Venezuela
Guayana Highlands
Auyán-tepui bordering Brazil and Guyana is situated in an area which has several names: Gran Sabana, Guayana Highlands or more popular "The lost world". The latter name was used as the title of a book by the fiction writer Arhur Conan Doyle (of Sherlock Holmes fame), who was inspired in 1880 by the stories of one of the first explorers in this region, the botanist Im Thurn.The tepuis are the remains of a big sandstone plateau, eroded through the ages and relatively recently charted. With a surface of 600 square kilometer Auyán-tepui is one of the bigger and also more accessible tablemountains, starting from Canaima Tourist Camp one can reach it in a fast boat over darkbrown colored rivers in about five hours, after which a one hour walk is needed to reach Angel Falls with its free fall of 800 meter.
On the tepuis and their steep walls grows a unique vegetation with many - even per mountain - endemic species.
Among them many bromeliads, difficult to reach but one of them, Navia tentaculata, is easily spottable when reaching Angel Falls on rocks in the Churun-river and also on the trees nearby.
