Barinas and Los Llanos

6am start and we were on the truck heading into the Los Llanos region of Venezuela. This region is similar to the Pampas in Argentina in that it has many huge cattle ranches and real cowboys with real cowboy hats and horses. We passed through thousands of acres of lush green farmland, grazed on by the Indian "Brahman" breed of cow, which are very docile, more resistant to ticks and, best of all, have funny big ears.

We stopped for lunch in Barinas, a typical town in this region. We were surprised to see huge 1m long iguanas in the central plaza, darting easily up the trees when we approached. There were beautiful yellow birds and even an owl sleeping on a branch high in a tree, which we tried to wake up by shouting and impersonating mice. The locals looked at us as if we were mad to be taking photos of these animals. Just as everyone was relaxing by the park we heard a huge crash in one of the trees followed by an almighty thud. We spun round to see a huge iguana splatted on the path, still on the branch which had collapsed under its weight. It sat there for a bit looking around puzzled, and, as casually as it could, it climbed back up the tree it fell from. Everyone found this hysterically funny and we laughed for a long time at the poor iguana's expense.

Our bed for that night was at a jungle lodge outside town in the middle of nowhere owned by a New Zealander. There were opportunities to do white water rafting here, but there was no way Dee was going anywhere near rapids again. I swam for a while in the river with the Danish couple, Mikkel and Katrina, and then 4 of us went on the jungle trek with Alan. Alan is our wildlife guide for the next few days in Los Llanos and fancies himself as a bit of a Steve Irwin. We didn't see much we hadn't seen before in the jungle in Ecuador. I was hoping to see a snake, but the best we could come up with was a furry caterpillar. Alan is also a collector of butterflies and had discovered a couple of new species, but apparently that isn't too uncommon in the butterfly world. We slept in our mosquito-netted lodge for 14 people and lit a mosquito coil to kill all the creepy crawlies that had somehow snuck in.

The next day we got on the truck with Alan instructing us as our guide. We were heading towards his lodge in the middle of Los Llanos when we spotted our first anaconda. Unfortunately it was dead on the side of the road, having been run over, but it still got people excited and hopeful that we would see one alive. If one man can get us an anaconda it was Alan (he told us) - his record is 11.5 in one day (10 alive and 3 dead - they count as half).

Alan's lodge was in a village called San Vincente on the Apure river. Most people here are farmers or fisherman, and some of the money we have paid goes back to the village, supporting the school and educating the people about conserving the wildlife. When we arrived, the heat was oppressive and the lodge didn't have aircon. 8 of us were in the room with beds, the rest were in hammock room upstairs. After a sweaty siesta we headed out on our first boat trip on the river. We were trying to spot river dolphins and Alan knows where they like to hang out. The boats stopped at the mouth of a tributary and the drivers revved the engines, which gets the dolphins curious. Soon enough someone would shout "OVER THERE!" and we'd all spin round excitedly to see the remnants of a splash. A couple of times I saw a fin above the water but was too slow to photograph them. The dolphins got braver and more inquisitive and started to jump higher to see what was happening on the boat. I got a lucky shot with my camera and photographed one with it's head out of the water, which, Alan says, is quite a rare thing to do. They are ugly. Really ugly. They aren't cute, like Flipper, they are an ill-looking pink colour with swollen looking f aces. More like Flipper with some kind of terminal blood disease. They had begun to lose interest so I asked if I could get in the water to try to bring them back. Alan thought it might help so I jumped in and made plenty of splashing sounds and funny noises underwater. One dolphin surfaced briefly about 4m away from me, but the water is so murky I wouldn't be able to see them if they came close anyway.

We were shown some more wildlife which is indigenous to this region. The boat driver caught a vegetarian piranha and we saw a strange, prehistoric turkey-type bird called a Hoatzin bird. It is thought to be the missing link between dinosaurs and birds because before 3 months old, the young have claws on their wings, like little dinosaurs. The bird is not a member of any super-species, and has no sub-species, it is it's own genius. And it's loud, fat, ugly and flies badly, so I'm surprised the species has lasted so long.

