Destinations

The Llanos is a region of Venezuela that is full of wildlife and much more. We were on safari at the Hato El Cedral, a 130,000-acre cattle ranch in the middle of the Llanos - central Venezuela's seemingly infinite floodplain of rivers, marshes and prairie. The plains fizzed with aquatic wildlife and dense flocks of birds. But, hidden somewhere, was the mother of them all: the giant anaconda.

The Llanos covers nearly a third of Venezuela - a mind-boggling 240,000 square miles. It's a kind of surreal Norfolk Broads without cabin cruisers.

Tales of the near-mythical status and size - as much as 20ft in length - of the anaconda had fired our imaginations. The llaneros, the cowboys of the plains, describe how the monsters devour cattle whole with a single bite, after first intoxicating them with a deadly gas.

But it was Lebsky who sent our anxiety levels soaring. He told our small party - which included a French family, and Sara and Antonio, a likeable couple from Bologna - that hunters had killed a huge anaconda in Venezuela's Orinoco Delta the previous month; on cutting it open they found the body of a man.

I preferred to concentrate on the anaconda's usual dietary predilections as I scrambled down the levee to join Lebsky by the pool. They are partial to deer and capybaras - which they constrict, suffocate and gradually digest through distended throats - and can survive for months between meals. "I hope we find one that has eaten recently," said Antonio, a food-hygiene biologist. No one laughed.

Lebsky was right. A huge female anaconda was coiled asleep by the shallows of the pool (the females are the Amazons of the animal world, growing to five times the size of their male counterparts).

Casting aside their wellies, Lebsky and our driver, Victor, splashed across the boggy ground and emerged wrestling the anaconda. It was like a cheesy scene from an episode of Tarzan, only the snake had momentarily forgotten the script. She had seen them coming, and had started to slip into the pool's turbid water. She was no match, however, for our dynamic duo. Lebsky took a firm grip behind her head and Victor grappled with her midriff as the lower portion of her body began to coil powerfully.

They needed an extra pair of hands, which proved to be mine, as the Italian couple were changing a film and the French contingent refused to leave the truck. I grasped at her soapy skin and was soon sporting several tightly wrapped loops around my forearm.

Eventually I managed to wedge her tail underneath my armpit, and we unfurled the 14ft anaconda like a scaly pennant. Her strength was impressive; the convulsive tremors surging through her body were palpable.

It was impossible not to admire her. Despite the truculent curses issuing from the pinky-white depths of her mouth, we were able to examine closely her beautiful markings of olive bands with ringed custard-yellow dots that resembled false eyes. Her middle was swollen, but not with the remains of some macabre meal - she was pregnant, and would shortly bear up to 75 live young.

Given her condition, and our tiring arms, we released her back into the pool and, none the worse for her ordeal, she skulked beneath the lily pads.

We returned to the homestead for lunch. Guests stay in a neat compound that backs on to the main corral. The comfortable cabins are shaded by an almost continuous canopy of ceiba and mango trees, and clustered around a central swimming pool and a dining room dressed in crisp white table linen.

The cook's bell summoned us punctually. Beef was served at every meal: shredded for breakfast, steaks for lunch, bourguignon for dinner. But what else could I expect? This was a working ranch, and the llaneros who maintained the 17,000 head of cattle were genuine cowboys.

Owned by the Rockefellers in the 1950s, the ranch opened to tourists about 13 years ago. The abundance of the wildlife stems from the inhospitality of the landscape and a gritty cattle industry that makes few demands of the land. There are 1,200 anacondas on the ranch, the birdlife is possibly the finest in South America, and the rare and widely persecuted Orinoco crocodiles are making a tentative recovery.

After staging a mini-rebellion at the prospect of yet more beef, Lebsky suggested that we fish for our dinner. Close to the compound we boarded a motorised launch and were soon skimming along the silvery channels between islands of grassland that had been marooned by the winter rains.

As we drifted close to the riverbanks, turtles would belly-flop into the water, and at times the shallows heaved with egrets, ibises, spoonbills and herons. On the banks spectacled caimans, a species of crocodile, struck static poses - jaws agape, offering just a modicum of menace.

Victor soon landed the nose of the boat on a sandy bank and dished out fishing lines. The quarry was piranha.

