Travels With Charlie - In which a savvy entomologist journeys to towering rock chimneys in Venezuela with one of the world's last professional explorers

International Wildlife, March-April, 2001 by Mark W. Moffett

A call from Charles Brewer-Carias is an experience that increases a biologist's heart rate. "Mark, how are you doing?" he will open with a disarmingly gentle voice. Then in delicious detail, he will describe the expedition he's organizing to places not only extraordinarily wild, but in some cases never before seen by Homo sapiens.

For me, the call came in mid-February. "Drop everything," he said. His newest expedition was to begin in just three weeks, but as an entomologist with an enduring curiosity about the world's most remote faunas, how could I not drop everything? Charlie-a former dentist and one of the few people alive today who can call himself a professional explorer-was arranging a trip to the sandstone mesas of his Venezuelan homeland, mesas named tepuis by the Pem-n Indians.

The appeal of exploration has captivated humankind for ages, and Venezuela's wildlands carry a special allure. "Why shouldn't somethin' new and wonderful lie in such a country? And why shouldn't we be the men to find it out?" wrote Sir Arthur Conan Doyle of these mountains in The Lost World. This novel about prehistoric life in Venezuela was inspired by British botanist Everard Im Thurn, who in the 1890s brought back specimens almost as startling as Darwin's from the Galapagos.

While no dinosaur has yet to show up from a tepui, these isolated mountaintops have in recent years yielded hundreds of species of plants and other organisms new to science, many of them directly due to Charlie's enduring curiosity and unbridled planning skills. Charlie himself has more than 20 species named after him, a few of the uncounted new animals and plants collected on the hundred expeditions he has organized over the years.

Three weeks later I am met at the Caracas airport by a chauffeur who tells me Charlie left for the tepuis yesterday. Delivered to the civil airport after a night in a hotel, I sip tea in a waiting room decorated with photographs of biologists at remote sites. In each one is Charlie, looking very much the gentleman explorer, almost unchanged today at 62 from some of the earlier images except for the increasing gray in a trademark handlebar moustache. I know almost nothing of the itinerary, and in that incongruously immaculate, air-conditioned room, my anticipation is growing electric.

In the course of my life, I have traveled deep into forests around the world. In the process I've met many extraordinary people, but Charlie comes closest to the heroes of my childhood: the early explorer- biologists such as Alexander von Humboldt, Alfred Russel Wallace, Thomas Belt and Richard Spruce. And, of course, Charles Darwin. I admired them then, as now, for their breadth of knowledge and their courage, and for their shear joy in nature experienced firsthand, an approach seemingly distant from modern scientists' often laboratory- driven lives.

For field biologists, Charlie's life is as legendary as those of the early explorers. A self-taught natural historian who was for a time a high-ranking Venezuelan politician, Charlie has gleaned a knowledge of dozens of topics over the years-from geology and geography to ecology and anthropology-particularly as they pertain to Venezuelan rain forests.

Other cars roll in, and I meet Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, patron of the expedition, an elegant Venezuelan who I discover has a passion for national conservation. We talk for an hour about the marvels of her country on board a private jet that rushes us to a landing strip by the Orinoco River. Two red helicopters await us there, gleaming with an intensity unique to freshly unwrapped cherry candies. Within minutes they are crammed with supplies, and up we go.

Another hour airborne, with the roar of helicopter blades thankfully muted by my headset, I begin to see the distant, misty forms of tepuis, natural rock chimneys towering thousands of feet into the air. My pilot points out one, Cerro Autana, so high and narrow I may have guessed its distant hazily-etched form to be the product of vertical clouds acting on my now overactive imagination. This tepui will be one of our targets over the next few days. Is that where we are going now? The pilot shakes his head, pointing below: Within the emerald green forest and at the center of an eroded tepui lies an inky lake rimmed by white sand, surrealistically resembling the eye of a squid. We spiral down toward it.

Our landing on the beach kicks the sand up in a maelstrom. As the propellers slow, Charlie and others emerge from the forest to greet us. Charlie grins from ear to ear, arms outstretched to encompass the lake. "Look around. Amazing! The first time ever for a biologist!" I meet Fanny, his wife and at times fellow adventurer, her eyes sparkling. Then Oswaldo Fuentes, a herpetologist from Venezuela's Central University. There is my friend Juan Carlos Ramires, an expedition organizer based in Caracas. Patricia introduces her son, Guillermo, a television producer, and her daughter Adriana, a student at Columbia University in New York on her mid-term break.