The road from Río Blanco to Batabanò crossed uncultivated land, half covered in jungle, with wild indigo and cotton trees in the clearings. Several friends, including Seìor de Mendoza, captain of Valpraíso harbor, and brother of the famous astronomer who had lived so long in London, accompanied us to Portrero de Mopox. While herborizing we found a new palm tree with fan leaves (Corypha maritima).

In the Pararuma camp we saw for the first time some live animals that we had only previously seen stuffed in European cabinets. Missionaries trade with these little animals. They exchange tobacco, a resin called mani, chica pigment, gallitos (cock-of-the-rocks), titi monkeys, capuchin monkeys, and other monkeys appreciated on the coast, for cloth, nails, axes, hooks and needles. These Orinoco animals are bought at disgustingly low prices from the Indians who live in the monks' missions. These same Indians then have to buy from the monks at very high prices what they need for fishing and farming with the money they get from the egg harvest. We bought various little animals, which travelled with us for the rest of our voyage up river, enabling us to study their way of life.

I stayed in the San Antonio mission long enough to open the barometer and take some measurements of the sun's altitude. The great square lies 216 toises above Cumanà. Beyond the village we crossed the Colorado and Guarapiche rivers, both of which rise in the Cocollar mountains and meet lower down in the east. The Colorado has a very fast current and its mouth is wider than the Rhine; the Guarapiche, joining the Areo river, is more than 25 fathoms deep. On their banks grow a beautiful grass (lata a caìa brava), which I drew (55) two years later as I ascended the Magdalena river, whose silver-leafed stalks reach 15 to 20 feet. Our mules could hardly move through the thick mud along the narrow and flat road. Torrents of rain fell from the sky and turned the jungle into a swamp.

From my earliest days I felt the urge to travel to distant lands seldom visited by Europeans. This urge characterizes a moment when our lifeseems to open before us like a limitless horizon in which nothing attractsus more than intense mental thrills and images of positive danger. I was brought up in a country that has norelations with either of the Indies, and I lived in mountains far from thesea and famous for their working mines, yet I felt an increasing passionfor the sea and a yearning to travel far overseas. What we glean from travelers' vivid descriptions has aspecial charm; whatever is far off and suggestive excites our imagination;such pleasures tempt us far more than anything we may daily experience inthe narrow circle of sedentary life. My taste for botanizing and the study of geology, with the chance of atrip to Holland, England and France accompanied by Georg Forster, who waslucky enough to travel with Captain Cook on his second world tour, helpeddetermine the travel plans I had been hatching since I was eighteen years old. What attracted me about thetorrid zone was no longer the promise of a wandering life full ofadventures, but a desire to see with my own eyes a grand, wild nature richin every conceivable natural product, andthe prospect of collecting facts that might contribute to the progress ofscience. Personal circumstances prevented me from carrying out theseabsorbing plans, and for six years I had the leisure to prepare myself forthe observations I would make in the New World by travelling through several European countries and exploring theAlps, whose structure I would later compare with the Andes between Quitoand Peru.

Around three in the morning, lit by the dismal light of a few pine torches, we set off for the summit of the Piton. We began the ascent from the northern side, which is extremely steep. After two hours we reached a small plateau, named Alta Vista because. of its height. The neveros, those natives who collect ice and snow to sell in the nearby towns, reach as far as this point. Their mules, better trained to climb than those hired by travelers, reach Alta Vista. The neveros then have to carry the collected snow on their shoulders as they go down. Beyond this point the malpaís begins. This term, in use in Mexico, Peru and all places where there are volcanoes, refers to regions stripped of vegetation and covered in lava fragments.