Known as caribes - meaning flesh-eaters - they are an abundant, popular food source. On cue, Victor produced the bait - a tender cut of beef.

He was the first to land one. The piranhas were larger than I expected, the size of a saucer, with distinct halves of apricot and silver. They were lean and bony, so we needed to catch several each to make a decent meal. That was no problem as the water around the boat soon bubbled unnervingly.

The guests proved inept anglers; the only bites we got were from opportunistic mosquitoes. Fortunately Lebsky and Victor saved the day.

Dinner secure, we returned home just as the sun was losing its enthusiasm for the day. Close proximity to colossal serpents, crocs and flesh-eating fish had added bite to this magical place. They say in this region that if you stare hard enough you can see the curve of the earth. In the Llanos, I felt that anything might be possible.

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The Lost world and Jurassic Park.

LA GRAN SABANA, V.E. (AP) There are only three of us in the Piper Air Plane- the pilot, my husband and me. From the co-pilot's seat, I can't help noticing that the cockpit dials are held together with parcel tape and the needles on the fuel gauges are all on empty. A tattered image of the Virgin Mary is glued to the altimeter.

With no preamble or safety drill, we rattle along the dirt runway and lurch into the air, jerking as if bumping up a flight of stairs, and then tipping as we wheel over the scattered remains of a crashed plane, and head out across the bleached grass of the Gran Sabana.

A cool breeze blows through gaping holes in the fuselage. Outside the window, the plane's wheels remind me of my lawnmower, and the tyres have no tread. Both compasses are jammed at north, even though we are flying south-east. "No worry," shouts the pilot, "very new engine inside."

For a few minutes, I can hear my heart beating with alarm above the roar of the very-new-engine, but soon I am transfixed by the views and forget my fear. The savannah stretches to infinity in all directions - a gently undulating, mottled carpet of faded green, ochre, khaki and beige, with occasional swathes of darker tropical forest. Sunlit clearings are littered with matchstick-thin tree trunks, slashed by local Indians.

We soar over a wide, brick-red river, and cross smaller tributaries that meander in tight loops through the forest and swirl out across the plain.

Lines of moriche palms mark the course of underground streams. Pale webs of narrow footpaths link clusters of palm-thatched mud huts. The lichen-coloured highlands are dotted with plumes of smoke, curling into the hazy sky. Pemón Indians burn the savannah to trap meat - two weeks later, juicy new shoots will attract tapirs, armadillos and deer.

After an hour, we reach the tepuys, astonishing rocky remnants of the time - two billion years ago - when South America, Africa and Australia were joined. Isolated millions of years ago from the surrounding plain, the mist-shrouded summits of these table-mountains are home to unique forms of life.

This is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Lost World. The author never saw Venezuela's Gran Sabana, but he listened to travellers' tales of this wild and desolate spot, and described it with uncanny accuracy.

We have flown over his "irregular palm-studded plain", where, in its "damper hollows, Mauritia palms threw out their graceful drooping fronds", and seen his "brooks with pebbly bottoms and fern-draped banks gurgling down the shallow gorges in the hill." And here is his "line of high red cliffs", ancient outcrops on whose summits Jurassic flora and fauna have survived.

We land on a bumpy airstrip at Santa Elena, a small mining town near the Brazilian border, where our guide awaits us. It is reassuring to have Julio with us - at road blocks, he speaks deferentially to the armed teenage soldiers as they moodily check our passports, rip open our luggage, and inscribe our names in dog-eared ledgers.

Julio is also glad to have us, because with tourists in his car he can avoid a four-hour queue for petrol. President Chavez has fixed the price of petrol at a generous 2p per litre, much cheaper than in Brazil, so hundreds of people make a good living by buying petrol in Santa Elena and selling it across the border on the black market.

Soldiers wielding rifles supervise mile-long queues of dilapidated vehicles - locals in one line and Brazilians in another - and collect unofficial "taxes". Many of the pick-up trucks have been fitted with huge (illegal) tanks to maximise earnings.

Santa Elena is a jostling, ramshackle frontier town, with open-fronted shops selling hardware and food, extended families lounging on doorsteps, tousle-headed prospectors swigging beer, and a mission church with an unusual wooden roof, carved by an architect who apparently seduced all Santa Elena's maidens before being drummed out of town.

