El Abuelo ("The Grandfather"), our worn-out wooden boat fitted with two powerful engines, cuts a deep furrow through the brown water of the Orinoco River as we rush downstream. It's as if we were riding a bullet train, the outline of the shore blurring past and dissolving into strips of green. The force of the wind chokes me, and I feel something wet on my forehead that I mistake for raindrops—after all, it is late summer, the rainy season in Venezuela. But I smell gasoline. The drops are coming from the two huge barrels the captain propped near the bow of the boat before we boarded.
It's hard for me to take in the changes in the landscape—the gradual transition from open savanna to dense delta jungle—while trying to avoid being blinded by the gasoline and to keep my shirt and parka from billowing over my head. I also realize that if we hit a rock we will be blown sky-high and reach the delta in a cloud of smoke.
The captain assures me that the chances of hitting a rock are remote during the rainy season, but I'm still concerned—our boat's speed seems unnatural. I have always associated the Orinoco with slow motion. Even when the rains engorge the river, breaking it into muscular whirlpools, it seems to belong to people who bide their time—to the stout, languorous women cooks of Ciudad Bolívar, stirring their pots of fish sancocho, or the skillful Guayanese fishermen, who fight the Goliath current of early August with the force of their paddles and hold their boats miraculously still while they throw their nets into the murky water.
Just as the river belongs to these people, so they belong to it. Their daily lives are tied to the predictable ebb and flow of the tides, the movement of the fish, and the cycles of rain and drought that shape the immense Orinoco and the land around it. Beginning as an insignificant trickle high in the Sierra Parima near the Brazil-Venezuela border, the river flows unimpeded through 1,600 miles of Venezuelan territory. In its journey toward the Atlantic, it is nourished by waters from all over the region: glacial streams from the snowcapped mountains of the Venezuelan and Colombian Andes; muddy tributaries that flow through the endless plains to the west; mysterious black-water rivers born in the Guayana Highlands, among the oldest rock formations on earth. Just before it empties into the ocean, the now enormous Orinoco morphs into one of the world's largest deltas, a maze of caños, or channels—some as narrow as a mountain creek, others as wide as the Orinoco itself—that cut through mangrove swamps, stands of moriche palms, and alluvial flatlands.
The Orinoco is a cultural as well as geographic divide: It forms the frontier between the tamed land of immigrants and criollos—the hybridized culture that sprang up in the Americas with both old- and new-world parentage—and what is left of the great Venezuelan wilds and their native peoples. In this grand theater, the clash and melding of different cultures is still played out on a daily basis with startling clarity. Not coincidentally, this collision of cultures in a land of extremes has also resulted in some surprising and vigorous new cuisines. And those are what I've come here to find.
This is not my first trip to the Orinoco basin. I find myself returning again and again, drawn to its grassy plains and Indian villages. As a woman who left Cuba during the 1970s, exploring this region allows me to trace the "lost steps" of the Taino Indians of Cuba, an offshoot of the Orinoco Arawak. Every time I see a woman turning yuca, the mother plant of the Orinoco and Amazon basins, into bread, for instance, a layer of my Spanishness is stripped away to reveal a connection to the Indian part of Cuba's background. (Whenever you see the huge flatbread called casabe—Cuba's oldest staple—you know that you are looking at a legacy of the Indians of the Orinoco.) This ancient link gives me an odd sense of belonging—not so much to a place of my own, but to Cuba's ancestral homeland. Nowhere in Latin America do I feel more at ease than I do here.
This time I want to revisit the popular festival that celebrates both the running of the sapoara—a silvery, shadlike fish that spawns upriver near Ciudad Bolívar—and the city's patron saint, the Virgen de las Nieves ("Lady of the Snows"). The festival represents the blending of the primordial and the colonial at its best. I am also bound for Puerto Ordaz, where some of the most exciting contemporary cooking in all of Venezuela is occurring. But my immediate destination is the delta home of the Warao people, one of the oldest indigenous cultures of South America.
