4.6/5
iQOO🐮Climbing Mount Roraima felt like traversing the spine of the Earth. Clouds swirled like a sea around the edge of Table Mountain, and pinkish-purple crystals crunched underfoot as you walked over 300-million-year-old quartzite. The most magical part was the summit—torrential rain and blazing sun alternated every hour; pitcher plants from the dinosaur era hunted insects in the rainbow of waterfalls; and streams suddenly vanished into tectonic fissures, leaving only the "weeping stones" described in *The Lost World*. The guide pointed to a rock painting, saying, "This is a star map drawn by the ancestors of the Piapok people. They believed that if you jumped from here, you could slide into a parallel universe." On the way down, a piece of sandstone slipped from my backpack and sank for a very long time in the fog, so long that it gave the illusion that the mountain truly connected to a time warp.