Julio is full of stories. At a riverbank scarred with illegal gold and diamond open-cast mines, we hear about a local, called Barrabas, who found the world's largest diamond and sold it for millions of dollars, only to die as poor as he began. Julio explains cheerfully that miners who find gold often kill team-mates to increase their share of the haul. Then they spend their earnings on drink.

The Gran Sabana is as beautiful from the ground as it is from the air - utterly silent and still, an immense, empty, sepia-tinted vista scattered with wisps of pale smoke.

In the distance, the craggy tepuys loom, including Roraima, the highest and most famous, home of Conan Doyle's terrifying dinosaurs. We are attacked by smaller but equally unwelcome beasts - puri-puri gnats.

Our legs are soon covered in red welts, which itch for days. Julio drives us to Quebrada de Jaspe, an orangey-red riverbed of pure jasper - a radiant, shimmering palace floor overhung with tangled primary forest. We crouch under a waterfall for some bracing hydrotherapy, and then tiptoe over the slippery slabs. The semi-precious stone still bears the marks of British prospectors who supplied luxury bathrooms until 1972, when the area became a national park.

Next, Julio practises his off-road driving skills to reach Arapena Meru, a frothy cascade of inky, tannin-stained water, known locally as Coca-Cola falls. Crested caracaras and vultures wheel overhead in a hot blue sky.

At midday, we reach Woy Meru, a waterfall linking two palm-fringed pools, where we swim and wallow, and have more head-and-shoulder massages under the cascade. We lunch on beef, plantain and yucca in a palm-thatched cabana.

Only Indians are permitted to live in the vast Canaima National Park, whose 7.5 million acres make it one of the largest parks in the world.

A new surfaced road linking Venezuela to Brazil has brought relative prosperity to villagers who live near it.

On the way back to Santa Elena, we stop at some half-built stalls, buy a palm-woven basket, and then stroll with Julio through a straggling village. Beside each new, government-issue concrete bungalow, we see families sitting in the shade of traditional, open-sided mud huts thatched with shaggy palm-fronds. Julio explains that the new corrugated-iron roofs are too hot and stuffy.

Children scamper out to wave at us, but not everyone in the village welcomes strangers - suddenly we are engulfed in smoke. An old woman has lit the grass outside her house to purify the air, and banish our bad magic.

Back on the Tarmac road, we pass ancient villagers, bent double under baskets of dusty manioc. At a river, brightly coloured clothes are spread on rocks to dry. We pick up four park rangers - locals who work as conservationists and fire-fighters, trying to educate their peers against burning grass near their homes.

After two days, we take to the air again, soaring over a bobbly green mantle of forest spiked with tall palms, sacred Ceiba trees, and unexpected patches of pink blossom. There are more than a hundred tepuys, some isolated, others separated by deep canyons. Waterfalls slice down sheer cliffs in sparkling ribbons. We skim over craggy summits, deeply fissured with pinnacles and fairytale battlements, or dotted with patches of coarse grass - Conan Doyle's "beautiful fringe of verdure".

Finally, we circle over a dramatic labyrinth of gorges, and our pilot points out Angel Falls, the world's tallest waterfall - a slender thread of water, plunging for half a mile before dissolving into a cloud of vapour. Moments later, we reach Canaima, a tiny settlement on a lagoon, with a row of fat, foaming waterfalls, surrounded by tangled forest.

The next morning, we wake in time to see the sun rise beyond the waterfalls. We swim in the silky saponin-dark lake, fringed with freshwater mangroves, moriche palms and dense jungle.

There are no roads to Canaima and the sense of peace is intense. We loll in palm-fibre hammocks, soothed by the roar of the falls and caressed by cool spray that wafts across the lake. Macaws and toucans, in unlikely, gaudy colours, strut past our veranda. Monkeys chuckle from a large cage.

At dusk, we stroll along a beach of soft, pink sand and watch village children splash in the terracotta-coloured shallows. Mothers, sitting at the water's edge, pause from their laundry to gaze out across the inky ripples of the lagoon. As darkness falls, fireflies flash from the jungle, frogs croak, macaws screech, cicadas chirp, bats swoop and the inky sky is covered with stars. And the waterfalls thunder on. .

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