The lack of infrastructure was surprising, and one could scarcely believe that in the
1920s Venezuela was the world’s largest oil exporter. At the time of writing,
Venezuela, with 300,878 million barrels of proven reserves, had the largest amount
of proven oil reserves in the world. This meant Venezuela was a country with vast
wealth, and this wasn’t “new money” as they had it for the past 100 years!
The next day was spent in Santa Elena. The weather was scorching as the rainy
season had ended. I feared this meant we had missed any chance of rain cooling us
down. The day was spent doing the usual housekeeping and obtaining a Venezuelan
SIM card.
Santa Elena – San Francisco - 71 km
The following morning, the map indicated a route north through the Gran Sabana
National Park and showed a few hamlets scattered about. However, we soon learnt
the map couldn’t be trusted. Even the shortest distances were wrong, and place
names didn’t correspond with signboards.
Still, the landscape remained stunning with the road disappearing over the Gran
Sabana’s grassy hills (Great Plains). The scenery and wide-open spaces reminded
me of Africa. Still, it was utterly different from the Amazon basin we had come
from. Numerous photo stops were made or, at times, purely to admire the views.
The park was massive and included both Angel Falls and Mt Roraima. Much of the
park was characterised by wide-open savannah, scattered with Moriche palms (the
palm tree with a thousand uses). The park was indeed a unique area. It’s situated
atop a plateau of the Guyana Shield, one of the world’s oldest geological
formations, dating back over two billion years to the Pre-Cambric era. The park was
further known for its tabletop mountains, some of the oldest landforms on Earth,
created long before the continents drifted apart. I found those numbers mind-
boggling.