EDITORIAL & OPINION — ODDS ‘N’ SODS — Five o’clock follies

The following is the first in a series in which the author, an exploration geologist based in Delta, B.C., recounts his experiences working in the jungles of Venezuela in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Puerto Ordaz, an hour east by air from Caracas, is the gateway to the Venezuelan gold rush. The port, which includes the cities of Ciudad Guyana and San Felix, straddles the confluence of the Caroni and Orinoco Rivers.

The area is ugly but functional, and incoming explorationists can rent a truck at the airport and head to the Hotel Intercontinental Guyana for a last night of luxury before continuing south to where the action is.

The hotel is magnificent. After months in the jungle, the northbound find it something of a paradise. A swimming pool sits atop a craggy rock face that overlooks waterfalls in every direction. The two restaurants serve what seems to be (to those numbed by months of chicken) an infinite variety of dishes. A comfortable bar opens early and closes late, and the staff seem happy to bring a succession of gin-and-tonics to even the scruffiest of geologists, with clean clothes on his freshly showered back and a ticket home in his pocket.

For promoters who dare not venture farther south, the hotel is where many a deal are made. The staff speaks English, the phone lines work, and there is even a fax machine — all in all, it amounts to an air-conditioned oasis on the edge of the jungle.

At six o’clock north latitude, the spring days lengthen imperceptibly. The only noticeable change is the increasingly frequent afternoon rains, forewarning that in another month the real rains will come. Not even the Vancouverites among us have seen rain like this — a wall of water that does not so much fall but is driven earthward from a violent, violet sky.

As the sky turns purple and the wind comes up, the promoters begin to gather on the upper veranda of the Hotel Miranda. It is almost five o’clock.

If the Intercontinental Guyana in Puerto Ordaz is the gateway of this goldrush, then the Hotel Miranda in nearby Tumeremo is its nerve centre. It, too, has a working telephone, though it’s kept under lock and key and is available subject to the mood of the matronly Senora Norris, who runs the place. The Miranda has showers (occasionally hot), toilets that usually flush, and a licorecia next door that sells cold beer through the front door until eight o’clock and through a slot in the door until ten. It has its own parking lot, air-conditioning and a couple of television sets. Senora Norris shows a rented video each evening at nine o’clock. None of the Canadians watch, for the best entertainment is to be had upstairs on the veranda.

Each afternoon, the chairs are pulled back from the tables into the suggestion of a semi-circle. The tables are heaped with paper bags full of sweating cans of cold beer. Sunburnt and overweight middle-aged men slump back in their seats and, long into the dying light and on into darkness, trade gross exaggerations and buoy each other’s hopes that this rush is the biggest and best since Hemlo.

Hemlo is the most widely drawn analogy here, by the promoters at least. Interestingly, there are at least two similarities between this rush and the one that swept through northern Ontario in the early 1980s. Both came as the exploration industry was reeling and both were financed by juniors promoting land positions around a single deposit. In each case, the deposit was snapped up by a major mining company, leaving only highly prospective ground to the juniors.

Then, as now, the inferred value of any of the claims or concessions was based on physical proximity to the deposit, as opposed to realistic appraisals of geological potential. Stock prices soared with each new location map published in The Northern Miner. Stock prices crashed when the limits of the deposit were eventually defined. In that regard, the Hemlo analogy holds — a lot of people are going to lose a lot of money when the bloom falls from this rose.

Whether there is a deposit here the size of Hemlo is another question altogether. It is too early to tell, simply because there are few people, apart from Placer Dome at Las Cristinas, who are doing actual exploration. Placer is keeping quiet. The promoters who gather each evening in Tumeremo are nervous but appreciative. No news is good news, because the reality of whatever Placer has cannot meet the expectations of the market. They all know that, though most of the investing public does not. The justification is, and always has been, caveat emptor.

Senora Norris rises at six o’clock every morning to set out a thermos of sweet and thick black coffee, and then climbs the long flight of stairs to the veranda that looks out over the still largely sleeping town. The tables are strewn with the litter of beer cans and cigarette butts of the previous night. She gathers the garbage, and wishes good morning to her guests, all of whom seem to know one another. A man greets her with his two word Spanish vocabulary, as do all of them — foreign but friendly. Still, business is good.

Sobe, the housemaid, joins her to help. She is dressed in a shirt that proclaims on its back “Yo amo el Pez.” Senora Norris wonders where she got it and what it means, and why the “Canadiense” snicker when they see it.