Pink Boots and a Machete (16 page)

The captain strongly disagreed with Gilly's emotional portrayal of the creatures and said he'd personally witnessed them pull several fishermen to their deaths. He described how they can propel themselves up to more than three times the speed of an Olympic swimmer; a human didn't stand a chance. He described how one squid would pull the man down and drown him, and then several more would join in the ambush and then eat the body. I was beginning to think I'd been better off with the great whites.

That night, several miles out in the ocean, the water was again rough. The plan was for Bob to jump in first and dive down to the dangerous depths. I would feed the electrical cord for the lights and wait until a jumbo squid ascended to shal
lower depths. Then I, too, would get into the water. We were using red lights, so as to not startle the squid with bright, white light. Underwater the squid themselves flash red on and off. Perhaps they would confuse us as one of their own. Why they flash, like most of their habits, is still a mystery to science. Some scientists speculate that it's a form of communication. Others argue that the flashing behavior might serve to confuse a lurking predator whale.

I was excited, but no one was as keyed up as Gilly. Despite having studied them for more than 20 years, he had never been deep-diving with these animals, and most of the behavior we would document he'd never seen. Bob's camera would become Gilly's eyes underwater. Bob jumped in and before long, I got the OK from him to dive in. In the dark waters only a few feet away from me swam both the weirdest and the most beautiful creatures I had ever seen. Their long bodies lit up and changed colors, like a spectacular underwater light show. I was trans-fixed by their movement, their long tentacles flowing gently through the water. Lethal and beautiful at the same time, they were hypnotic to watch.

At first it seemed the squid were wary of the lights. I was beginning to think that their aggressive reputation was undeserved and if anything they were shy at a distance. But curiosity soon got the better of them, and one of them went for the light, then the camera, then Bob's mask. Soon Bob was surrounded. I remembered his words topside, “You have to let them know you are big and bad, and they will have a fight on their hands if they don't back off.” Another of the squid
began spurting ink. With his camera Bob began pushing the attacker away, his free hand disengaging a tentacle from his mask. It quickly backed off. With bated breath I realized that as quickly as it began, the drama was over.

Heading back to shore, I couldn't wait to get out of my wet suit and back into my pink boots. The ocean is a mysterious and wondrous place, which I love and respect. We know more about other planets than we do about what lies beneath our amazing seas. I felt privileged to have spent time with these mystifying sea predators. But I had come to the realization that I am most comfortable on land, on my feet back in the jungles of our cute, closely related cousins. Gorillas I can read. Red devils and sharks…not so much.

A number of early explorers spoke of mysterious mountains that thrust skyward over South America's dense jungle. The mountaintops appeared like islands in the sky. Their descriptions inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to write
The Lost World,
a novel set in an isolated place where dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals existed. The dinosaurs were fiction. But the mountains are real, and the present-day Guyana natives are superstitiously scared of them. It was in this remote, trackless,
virtually unexplored jungle of southwestern Guyana that I would have one of my most memorable extreme expeditions.

And, yes, Guyana is where I almost died years before. History would repeat itself.

Our team's mission was both high risk and high return. At National Geographic headquarters, the producer Peter Getzels, an American with a British accent that seemed to fade in and out, sold me on the idea almost instantly. He pointed to the high probability of discovering new species, and that is always exciting. He said the place we were going was a place few people have been, and though we can locate it on a map, that doesn't mean we'd find it. Mysterious…I liked it. He also explained that several other expeditions had set out to survey the area and failed. We would be the first to explore and collect specimens. It sounded like a challenge, and I've never met a challenge I didn't like. But then he warned me that the expedition would include not only real science but also severe rock climbing. Hold the horses. “Severe rock climbing?” As in hanging from the side of a cliff wall thousands of feet up? No, thanks.

I explained that I had never been rock climbing, much less
severe
rock climbing, a laughably tough technical grade. I was born and raised in Miami, where the tallest mountains are landfills. Even if I wanted to, I wouldn't have time to beef up my climbing skills before the expedition was on its way. But Peter insisted that I take a lesson at a climbing school in Maryland and then decide if I was up for it or not. I agreed. What I didn't mention is that I am scared to death of heights.

The explorer gene in me must have beaten out my fear, because before I knew it, I was on my way back to Guyana. Truth is, I could never turn down an expedition, even one that involved high altitudes. On the departing flight from Washington, D.C., the entire coach section was filled with Guyanese wearing jackets and ties. I couldn't believe my luck when the flight attendant offered to bump me and the crew to first class. Then I learned why. The plane was full of mourners heading home for a funeral, with the deceased peacefully resting in coach. It made for an eerie if not foreboding start.

In Guyana I was joined by biologist Bruce Means and herpetologist Jesus Rivas, as well as by two of America's best climbers, Mark Synnott and Jared Ogden, both highly experienced with extreme peaks. Our survey of these cliffs would almost certainly bring to light species completely new to science. But nothing worth doing is ever easy. If our search for undiscovered creatures was to yield results, we would have to tackle the dangers of extreme climbing and rappelling, both in our ascent of the
tepui
and our descent into the darkness of a giant sinkhole.

