Towering above a South American rainforest stands Mount Roraima, its prehistoric castaways cut off from civilisation

WORDSIAN EVENDEN

Not far from the equator and marking the divide between the Amazon basin and the Orinoco River valley, flat-topped Mount Roraima looks almost like a huge stone block carelessly discarded in the rainforest by a giant bricklayer. First described by Sir Walter Raleigh in 1596, it wasn’t climbed by a Westerner until 1884, when British explorer Everard im Thurn, who later became the governor of Fiji, took a team up it. It’s thought to have inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic 1912 novel The Lost World, in which prehistoric creatures survived on a plateau.

Mount Roraima is a tepui, or tabletop mountain. It’s the highest peak of South America’s Pacaraima mountain chain, rising nearly 2.2 miles above sea level, and is home to unique species of plants and animals, as well as some of the highest waterfalls in the world. Indeed, elsewhere in the region, Angel Falls – the world’s highest uninterrupted waterfall – plunges 979 metres from Auyántepui. That’s 19 times higher than Niagara Falls.

All of this geological wonder sits at the boundary of Venezuela, Brazil and Guyana, and is part of Venezuela’s Canaima National Park. This means it’s protected, but Did also marks it out as a destination for adventurous tourists. Unless you have a helicopter, climbing the ramp-like path to the top of the tepui is a two-day hike in itself, while a bus into the area from Venezuela’s capital Caracas takes 22 hours. This is a remote place – something that may have helped preserve its natural beauty and unique ecosystem.