioc to make a flat, crisp bread. Men arrive carrying stringers loaded with fish. Villagers line up to get their share.
About a dozen men sit in the shade beneath the eaves and watch a shaman who sings songs about the forest spirits and mimics their movements with exaggerated gestures, while prancing back and forth in front of his audience. Some of the men wear face paint. They pass around a pipe, smoking yopo, an herbal stimulant. The drug clearly has an effect. Laughing, the men shout comments at the shaman. This yopo ceremony was going on when we arrived in midafternoon and continued for two more hours. It takes place every day. Women are excluded.
We wander around, observing the Yanomami at their quotidian tasks, smiling and asking some for photos. A few smiles are returned. They are polite, but we don’t feel welcome. For the most part, we are ignored. The Yanomami are not known for their hospitality and, in fact, have a history of resolving disputes with violence, sometimes with fatal results.
Our accommodation is one of the spaces under the eaves, similar to the spaces occupied by Yanomami families. The only amenities are two string hammocks. There is also a homemade smoothbore single-shot rifle and two spears nestled in the overhanging eave. We will be sleeping here tonight. Our toilet is the rest of the rain forest.
Shaman at the yopo ritual, Yanomami village
Yanomami children and a friend
The leadership of the village is shared by two men referred to as the “old chief” and the “young chief.” The old chief is an advisor, but the young chief makes the final decisions and sees that they are carried out. The shaman is the repository of the myths and legends that constitute the spirit world of the tribe.
The young chief is in his twenties, short, wiry, olive-skinned, energetic, and given to frowning. Like all the men, he is bare chested and wears loose-fitting shorts. Like some, he wears face paint. He conducts an inspection of the compound and scolds the family who occupies the space next to ours for letting a palm strip binding loosen. He shakes the rifle in the roof to make sure it is secure, all the while ignoring us. The family tightens the binding immediately.
In the fading light of early evening, the men and women of the shabono gather in the commons. The men carry long spears. In a column, by twos and threes, they move forward with little hopping steps. Every few seconds, the men utter a deep guttural cough, like a jaguar makes to freeze its prey. The column stops in front of us, and the men form a semicircle into which the women step, two by two, chanting and dancing. After they finish, we lay out our gifts, the fish hooks and line, which are divided among the men. The young chief brings out a long red cloth and tears one-meter-long pieces from it. He distributes them to the women, who clutch the fabric and hurry to their quarters. They will use the cloth for clothing and decoration. Some women quarrel over perceived unfairness in the
distribution, but the young chief speaks sharply to them and they disappear.
Rodrigo and León bring our dinner from the boat. León assures us that the Yanomami will take good care of us and that the crew will return at eight the next morning to pick us up. They wait until the chief gives permission and then leave us alone with the Yanomami.
Evening segues into night. Cooking fires blink around the rim of the oval. Two rooms away, an old man sings softly to himself. Men and women speak in hushed voices. Children laugh and cry. I gingerly mount my hammock and pull down the mosquito netting. The hammock stretches with my weight, enveloping and supporting me, swaying almost imperceptibly, bringing sleep.
But, alas, drinking a lot of water to avoid dehydration results in bladder discomfort that cannot be ignored. It awakens me in the dead of night and will not be put off. I clamber out of the hammock and make for the bamboo gate at the opening in the palisade. I get there but find the gate is tied shut. Desperate, I climb over the gate, scratching my bare legs. I stagger into the field and obtain blessed relief.
On the way back, I am disoriented in the dark. It is impossible to tell one living area from another. I stumble and fall into a family’s space, startling its inhabitants. A tall young man arrives, helps me up, and points to my cubicle. I make gestures of apology to the family and return to my hammock.
In the morning, the village slowly awakens. People relax in their hammocks, talking quietly. They stoke their fires and prepare the first meal of the day, often consisting of manioc and other root vegetables.
Eight o’clock comes and goes. No one from the boat appears, but the young chief does. He is not smiling. He gives a curt order to two men, who begin stuffing our possessions into our backpacks. When they finish, he barks a single word in Spanish, “Vámonos! (We go!)” And we go—out the little opening in the shabono and into the fields, the Yanomami carrying our gear. Barbara and I are practically running to keep up, not really sure what the young chief plans to do with us. We struggle over the brush piles and splash through the streams, until, finally, we see our comrades coming toward us. Apparently, after sundown, the boat at its mooring was beset by a monstrous cloud of mosquitoes, and the crew had to move down the river to a breezier location.
