Los Llanos are the huge flood plains of western Venezuela stretching from the mighty Orinoco river into Colombia east of the Andes. The area is quite simply one of the hottest places we have ever visited, almost too hot to move by about 10 o’clock in the morning until early in the evening.
The area was teeming with life from capybara, flamingos, anteaters and rattle snakes to pink dolphins, giant otters and anacondas. As well as caiman, the waterways were filled with piranha, the red bellied version being the most ferocious.
We went fishing for piranha with a line and hook and a chunk of chicken as bait. You simply throw the baited hook into the water, jerk the line the second the bait hits the surface and if you are quick enough you will pull out a piranha. The bait was eaten as soon as the hook hit the water and so we needed to act very quickly otherwise the fish escaped! The water was so full of piranha that we had pulled out a dozen or so in a matter of minutes.
As well as piranha, a guy from the farm we were staying at was catching another type of fish, pávon (‘peacock bass’), to add to the piranha for the supper later that evening. Unlike piranha, pávon is not a species that is native to Venezuela having been imported by the Government in the sixties to control the amount of the former in the waterways. The breed spread like wildfire and they are so numerous that they are not too difficult to catch despite their competitive reputation. Pávon is a delicious fried fish and certainly preferable to piranha which we found very bony.
The local music of Los Llanos is ‘Joropo’ ‘(‘Joropo Llanero’), a musical style usually featuring a harp, a four stringed cuatro and maracas played together in a hard driving, folkloric style.
The time signature for this music is 6/8 making playing along on the maracas (as we did when invited to), fairly challenging when full of rum and Polar beer!
FOOD, FILMS 'N' TINGS 