South American Explorer

Authors Richard Starks and Miriam Murcutt set out to explore the geography and people of an unusual river deep in the heart of Venezuela.

 

In 2005, authors Richard Starks and Miriam Murcutt were commissioned by Geographical – the magazine of Britain’s Royal Geographical Society in London – to write an article about a strange river in Venezuela called the Casiquiare. This river, once the source of great controversy, is like no other on the face of the planet. It joins two otherwise separate river systems, the Orinoco and the Amazon, by apparently flowing up and over the watershed that divides them. Rivers should not be able to do that.

 

In their book Along the River that Flows Uphill the authors recount the story of their journey along the Casiquiare, including a brush with Yanomami Indians and a confrontation with FARC guerrillas.In this extract – showing how reality can differ from expectations – the authors describe their first meeting with the Yanomami in a village called El Cejal, which they visited with their guide, Lucho.

 

At El Cejal, we get our first view of an established Yanomami village. I’m intrigued by the prospect because in the films we watched before we set out, the Yanomami lived in large, circular structures, called shabonos, which are unlike anything I’ve seen.

 

Each shabono rested on a skeleton of poles, tied together by vines. It had a single entrance and a protective roof of leaves that sloped up to the sky. The roof was open at the center so that smoke from their fires could escape, and inside, all the families in the village lived in their own allotted spaces – sleeping, cooking, playing, fighting and arguing in very open, very public, communal lives.

 

When we step ashore the first sound we hear is the piercing blast of a whistle, which I take to be a warning, intended to let the villagers know that a couple of strangers have unexpectedly arrived.

 

The muddy patch of bank where we land funnels away from the river and leads us towards a gap in the undergrowth. There we follow a narrow track and after about thirty yards, we see two men approaching. Both are dressed in over-sized T-shirts that hang loosely over shorts.

 

There is no sign of a penis-string. I brace myself for a challenge – perhaps even a confrontation – but the two men brush past like busy pedestrians on a city street, not even acknowledging that we exist.

           

A few steps further on we emerge into a clearing and look around. The village surprises me. There is no shabono here. Instead, a number of separate huts with mud walls and palm-thatch roofs stand comfortably spaced about fifty feet apart. It’s quiet, with no one in sight.

 

But then another shrill blast from a whistle startles us, and on the other side of the clearing a man emerges from behind one of the huts brandishing a machete that he waves in our direction in what I hope is a kind of greeting.

 

For a brief moment I am confused because the man does not fit the Yanomami profile I’ve formed in my head any more than did the two men we passed near the river.

 

No wedge of tobacco extends his lower lip, and nothing repulsive – green or otherwise – hangs from his nose. Instead, he is smartly dressed in an overly-large Los Angeles Lakers T-shirt that hangs outside a pressed pair of floppy, red shorts.

 

When he draws near enough to greet us, he speaks in fluent colloquial Spanish.

After a further exchange, we come to understand that the man is the village’s soccer coach. He has been blowing his whistle to round up his team – he wants to lead them on a training run – and he’s been using the machete to hack back the jungle that’s slowly encroaching onto the make-shift pitch.

 

The night before, he tells us, he showed his team a video of Rocky IV, which he screened on the village’s one, battery-powered television set.

‘Muy bueno,’ he says. ‘Muy inspirador.’

 

Lucho joins us and takes us around to meet some of the other people he knows in the village. One is a school teacher, who shakes my hand and says I should call him Davi. He clearly has no inhibitions about using his name – in fact, he insists I write it down in my notebook and peers over my shoulder to make sure I spell it correctly.

 

Three other teachers work in the village, he tells us – waiting while I write this down too – who are here as part of Chavez’ drive to improve the standards of education throughout the country. He stops and I realize I’m expected to be his Boswell and write everything down, so I scribble ‘improve standards’ in my notebook, as he carries on to tell me that the government provides a selection of text books, which the children study in the village school.

 

Then, when the children are older, they are sent to a boarding school in the much bigger village of Esmeralda, further up the Orinoco.

 

I look around with fresh eyes. It all seems so orderly – so civilized. Not at all as I expected. The huts may be mud, but now they seem more like small cottages set around a village green. There’s even a dog – albeit skeletal and panting in the heat – but nonetheless trotting along as if it has important business to transact.

           

The first sign that I might be misreading the situation comes when we arrive at the hut of the headman, or pata. Lucho pushes at a wooden board that serves as the door and we step inside. After several moments waiting for our eyes to adjust to the gloom, I see that I’m standing on a mud floor with a high roof that slopes steeply overhead.

 

In front of me, two wooden poles have been stuck into the floor, with a third one slung horizontally between them. This third pole is draped with loin cloths, underpants and shirts, as well as the carcass of an animal I can’t identify. A Yanomami man crouches beneath it, holding a machete and apparently guarding a heap of papaya on the mud in front of him.

           

Next to him, slouched on a white plastic chair, sits a big-bellied man wearing blue shorts and an angry scowl. This is the headman, Lucho tells me. A huge wad of tobacco is stuffed into his lower lip so that it sticks out like an open bottom drawer – his teeth, when he shows them, are black with decay.

 

He glares at me with an expression of malice. In the gloom behind him a hammock swings, and from even further back comes the sound of a baby crying and a woman murmuring in an effort to calm it.

           

I step forward and present the headman with the braids of tobacco that we bought in Puerto Ayacucho.

 

The tobacco is still damp, just as it should be, and since the shopkeeper we bought it from assured us that it’s of the best quality, I am confident it will be well received. The headman snatches the braids from me and holds them in both hands under his nose as if he’s about to gnaw on a bone.

 

Then he hurls them to the ground at my feet. He makes a noise of disgust that needs no translation, and for a long moment there’s a strained silence. I’m not sure how to proceed, but then I remember the Number Ten fish-hooks and pull a small bag of them out of my pack and extend it towards him.

 

He again snatches at the bag, peers inside and examines the fish-hooks, one by one, before he passes them on to the man on the floor with the machete and the heap of papaya.He grunts then, and dismisses me with a flick of his hand.  Lucho smiles. And so, finally, do I.

 

 

Richard Starks has worked as a writer, editor and publisher of newsletters and magazines. He has had five other books published, and has also written for television. Miriam Murcutt is a writer, editor and former marketing executive in the travel and publishing industries. Along the River that Flows Uphill is the second book the authors have written together (their first being Lost in Tibet - a true-life adventure set in pre-Chinese Tibet). The authors can be contacted through their website: www.starksmurcutt.com.