There are more than a hundred of these remote, high, sheer, flat-topped table mountains called tepuis. They are found in Venezuela, Brazil, Suriname, and Guyana, but they are not well mapped or well traveled. Their biological value lies in that they are some of the earth's oldest geological formations. The sandstone rock of these formations was laid down as sediment about 1.6 billion years ago, making them more than three times older than the earliest macroscopic fossils. Over
millennia, the vast sandstone plateaus were fractured by movement of the Earth's crust and eroded by the day-by-day effect of water. Even by geological time the formations are ancient, and very little is known about the plants and animals that live on their cliff sides and in their sinkholes. Virtually untouched, this ecosystem is a link to Earth's prehistoric past. The tepuis are places where time has stood still, and the result is an astonishing landscape not seen anywhere else on Earth.

Our goal was to reach the summit of Mount Roraima, famously known as “the lost world.” It is Guyana's tallest tepui. On the border of Guyana, Brazil, and Venezuela, this massive mountain extends for nearly nine miles and is three miles in width. Its wide, flat summit tops out at 9,094 feet. I was psyched.

Our diverse crew met up in Georgetown, Guyana, and after a short meeting with the country's forest ministry, loaded piles of climbing gear and scientific equipment onto a rattletrap prop plane. Bruce, Jesus, Peter, and I would fly to a remote airstrip, hike from there to the mountain, and then the climbers, as well as cameraman John Catto, would join us by helicopter later in the expedition. The only helicopter in all of Guyana, it would be borrowed from the military. This would allow Mark and Jared to do an aerial reconnaissance of the climbing route, complete with GPS readings. Armed with that expertise, we scientists would pursue our exploration and collection of the species of flora and fauna that inhabit the vertical world of Mount Roraima's prow. Several scientists, traveling by helicopter, had studied the tepui summits, but no one had studied
the plant and animal life of the cliff sides themselves.

We landed on a tiny grass landing strip in the shadow of the tepui, at the edge of the jungle. We unloaded and trekked to an Amerindian village named Pipillipai, with a population of 670, and were greeted by the Akawaio tribesmen. Because this entire area was unexplored, only the local Amerindians would be able to find us a route to the mountain. Here we recruited numerous guides, 30 porters, and 13 trail cutters, who'd lead the way with machetes, hacking away obstacles in the path. It was a hard recruit because they'd have to commit to leaving their wives and children for well over a month. They also knew that it was a dangerous mission, not least because of the deadly and feared fer-de-lance.

Personally, I am not a fan of such big teams on an expedition. I feel responsible for more lives, and it is a surefire way to see fewer animals, as the noise made by the group sends them fleeing. But expeditions had failed in the past because of lack of food. The dilemma is the more food you bring, the more men you need to carry it, and the more food you need for those men, and so on. In this never-ending spiral, I nevertheless found myself hiring porters for the porters and more porters for those.

For the next six weeks we lived in hammocks, moving from camp to camp. The going was hard and slow from the outset. The trek was nothing short of jungle mountaineering. Although the route is not that steep by climbing standards, it was up a 70-degree jungle slope. We alternately grasped plants and bushes to haul ourselves up and with machetes hacked
them out of the way. As we struggled along, we found tiny frogs; spectacular bromeliads, odd tropical plants that live on other plants; brightly colored and therefore almost certainly poisonous snakes; and some fearsome-looking insects. Some of these species appeared to be unknown.

The strain of the trek was beginning to take its toll. With every step and biting insect and the constant rainfall, I was understanding why most tepuis had yet to feel the tread of explorers' feet. Excited as I was to go into this lost world of tangled, twisted, and suffocating disorder to find the real Jurassic Park, the jungle was proving much tougher and more inhospitable than any of us had anticipated. In four days we had covered barely 20 miles.

Then one day, as if the going wasn't hard enough, an old cheerleading injury reared its ugly head. I had once badly sprained my ankle and now, weakened, it blew up to the size of a baseball. I couldn't let this slow the expedition down. I would have to keep pushing through the pain until we camped that night. Fortunately, night comes quickly in the jungle, and before I knew it I was lying in my hammock. I could hear Bruce wading around in murky water with a headlamp looking for frogs.

Mornings here could be gorgeous when the weather was clear. A brilliant light spilled through the mist and treetops, giving a glimpse of heaven. I had a good night's rest, and my ankle was feeling better. But the jungle was relentless, and it wasn't just the difficulty of the terrain. Bruce woke up that morning with a painful ball under his toes. A creature had burrowed in his foot. He also had swollen lymph nodes, which
generally means an infection.