I have prevailed upon our boat's captain to put the brakes on our mad rush. As we move now more slowly down the river toward the stilt fishing villages of the Warao, I feel as though I am traveling back in time, sinking into the rhythm of an almost unknown world. On the very edge of the river, I glimpse conucos, patches of cultivated land carved out of the forest. Here, small farmers grow the starchy everyday staples that add body and substance to the sancochos (big soups) of Indians and criollos alike in Venezuela. I see plantain trees weighed down by heavy clusters of ripening fruit; yuca, of course, with its slender stems and splayed leaves; taro, called ocumo chino in Venezuela, with its heart-shaped, glossy edible leaves and swollen tubers; the tendrils of auyama (Caribbean pumpkin) entangled with the delicate vines of name, the true yam.
We soon begin to enjoy being so close to the water, and start to think of our boat as our car, taking it into almost inaccessible channels where vegetation brushes against the boat's sides. I pluck a huge flower from rábano de agua, an aquatic plant with a peppery, radishlike flavor that the Warao use as bait to catch morocoto, a fish that's equipped with molars to eat those flowers and the fruit that falls from the palms in the flooded jungle.
Two elderly Warao women paddle past us in dugout canoes so shallow that they almost seem to be gliding on the water itself. But their gentle pace is deceptive: A few hours later, when we reach a small Warao community in the Caño Makareo, farther downstream, they are already there. It's time for the noon meal, and I notice that the women who live with criollos are cooking their fish and tuber soups with onion, garlic, cilantro, and scallions, as most non-Indian Guayanese do. In contrast, the pure Warao households cling to their spartan diet of fish, grilled or boiled in soups with tubers, plantains, and no seasoning other than salt.
At dusk, the huts are lit with the soft glow of cooking fires. The smell of burning wood and grilled fish combines with the wild scent of decaying vegetation and brackish water. In the darkness, I listen to the nightly chorus of insects and frogs. The tide is high now, and the river rushes below, while a jaguar cries in the thick jungle. A cloud of mosquitoes hum around my netting like combat helicopters, and the rain starts to fall in a wondrous, steady rhythm.
The sensation of living in a house built on stilts, I soon find, is like no other: You are part of the environment, one with the elements, vulnerable yet strangely safe. Lying in my low bed (my back protested after one night in a more typical hammock made from tightly woven moriche fibers), I try to imagine spending my whole life above the water, without touching solid ground. For most Warao, the only firm surfaces their feet will ever touch are the uneven floors of their huts and the rough bottoms of dugout canoes, their only means of transportation in the complex network of water roads that crisscross the delta. It is not for nothing, I reflect, that the Warao are known in their own language as "the people who paddle."
The next day, we embark on an excursion to Mariusa, an archetypal Warao village that I've seen documented in dramatic aerial photo¬graphs. At high tide, the houses in the wide mouth of the caño seem to be standing, marooned like oil rigs, in midocean. But at low tide, they are sur¬rounded by a seemingly endless expanse of mud. The people of ¬Mariusa are beautiful, proud, and very tough; the women wear elaborate bead necklaces, which signal that this is a well-to-do community.
Here we find a living example of the ways in which the cuisines of pre-Columbian America were transformed. The traditional Warao starch, called yuruma, is extracted from the pith of the moriche palm in an elaborate process that includes rituals and chanting. Unable to obtain the starch during the rainy season (they can't cut palms when the groves are flooded), the people have come to rely on the leavened wheat flour bartered by traders from Trinidad or Tucupita. So, despite the tons of fish I see being hauled onto the piers of Mariusa, Elías Pérez, the village's cacique, or chieftain, dramatically declares that the people are hungry: They have no flour to make the flat bread they call domplina (from the English word dumpling), which they now eat at every meal with their fish.
It is at times like this that the paradox of modern cultural exchange really hits me. For the people of Mariusa, the most potent symbol of food is not the age-old bounty of the river in rainy season, but an industrialized product out of bags that is totally unconnected to their past.
