After bouncing to a stop on the grass strip, we climbed out of the plane, unloaded our backpacks and started the 200 yard walk toward the small gathering of thatched roof huts that comprised the town (village? hamlet?) of Kavak. Before we got to the village, the pilot turned his plane around and was in the air again. Technically, Kavak is not a “real” village. It was built by a tour company to house tourists. In exchange for allowing the construction of a lodge on their land, a group of Pemon (this particular group is called Kamarkotos) get to live in the village. There were no more than a dozen huts in Kavak, each constructed of mud, sticks and palm fronds. Most Pemon live in buildings made from modern materials like concrete cinder blocks, the huts were for the tourists. Four of the huts were for visitors and came with concrete floors, the rest had dirt floors. “Electricity” was supplied by a few solar panels and was limited to one solitary light bulb in each hut. Running water was supplied by a cistern in the village and was pretty much limited to toilets. There was also no place to recharge my camera battery, which was a bummer because I neglected to charge it before we left and it was getting low. We were shown to our hut, which had beds, and after settling in, Greg and I set out on a short walk to a nearby creek to take a bath and hang out. The village was in a stunning setting, nestled up against the southwestern corner of Auyan Tepui with the seemingly endless Sabana on the other side of the town. After our bath in the creek (it was raining the whole time) we headed to the large rectangular hut in the middle of the village for a lunch of roast chicken, pasta, fruit, strong coffee and ice tea and cassava bread. After lunch, our guide (Felix) led us on a hike into the foothills of the Tepui to a waterfall located in a slot canyon. As we climed up the hill toward the Tepui, the Sabana gave way to denser vegetation until we were in a heavily forested area. We came to the beginning of the slot canyon and realized that we would be swimming up most of the canyon. We took off our shoes and shirts, put them in the dry bag and jumped into the cold water running down from the top of the 8000 ft tepui. Ropes were strategically placed so that we could pull ourselves along as we made our way up the canyon against the strong current. At several points we had to get out and hike around short waterfalls. We finally made it to Kavak Falls which was about a fifty foot fall down into the narrow slot canyon. We sheltered under a ledge across from the fall and were blasted with mist from the fall. After resting a while we headed back. This time there was no need to hang onto a rope, we rode the current. It was a little like tubing without an inner tube. Along the way back we saw another 100 ft cascading waterfall. We hiked back to the village and changed into dry clothes.
Before dinner, we were offered a local delecacy, boiled grasshoppers with a hot sauce made from some sort of really hot pepper and the “butts” of leaf cutter ants. The hot sauce was ridiculously hot. Slap-my-ass-and-call-me-Sally hot. I think the peppers were grown by inmates in an insane asylum. The ant-butt-juice came from the venom sac of the soldier leaf cutter ants. (Leaf cutter ants are huge and can strip a tree of leaves. The soldiers are even more huge and have a venomous bite.) The grasshoppers were not bad. They were a little salty and not as crunchy as I thought they would be. It was served with cassava bread, which is an unleavened wafer/biscuit of mashed up cassava root. The Pemon make giant sheets of the bread which are then kept in big Hefty trash bags. Every meal includes cassava. All in all the grasshopper snack was pretty good, especially when taken with a very conservative amount of the hot sauce. Dinner was spaghetti. The grasshoppers with ant-butt sauce was better than the spaghetti. We turned in early In anticipation of our first day on the river.
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