In the rain forest there are several organisms that can take up residence under your skin. I once had a botfly, for example, living in my arm. The area was sore and bumpy, but it was only when the botfly stuck its breathing tube out that I realized what it was. Burrowing worms, entozoa, are other pesky critters. They burrow into human skin causing a boil-like infection, which eventually breaks, leaving the head of the worm protruding. You can't pull it out, or the worm breaks in the body. These entozoa often grow to be ten feet long. Natives draw out a few inches per day, reeling them on sticks as they emerge.

In what can only be described as jungle surgery, I dissected Bruce's foot with my pocketknife. Having no training in this—other than having worn a nurse uniform as a kid—I peeled the skin back and used my tweezers to poke around, evoking a few grunts and a little scream from Bruce. I found the culprit. Bruce's painful ball wasn't a botfly or a worm but rather a burrowing flea that dug into his flesh and became distended with eggs. One flea turns into hundreds, and they all feed on blood. I had to be very careful removing the mother flea, so as not to unleash the eggs.

With one problem solved, we could move on, but we were hardly in the clear.

The original plan was for us to establish a base camp in the jungle, after which the climbing team would bring in additional gear and provisions for the ascent. But what we thought was a day's walk to the prow had taken a week. We couldn't communicate our position to Mark and Jared because the satel
lite phone wasn't working. We had no way of knowing if we were on course. When a cackley call finally went through, all we could tell them was that we were about three miles northeast of the prow, near a waterfall.

With the muddy soil, protruding roots, and nothing but a single green rope—which was starting to fray—to prevent a 60-foot fall, the climb to Roraima's base was treacherous. My journal entry noted that the trip “marks the most rugged and arduous expedition I have ever done.” We trekked no less than eight hours a day, and as there was no water source nearby, we could not bathe. I had enough ailments to last me a lifetime. They included terrible stomach cramps, which I could only guess were caused by parasites, and unexplained puffed-up lips, which looked like bananas when I smiled. I took comfort in the idea that they were as swollen as Angelina Jolie's, though, alas, not as sexy. Worst of all, I had red, blistering sores covering my legs, source also unknown. Even the thought of having to put wet boots on for another five weeks was more than I could bear. To top it all off, our food supply was dwindling, and if we didn't meet up with the climbers—and our additional food supply—soon, this expedition would fail like the others.

Everyone was also dehydrated. We carried only enough water for the day, assuming we'd find some kind of stream along the way. Though everything was saturated with water, it was not drinkable. Bruce pointed out that the bromeliads that blanketed the ground were full of water. I dumped one into my bottle and shone my headlamp on it; the water was thick,
soupy, and swarming with thousands of microscopic worms.

We kept trekking. Pinned to a tree was a note left by the trail cutters, who were farther ahead, advising us to continue on and camp by a waterfall. It also said to arrive before nightfall. But we weren't sure how much longer we had to walk to reach it. We sped up as much as we could. Hours later the jungle finally opened to a place where water had been flowing for millions of years, carving a gash in the landscape. There in the clearing alongside a river was one of the most stunning waterfalls I'd ever seen. We had finally reached the base of Mount Roraima, “the mother of all waters.”

I jumped into the river fully clothed, swam across to the waterfall, and had my shower.

As the second week dawned, we still hadn't linked up with the climbers. The blisters on my legs looked disgusting; weeping and oozing, they seemed to get worse by the minute. Our food supply was now dire. For several days we survived on nothing more than a meal a day. Then that ran out. At night I would eat a granola bar from a stash I kept secretly in my backpack, but eventually those too were gone. If the helicopter didn't arrive soon with the extra food, we'd need to start walking back, which would mean hiking with nothing to eat. I wouldn't be surprised if the porters mutinied and headed back without us or our gear. I'd seen it happen before.

We spent the day searching for animals. Bruce and I dug up some worms he thought might be new to science. We found another worm he said was an alien species. Introduced by European colonists, they had invaded this primal area. We also
found huge spiders; some of the world's biggest inhabit these jungles. Biggest of all were the tarantulas, which seemed to be a dime a dozen. Bruce and I killed some time playing with these hairy and fearsome-looking creatures. Though Bruce was afraid of spiders, he's a biologist, so I think this was his therapy to get over it. He let the tarantula climb on his head. The Amerindians laughed hysterically. Bruce just looked nervous.

The laughter didn't last long.

Eldon, one of our porters, was laid up in his hammock. I touched his forehead, and it felt very hot. We suspected he had cerebral malaria, common in this area. We all realized that the mosquito that had bitten Eldon could infect any one of us. But he needed to be carried out, and time was working against him. More than ever we needed that helicopter.

It was a problem for all of us, but the expedition had to stay on course.

We sent the trail cutters ahead to continue working on the route. Then suddenly a weather front moved in. An awful sound came off the tepui and with it a huge spray inundated the camp. A massive storm caused the waterfall to roar, and its spray alone became a torrent. Jesus and I began stringing up tarps, but the wind quickly ripped them apart. Standing there sopping wet in what had been my last set of dry clothes, I thought, “This would never happen in an office.” But I hate cubicles.