The next morning, we head back upriver toward Puerto Ordaz (part of Ciudad Guayana, an industrial boomtown and Venezuela's fastest growing city), passing the convergence of the Caroní and Orinoco rivers. They flow side by side in the same bed for miles without mixing, like two monstrous snakes: the Caroní dark as black beans, the Orinoco café con leche brown. The boat takes us to the spot where the Caroní breaks into a spectacular waterfall called Salto de la Llovizna. We stay for a while, watching a couple of fishermen land a payara, a large spiny fish that sports two huge, menacing-looking hooked fangs. I buy it on the spot for Néstor Acuña, the young chef of Ercole and Divinum, two leading restaurants in Puerto Ordaz.
Acuña's menus showcase the finest ingredients from the region. His food is infused with the flavor of new-world cilantro, old-world cilantro, the wonderful Venezuelan brown loaf sugar called papelón, and ají dulce chiles, which deliver that same concentrated herbal and musky taste and aroma as the Scotch bonnet and the habanero but have none of their heat. He works primarily with splendid river fish such as the luscious and mild pavón, or peacock bass, and the giant catfish called laulao, which he cures lightly in a mixture of coarse salt, bay leaf, rosemary, and rum before smoking it over a chaparral fire with more bay leaf and rosemary. He uses caraotas negras, the black beans Venezuelans adore, to add color and flavor to the dough for black pasta. This is fusion at its best, a marriage of European technique and local ingredients.
As we eat our way through Acuña's cooking, I am tempted to linger for a few more days. But it's time for the first flush of sapoara farther upstream, at Ciudad Bolívar, and we need to get a move on. Tomorrow, August 5, is the feast day, and I don't want to miss the procession of the image of the Virgin from the cathedral to the fish market and then by boat three miles upriver to a local landmark, Puente Angostura. It's famous for being the only bridge spanning the Orinoco in its entire incompletely mapped length.
When we arrive in Ciudad Bolívar, I'm surprised to find that the Paseo Orinoco, the river boulevard, is deserted. Something is terribly wrong. Sure enough, when we reach the fish market we are told that the heavy rains have not come yet and that only a few sapoara have been caught so far. No sapoara, no fishing festival. The big dramatic ending to my trip has just evaporated, and I am desolate. But the procession of the Virgin is still on, and we gamely climb aboard an old ferry with a contingent that has just come from the cathedral—it includes the captain's little granddaughter, dressed all in white for her first Communion, and a pair of guitar-toting troubadours going to her party.
It's at this point that the water procession begins, but it's not the spirited folk festival that I remember. The statue of Mary is unromantically plunked in a motorboat and—with a retinue of fancy fishing boats and other watercraft—takes off for the bridge so fast that we catch up only moments before she is handed over to a crew from the Venezuelan navy. I am ready to weep.
At that moment, the little girl stands up in the bow of our ferry and opens her arms to take the breeze. She is everything I'd been thinking we missed—a sacrament of this moment and this place, a bond between river and sky. Her grandfather beams with pride at his little Virgin of the Orinoco, and one of the traveling troubadours begins to improvise a song: "Even though the sapoara have not come, there is reason to celebrate."
We take him at his word and head for a restaurant I know called Ña María, back at the fish market. The owners, Ana Farfán and her mother, María Lourdes Rojas, a genial Guayanese who proudly wears shiny yellow 24-karat gold jewelry earned by her success, are old friends of mine. We gulp down ice-cold Polar beer and order the house specialty, a lovely, aromatic fish sancocho. After this, we have crisp fried fillets of laulao served with a mound of palo a pique, the area's popular rice and bean combination, a telltale sign of contact between the Orinoco, the Venezuelan plains, and the islands of the Hispanic Caribbean, where similar dishes are also a staple. As I chat with Ana and María, I feel I am visiting family, so dear and welcoming is the taste of their food. I am back on my turf, and I know that I will return one day, like the sapoara, to this river where a part of my soul also belongs.