The 2 boats pulled into a tributary and we were handed fishing lines with cuts of meat on the hooks (the vegetarians opted out). Here was a good place to catch piranhas. As soon as I threw the line over the side I could feel slight pulling on the line as the fish nibbled the bait. There were a lot of piranhas around the boat and they were hungry. I would quickly yank the line to find that those damn piranhas had nicked my bait. Each time I was so close, but these piranhas were too nifty. Joakim, a skilled American fisherman, was the first to catch a big one. Alan passed it around, showing off the red bellied piranha's huge razor-sharp teeth. Not many other people caught piranhas, but the free beers were being handed out and it was fun trying. After losing half a cows worth of bait, I managed to catch a small catfish, and, right towards the end, James amazingly caught 5 piranhas in a row, with the same bait, which we had fried for dinner that night (the fish, not the bait). Dee put her fingers in her ears to block out the sounds of the fish being whacked on the head by a wooden club. She was enjoying just feeding the fish and didn't want to catch any.

After the sun went down things got serious again as we went anaconda hunting. The boats had big lights powered by the engines which were shone on the banks of the river and in the trees as we sped past. After about an hour we hadn't found any anacondas but Alan disappeared into one of the trees and emerged again with something big in his hand. He threw it into the boat and the animal scuttled around under everyone's feet. People screamed as the thing moved from the front to the back of the boat, like a Mexican wave. The large iguana was quick and panicky but I managed to grab it by the back legs and pick it up. Alan released it into the water and it swam to the shore and climbed up a tree. Over the next hour in the boat we didn't see any anacondas, but Alan caught us another couple of snakes. He broke off a branch which contained a brown tree snake. It bites, but it's not poisonous. Alan passed it around the boats so everyone could get a photo. Me and Dee were surprised to find out that Tim had a fear of snakes and when Alan moved the branch towards us, Tim all but jumped out of the boat to escape. The snake tried to attack Alan a couple of times but he was too quick and moved the branch away from himself and the snake snapped only the air.

The next day we were awoken at 4:47am to adventure out looking for special animal on the plains, and early morning is the best time to spot them. It was still dark when we woke up and bats were flying around the courtyard and coming to rest above the toilet door. They were tiny and cute, like mice. They disappeared up a crack in the ceiling and we left in the back of a cattle truck, the sun rising in the distance.

It wasn't too long before we stopped on the road between 2 fields. 2 of the drivers got out and legged it into the field on the right. Far in the distance like a tiny black dot, a black animal, the length of a human, bounded further into the field. The 2 drivers sprinted for ages after the giant anteater, until they were like 2 dots chasing another dot. Alan had a pair of binoculars, but soon they were so far away it didn't make much difference. The anteater had escaped and the sun was rising higher, making it less likely to spot another one. The drivers returned slowly, knackered after the chase. We didn't see another anteater that morning, but we arrived at a local ranch where we could walk around and spot wildlife.

