On our weekend off, we drove out of the steep mountains, cow fields and landslides of the Andes and into the pan flat grasslands of the Llanos.
The Llanos is a strange biome found only in Colombia and neighbouring Venezuela. It’s sort of savannah-like with patches of forest that have taken root in the gullies and valleys between hillsides.
Armadillo, tapir and giant anteaters roam in the Llanos, the latter tearing open the termite mounds that pepper the landscape. Toucans, hummingbirds and parrots flit overhead.
But what I wanted to see more than anything else was an anaconda.
I won’t have time to make it to the Amazon this field season, so I was grinning like a goon when we stumbled across a few old canoes by a palm-tree flanked water body. Before long, we had half rowed, half pushed our way over dense underwater grasses and were floating down narrow tributaries in search of ten metre snakes.
To cut a long story short, after about ten hours of searching through the riverside marshes and reed beds, we didn’t see any anaconda. We saw a few of their trails. Long bendy sections of flattened vegetation which would have been crushed as a giant slithered through. But no snakes.
That’s the nature of wildlife spotting. You’re not in a zoo. More often than not you won’t see what you set out to. That’s what makes any encounters all the more thrilling. And you still get a buzz just from knowing that a big fat snake might be tasting the air as you row on by.
Caiman, we saw plenty of. Some less than two metres away from our canoes would suddenly dip underwater and out of view. Now that’s nerve-wracking.
Terrapins would splash forward from their perch on a rotten log as we approached.
But on our anaconda-free river adventure, it was the strangest bird I’ve ever seen that which stole the spotlight. Sitting in the crest of a palm tree, in plain view, looking like a cross between that phoenix in the Chamber of Secrets and something a six-year-old would create if you gave them a bunch of crayons and asked them to draw a dragon.
A hoatzin. So weird. Google it.
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