1st January 2011. Venezuela. Yes, make no mistake, it was JANUARY THE FIRST! Last night, we didn’t make it to midnight to celebrate welcoming of the New Year with the Venezuelans, because we spent the whole night before New Year’s Eve in a rickety and very noisy bus carrying us almost halfway across this huge country. We finally made it to the south-eastern corner of Venezuela near the borders with Brazil and Guyana. This is the so-called Great Savannah (Spanish: La Gran Sabana), one of the most mysterious places in the world, very sparsely populated and surrounded by tepui mountains with flat peaks and vertical slopes.
We slept in a small hut, which had only mosquito nets in the windows instead of glass, and on New Year’s Day we set off with our Venezuelan guide to see this extraordinary land up close. Mount Roraima, the world’s highest tepui, looks majestic even from a distance and attracts like a magnet, but we will probably never get to stand on its flat summit. That day we visited countless waterfalls, gorges, canyons and viewpoints to finally stand at this spot. In a place as if taken out of a dinosaur movie. In front of us was a landscape that would have been perfect for the filming of “Jurassic Park”. We stood fascinated and wondered if the head of a brontosaurus might appear from behind one of the palm trees.
| location | La Gran Sabana, Venezuela |
| tripod/hand-held | hand-held |
| ISO | 100 |
| aperture | f8 |
| exposure time | 1/100s |
Looking for someone to do a landscape shoot for you? Check out what collaboration with me looks like.