Straight away there was a pond full of caimans, with a huge family of 30 or so capybaras in the distance. Us 'oldies', who had been on since Rio in February had already had our fill of caimans and capiburas in the Argentinian Pampas so we yawned our way through the first bit while the newbies took photos of the sunbathing caimans and the dead, vulture-chewed capybara on the side of the road. Alan told us that there are only 2 species of crocadilians in South America; the common caiman and the almost extinct Orinoco crocodile, which was over-hunted for its beautiful, handbag-patterned skin. The owner of the ranch told Alan he saw an anaconda in a pond up ahead and we all perked up. The driver picked up the dead, eyeless, half-eaten capybara and threw it in the back of the cattle truck we were travelling in, which grossed us all out. Further up the road Alan spotted where the anaconda was. Part of the snake was poking out from under the reeds and it had eaten something big, like a baby capybara or big caiman. Pete, with his eagle eyes, spotted the head poking a foot away from the bloated, floating lump in the stomach. The head was the size of a big burger, Alan estimated it was 3 metres long, a big one by any standard. He needed some people to help get it out of the water and I jumped up to lend a hand. Alan was looking a bit nervous as he prepared to grab the snake's head. I was in charge of the tail and the 2 drivers and Ian were in charge of the body. Alan counted down and we all pounced on the huge animal. It was strong - I struggled to stop it's tail coiling around my arm. With the added weight of it's dinner, it must have weighed the same as a human. It was 8 years old, 3.5m long, female and it pumped out stinking white liquid from it's anus, which, I didn't realise till later, was impossible to get off. I should have grabbed the body, not the smelly end. Alan passed around the snake for everyone to have their photos taken with it. When Ronak took the snake, everyone backed off. Ronak can barely hold his own bodyweight, let alone a huge, deadly snake's. But, to everyone's surprise, he didn't let go and no one was horrifically mutilated.

Once we all had our fill of photos, we put the anaconda back where we found her and she swam off, the lump in her belly still floating above the reeds. Alan told us there was a special animal that we were going to see next, so we drove deeper into the ranch, the smell of anaconda goo and dead capybara making us all gag. Good job this is an open-air cattle truck. We speculated that we might see a puma or jaguar as we stopped by another caiman infested pond, as the drivers began hacking the limbs off the dead capybara from earlier. They attached the bits of flesh to a rope and threw it into the water. Soon enough we saw the special animal - it was an Orinoco crocodile. It was 5 times the size of the caimans, which silently watched the croc take its share if the meat. It was obvious this was king of the pond. The patterns on the skin of the crocodile were beautiful. It certainly would make a nice pair of boots.

On the way back one of the drivers told Alan he overheard the ranch owner say he was going to kill the anaconda because it was too big. It was time for a rescue operation. Like the Thunderbirds, we found the snake again, threw it in the back of the cattle truck and transported it 100m away into another pond where it should stay away from the farmhouse and the cattle.

After returning to the house, washing my hands a lot and getting some sleep, Alan told us of a cow crossing which was happening that afternoon. Some cowboys were going to transport a herd of cattle across the 120m wide river. They herded the cows in 2 batches. The first batch we watched from the bank and for the second half we got in a boat and drove alongside the cowboys. The cows looked completely panic-stricken as just the tops of their heads protruded out of the water. It didn't help that the cowboys were whipping them with big sticks to get them all swimming together in the right direction.

That afternoon we headed out in the boat again to see what we could find. Alan managed to catch a weak, young caiman which we could hold. The drivers of the boat said he saw a turtle, but Alan insisted it was just a log, even after driving past a couple of times to check. The boatman drove to the bank anyway and jumped in the river and pulled out 2 massive mata mata turtles. The turtles are prehistoric and really weird looking. Their heads are flat and their mouths look like they are smiling. They have little pig noses and are nearly blind, but they can scratch with their claws so we needed to be careful when holding them. We let them go in a small tributary and got out the fishing lines again.

This time was even less successful than the first time and nobody caught anything of any note. The driver used a net and caught a big catfish for us all to look at. The sunset that evening was spectacular and everyone watched in silence as the colours went from grey to dark blue to pink and red. We drove around for a while in the dark, looking for more anacondas, but to no avail. In the distance we could see flashes of lightning in the huge clouds from the Maracaibo Lake.

That evening, Pete called me upstairs to the hammock room. He had found a baby bat that had fallen from the ceiling. It was crawling around on the floor squeaking. I picked it up and it was barely the size of the end of my finger. It gripped tight but was so light I could hardly feel it on me. I put it back up in the rafters and it instinctively climbed upwards towards its parents.

We left early the next morning as we had a dangerous drive at the end of the day and Tamar didn't want to drive in the dark. We bid farewell to the Crocodile Dundee of Venezuela at sunrise, and set off towards the coast for some beach time.