The biggest goldfinding

“El Trompo Rojo” awaited us at Caracas airport. He had spent his life as an engineer in the oil industry and could no longer bear it. What he did now was far more interesting. Some Americans had called him the “Jungle Buyer” because he had the most perfect gold crystals and diamonds. His real name was Alejandro Stern, but here in Venezuela everyone knew him only as El Trompo Rojo. That was also the name given to the rarest of all diamonds found here, the blood-red diamond. A single carat was worth nearly a million euros. After an endless journey, we left civilization behind. Soon, like prehistoric monsters, the first plateaus rose up, called Tepuis. On them, it was said, lived unknown animals and plants, along with abundant gold. Even dinosaurs might have survived, as described by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the inventor of Sherlock Holmes, in his Lost World. The great writer had never visited the region, which everyone here called Gran Sabana, but he had been inspired by the tales of adventurers. They told of hungry cannibals, headless men, fist-sized diamonds, and even dinosaurs tearing everything apart, seen with their own eyes. Thus, as early as 1912, he created the forerunner of all Jurassic Park novels, and he could hardly have chosen a better place on earth.

A Gold Seeker’s Life in the Jungle
The first gold digger we met near a small town aptly named El Dorado was a Swiss emigrant from long ago named Bruno Reichlin. “Bandits shot me five times in the stomach. I survived as if by a miracle,” he recounted, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. We continued south, near Santa Elena de Uairén. There we met another minero, who panned for gold alone on a river bend. “I have lived for years with five bullets in my belly,” he said when I asked about his scars. “Is it customary here to live like that?” I asked Trompo Rojo. “No,” he reassured me, “you just have to be careful and unpredictable. Never say when you arrive, never when you leave, and above all, never drink with the gold diggers after you’ve bought something from them.” He even told us how he himself had once had to shoot a man in the back, as if it were insignificant.
With an old rickety Cessna we flew over the jungle and finally landed on a bumpy field, so rough I feared the plane might crash nose-first at any moment. The hamlet was called Parkupi. From there we loaded everything onto a wooden boat with an oversized 200-horsepower engine and traveled for hours deeper into the jungle. The “Jungle Buyer” told us about himself, about how one becomes a dealer in gold and diamonds. His partner Arnoldo accompanied us, carrying the heavy bag of money – many thousands of euros. They wore pistols at their belts, and I felt as though their hands were fused with the grip.
Everyone offered us gold and diamonds. I learned how many facets and forms gold could take, and how many colors diamonds could have. I was amazed at how quickly mercury-bound gold could be “purified” in open fire. Nobody seemed to care that inhaling the poisonous mercury fumes could be deadly. Nor about working in malaria-infested stagnant pools.
“I love diamonds far more than gold!” Alejandro quickly brought me back down to earth. “Each one is a surprise.” It was obvious how hard it was for him to appraise them. Every nuance of color meant a different price, ranging from 120 euros to a million per carat. I was astonished at how many Germans were here, far from the world, trying their luck. Few could look back on a normal life. Many had escaped prison, most had fled Europe’s stressful and fast-paced life.
In one of the few larger settlements, Los Caribes, we discovered Hans Heiduck with his Susanne. He had built his “Villa Tranquila” beside a romantic waterfall. Some Rockefellers had already visited him there, he said proudly. Now two more German dropouts, Alfred and Klaus, were helping him. They, like everyone else, hoped for the big strike: many kilos of gold or ten-carat diamonds in just one week. But life here passed slowly and happily. I realized quickly that wealth is rarely found where gold is mined. And yet: where had I ever encountered greater dreams and hopes?
We visited one garimpeiro after another. Sometimes we drove over such rough roads that I marveled how our driver Kendall managed to continue. Time and again he jumped out, checked the depth of the riverbed, the stability of the logs meant to serve as a bridge, or hacked branches into the mud with his machete to free his four-wheel-drive Toyota. Then the wildly bucking boats nearly broke our bones. After days of travel we finally returned to the village of Santa Elena, at the Brazilian border, where we met another German: Frank Stöber. He marveled at how we had dared to venture so deep into the golden darkness. We admired him: after a prison sentence in the GDR for a failed escape attempt and other rebellions, he had built his life here as a gold digger. He had already published a book about “erotic jungle adventures as a gold digger” with a major German publisher. Another book about the greatest diamond discoveries in this forgotten world was due to appear – if there were still interest in the last adventurers. I reassured him: whoever enters this world experiences the fascination of precious stones firsthand. Where else, if not here, can an ordinary man, with the discovery of a great bonanza, change his life overnight?