The plane away from the settlement at Canaima and over the rest of the park to the south was just as impresssive and amazing as I had imagined. It was one of the main reasons why I was so keen to take this route in the first place as well as the fact it was enroute so I didn't mind paying the extra rather than going back to Ciudad Bolivar and getting a 12 hour bus down there!
All around were simply exquisite views of the table top mountains covered by thick dense forest, rivers and waterfalls everywhere, no sign of human life anywhere and this went on for a good couple of hours!
It was great to see the full extent of the of the famous tepuis of Canaima! More famously, this part was known as Roraima, the longest and most famous ridge of tepuis in Canaima although unfortunately we didn't get to fly over Roraima itself.
The pilot simply pointed over in the general direction of it when we were nearby. Speaking of the pilot, for the majority of the journey apart from take off and landing, he was casually reading the newspaper and controlling the plane with one hand (even through turbulence!) which was entirely unreassuring but I got the sense that he was pretty confident at flying at least!
After about 2 hours of flying across this awe-inspiring geoloical and vegetational wilderness untouched by humans, we began to fly over areas of lesser and lesser dense vegetation (the clear human impact of deforestation) and eventually buildings began to come into sight and Santa Elena (or at least the small airport) took shape below us.
It was a good landing and a fairly interesting if not remote looking place. Many billboards were displayed around with Chavez and presumaby the mayor of the city looking pleased with themselves and the message displayed was revealing that the airport would soon be an international airport (Chavez obviously trying to improve the quantity of tourists coming to Canaima and Angel Falls) and unfortunately more tourists means more development and destruction of this beautiful part of the Earth. It seems there are big plans for this place so just watch this space!
After discovering that my Swiss and Japanese co-fliers were staying in Santa Elena, I realised that once again I was going to be alone but I was used to this by now and got a taxi to the border alone which was a fairly short journey and much overpriced but at least I was there, nearly in Brazil my last country before heading home again.
At the border I found out that it was closed and I was required to wait for around half an hour until it was open again! For me this was absurd that they could close a border crossing but what could I do or say! I just had to sit tight and wait to get my stamp out of Venezuela. Pretty much at the moment I arrived at the border two other tourists got out of their cab with their bags clearly with the same intent. We were the only foreigners and so at least I wasn't alone and the 3 of us were all in the same boat. After they had been talking to one of the almost suspiciously overly friendly taxi drivers who just wanted to chat and chat, I went over to join their chat and found out one of them was English and the other Australian. The taxi driver seemed keen to help us get our stamps and seemed to like the Brits as did a few others in the passport office/important looking border building who also joined in talking about the British ways and culture and how there was a British settlement very close by where only English was spoken and only Brits lived and near to this was a similar settlement of Germans. A pretty cool place to live I thought to myself! Anyway so after about 20 minutes of chatting and waiting around, someone finally turned up to stamp our passports and off we went with the taxi driver who had been so keen to chat and help. After about 10 minutes driving straight up the road, we reached the Brazilian border.
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