The river cut its way between two mountains and had become a boulder sieve laced with hundreds of Class V-VI rapids. We spent the last seven days scouting and battling our way through the jungle, carrying our kayaks and 100 pounds of gear, making less than a kilometer per day. It wasn't supposed to be like this yet. The hard part wasn't supposed to come for another hundred miles.

Two years earlier I was flipping through an old issue of National Geographic and came across an article, "Venezuela's Islands in Time," about a strange land in the country's southeast corner, a vast tropical wilderness with table-topped mountains, rivers and grasslands called sabana. We planned to start on the top of the region's highest mountain and follow the Apoungua River into the Caroni and finally to its confluence with the Orinoco. The logistics were difficult: we had to get two 14-foot Prijon Yukon kayaks and hundreds of pounds of food and gear from our home in Utah, across the country to Miami, on the airplane, through customs and then across Venezuela to the put-in.

Before putting on we spent five days climbing 9,210-foot-high Mt. Roraima, leaving the boats behind. At one point I wished we had them with us; rains swelled the Rio Cuquen½n above its normal high, forcing us to search for a calm spot to cross. At six-feet-two, I was just able to wade with my backpack on my head. Jen, at 5' 4", had to swim.

The first four days on the river went well, paddling along on calm waters, seeing countless exotic birds and animals. Then we entered a mass of boulders and battled to make headway. On day 12 the river opened up. We had spent eight days going eight miles. Once free of the boulders we were able to make good time again, covering 18 to 25 miles a day. For several days I noticed a painful spot on my toe. When we stopped that evening I broke out a knife and sat down to operate, sliding the blade along the side of my toenail. The end of my toe popped open and a bug and eggs oozed out - a burrowing sand flea.

As we paddled along a quiet stretch of river we noticed a small group of dugout canoes sliding along under overhanging branches. The people at the controls, Pemon Indians, pulled out from under the trees and came out to meet us. The Pemon are indigenous here, living in family groups along the river. An old man in the front greeted us and asked, in Spanish, where we were going. They had a hard time understanding why we would be paddling our boats so far. The old man just shook his head slowly and said, "muchos saltos, muy peligroso" (many waterfalls, very dangerous).

They were right, we were playing a serious game. In this massive wilderness a simple fall could be deadly. Rescue was a long way off. We would pass within a day's walk of an airstrip on day 16, but most of the time we were more then a week from help. Rapids we would think nothing of back home suddenly appeared very dangerous. By day 18 the river had grown. We started on a small creek flowing about 200 cfs, but here the river was around 11,000, about the size of the Colorado through the Grand Canyon in summer. According to the map, we had come to the crux. The river steepens and becomes constant whitewater, then plunges 100 feet into a deep, narrow gorge. The waterfall was called Salto Eutobarima. Below the falls it pooled before rushing down the gorge, dropping 200 feet per mile. The entire gorge, six miles long, would have to be portaged.

The river at this point makes a long bend to the south. By cutting across the top of the "U" we could bypass the gorge and the worst of the whitewater. We set up a base camp beside the river and started into the jungle, machete in hand. We figured it would take us at least a week to cut a trail through the jungle and haul boats, paddles, tents, food and all the other gear over the hill and back down to the river.

The Pemon have a saying, "It takes a strong spirit to live in the forest." They spend much of their lives battling the jungle, trying to clear open space. They burn off the grasslands so the jungle won't take it back. It's easy to travel in the thickest parts of the forest because the upper canopy shuts out the light and little vegetation grows on the floor. But where the sun comes through it is a mass of vegetation, impossible to penetrate. Once, as I walked through the brush, something pierced me in the shoulder, like a bee sting: a couple of hairy caterpillars, about two inches long with one-inch-long spines.

Another day, while pulling the kayak though the brush, I saw a long, dark snake, a Bushmaster, below a log we had just stepped over. There are at least four kinds of poisonous snakes in this jungle. Some, like the Bushmaster, are deadly poisonous. A book said to avoid them, stick to the trails. Unfortunately, that wasn't an option.

By the time we were back on the river we were ready to get out of the jungle. But it was out of the frying pan and into the fire. For the next two days we ran some of the biggest rapids I've ever seen, a number of which would rival Crystal and Lava in size and difficulty. Many were so big and steep we had to carry around them or scout every inch. There were no books or guides saying Class IV rapids for the next 10 miles. No one had ever run them.

We carried our kayaks around one last waterfall and finally floated in flat water. We were past the crux, now we just had to put in the miles. A lot of miles. We had been on the river now for 26 days but we had covered less than half the 600 miles. We started with what we hoped would be 30 days worth of food. So far we had done well, we might even squeak out a few extra days on the food we had. We stopped at Indian villages along the way and bought bananas, pineapples, sugar cane and casava, a giant flat bread, not bad with peanut butter.

One flatwater day we saw a house boat floating on the river. As we drew closer we heard the chug chug of a diesel engine. We knew there were supposed to be illegal gold miners on the Caroni but we never expected them this far up river. Nervously, we pulled alongside the wooden structure. They were just as surprised to see us. We were tourists in a region that didn't have tourists. They invited us aboard and showed us how the dredging operation worked. Over the next 10 days we came across over 25 such dredges whose operators were always friendly and happy to see us.

They told us of the town of Uriman, 100 miles down river, where we could buy supplies. No roads went into Uriman; everything was either grown there or flown in. When we arrived we each bought an ice-cold soda. We had been purifying and drinking 80-degree river water for a month and a cold drink was a grand treat. The food was very expensive but we bought enough to get us to the end if we could keep moving full speed.

We encountered numerous rapids and falls each day but few posed any problem. If they couldn't be run it was easy enough to portage. The miners always mentioned the same rapid down river, Salto Babas, meaning Crocodile Falls. It was a beautiful staircase drop with smooth curls of glassy water. It turned out to be another easy portage. We felt we had overcome the final obstacle and only had a few more days of paddling to reach the Guri Reservoir and our journey's end. Almost immediately, however, we found ourselves in huge rapids again.

The hardest part was the fear of the unknown. What if it got worse farther down? What if we couldn't get out? We had a week's worth of food left and about 100 miles to get back to civilization. At 25 miles a day that would be no problem. But we had been stopped by rapids and rocks for eight days upriver. We spent an emotional night in the rain, listening to the roar of the rapids, questioning the wisdom of our decision to undertake such an adventure. In the morning we got up and started the long process of scouting, running and portaging. By mid-afternoon we had passed through the worst of it and soon found ourselves happily spinning our paddles through glassy waters once again.

The Venezuelan government built a dam on the Caroni, forming the eighth largest man-made lake in the world, Guri Reservoir. Its turbines produce more electricity than any other dam on earth. The reservoir is nearly 80 miles long and, in places, over 50 miles across. It's a virtual ocean. We had planned to hire a motor boat at a village along the reservoir to carry us across the lake, but what we didn't know was that a few years before, the dam had been raised and the high water had flooded all the villages. There were no villages left.

While searching, we accidentally stumbled across the lake's only civilized outpost, Jessie Parker's Peacock Bass Fishing Camp, an American-owned enterprise drawing serious fisherman. Its owner, Steve, was as surprised to see us as the miners had been. He had been here over 10 years and had never seen anyone approach by paddle power. Two greenhorns from the desert paddle out of a no-mans-land and park on his doorstep. He was so impressed he put us up for some rest and relaxation for a couple days before motoring us across the reservoir.