Cueva Del Guácharo
Venezuela's flat lands are surprisingly dry and boring in places, almost deserty at times depending on where you are. The people are very friendly and the food, though very strange is tasty. On this particular trip we drove through that area and up hill into the more forresty areas. As the trees grew denser we started to see banana farms nestled near the roads, and small homes with chickens scratching the ground around them. The roads twisted and turned with nothing but trees on either side for ages and soon after we all decided that we were quite hungry a turn in the road brought us to a little old lady sitting by the road selling something that looked like an empanada. It was one of the nicest and defiantly the most exotic breakfast I've ever had and to this day I don't think I'll ever find out how to get or make it again. We carried on and discovered a small town with brightly coloured houses in two straight lines facing each other over a thin dusty road. The children playing in the street wore almost festive looking clothing which showed bright colours though the dust. We carried on till we found a restaurant that sat on the edge of a cliff, maybe even a little over it, they had some toucans nearby and an inviting grassy lawn that was so green it reminded me of home in England. I don't remember what I ate but I do remember that it was interrupted by a huge commotion at the other end of the restaurant. There was a shriek and a chair fell to the floor and people ran around and shouted, then people laughed and clapped. People started to sit down and as the crowd began to sit back down at their tables we saw for ourselves that someone had decided that it would be nice to feed to toucans. The toucans had then decided that this man did not, in fact, actually need his pie, came into the restaurant (which like many in the country had no walls around the eating area), and took it. Of course no one with any sense will fight a bird with a bill that big for any pie, no matter how good it was. After lunch I played with some other children on the grass and was ushered back into the car to the National Park of Cueva Del Guacharo.

I don't think I actually knew what we were there for because apart from some very pretty butterflies I found the place just hot and boring at first and wanted to go home. I think I thought we'd just gone out to drive for the day maybe. After a little while of standing around at the visitors center though we were instructed, along with some other people to follow a guide up a path through some tropical bushes and trees. The rain forest here wasn't like it had been by angel falls, it was shorter and less impressive I think. We soon came upon a huge cave that stood out like the mouth of some giant monster and all around the foliage was so thick that you couldn't see any mountain or cliff. It was like the cave just appeared from nowhere. The ground was flat and a sandy yellow, the cave was just a huge void of black. Occasionally the black flutter of wings could almost, but not quite be seen and the noises of creatures within. We waited a while for everyone to get ready, and my sister was strapped into a backpack-like contraption on my mum's back. She was maybe a year old at the time and though she was used to sitting in it it was obvious that no one at the cave that day had ever seen anything like it before.

The tour started and we were told a little about the history of the cave, it was about 10 km long or 6 miles, hot high it was at the tallest parts and that in some places the roof was so low no humans could explore it yet. It was made of lime stone and was home to bats, frogs, fish, cockroaches, and many other things. We saw bats first. I'd been in many caves before and was quite used to them and just enjoyed their presence. We didn't walk very far before all light from outside was completely gone. The bath was only wide enough for two people in most places but in some maybe three people abreast, the cave was very wide though, the narrowest parts were wider than a lorry is long. After a while we thought we noticed something flying around that wasn't bats. Something what was a bit bigger and to our surprise yelled "guacharo!" in a croaky voice. It was the strangest thing you can imagine. The tour guide would stop every now and then to tell us about some of the odd shapes in the cave, but every now and then he'd stop and tell us about the things that lived there. He told us about the bats and how they lived in colonies on the ceiling which is normal in many caves, there were also cave snakes up there and guacharos which he said were very rare and nested only in a few caves. The had the most guacharos anywhere in the world. He shone his light up and we saw them. Little birds, with their nests fluttering around like bats. The guide told us how important the bats and birds where to the other creatures in the cave. Their droppings, feathers, egg shells and anything that died up there fell to the floor of the cave and became guano which provided food and compost for the cave. The man shone his light on the ground by the bath and there were big gasps from the crowd ad everyone for the first time got a look at the floor, which as moving! There were so many cockroaches and other creepy crawlies eating and living in the guano that the floor was a shiny black sea of movement as things crawled over each other in search of food. A little stream of surprisingly clear water ran through the bottom of the cave, it had special craps, shrimp, fish, frogs and other creatures that only lived in caves, because they were blind from living in the dark for so long and white because in suck a dark place they didn't need to have colour to camouflage themselves. Many even had bright pink or grayish-white eyes or just no eyes at all. The creatures in the water ate the guano that fell in the stream and each other.

We walked on and after a while it came to our attention that my sister was trying to give people heart attacks. She could hear "guacharo" being repeated over and over and is appeared had come to the conclusion that it was being said by the people around us. So, not wanting to be left out of the fun, she started to pop out from behind my mum's head at people and yell "guacharo!" which, since everyone was so impressed with the cave that they had forgotten about her, terrified some people almost to death. I have to admit that since she could hardly say anything at the time I was very much impressed with her impersonation of the birds.

It had been quite hot outside the cave, and very clammy, but I was surprised to find that while it sliwly got slightly cooler as we went deeper, the air was still just as damp. We had to try hard not to think about the cockroaches. I've heard that some places in England have them, though I've never seen them myself. In America they get quite big, the big ones are about as long as your mum's hand is wide. The ones in Venezuela the big ones are the length of your mum's hand longways. They can fly, their bit hurts when they decide to bite, they move very quickly and even though I'm now brave enough to kill the American ones on my own with a spray bottle and standing as far away as possible, I was defiantly not ready to deal with one in this cave. Fortunately none of them came onto the path, or at least not that I ever saw.

Eventually we had to stop, our guide explained that we were two miles into the cave and altough the cave went much deeper the path ended here. His light shone into the distance but the darkness just ate it up and all it really showed was the cave walls that were close to us. He said that the scientists had explored a few miles deeper but even there weren't sure just how much of it there was. It was dangerous in some places, and the scientists who worked there were also afraid that humans in the cave would damage the ecosystem within. Even a small team of scientists might upset the creatures there but large tours and a path built too deep would take out too much space for the native creatures. They'd decided that for both financial and ethical reasons it was best that the cave stop at two miles. That way people could visit and appreciate the cave, and get an idea just how amazing the cave was while only seeing a small section of it.

I was a little worried that the trip back out of the cave would be boring but as it turned out the cave had so much to see that the guide had only shown us about half on the way in and had saved the rest for the walk out. Most of it was the names of the formations of stalagmites and stalactites, but there were little bits of history about when things were discovered and by who and sometimes how. There was an opening way up high in the cave what wasn't found for ages and when the scientists got climbing gear and investigated it it turned out that it was a small tunnel that led to another huge cavern just like the one were were in but there was no way to safely get normal visitors there without horribly damaging the cave.