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Up into The Lost World, but where was Raquel?

From the Mail on Sunday

There are only a few places on Earth where landscape and weather conspire to create the perfect mystery. Mount Roraima in south-eastern Venezuela is one of them. For days on end, the summit of this massive table mountain can be hidden by cloud. Towering cliffs 1,500ft high guard its secrets from the outside world.
One can't help but wonder what's up there on the plateau as big as the Isle of Arran - and neither could the scientists of Victorian England. Fresh from their studies of Darwin, they speculated that something from an earlier age might survive up in the swirling mists. Which is why, today, Roraima is more familiar to us as Arthur Conan Doyle's Lost World.
At a time when interest in dinosaurs is at a Spielberg-induced high, it is odd that few people realise Mount Roraima provided the inspiration for the granddaddy of all dinosaur epics. The Lost World was inspired by the ascent of Roraima in 1884 by two naturalists, Everard Im Thurn and Harry Perkins. They spent just two hours on the summit - enough to scotch rumours of a South American Jurassic Park, but not enough to quell Conan Doyle's imagination.
On the map of Venezuela, Roraima lies right on the country's south eastern borders with Brazil and Guyana. It's an area called the Grand Sabana - a remote, high plain dotted with pockets of rainforest. Dominating this desolate landscape are the tepuis - more than 100 flat-topped mountains, the remains of an ancient plateau.
These weirdly eroded pedestals litter the horizon. They are islands in the sky ringed by sheer cliffs and steep, forest-covered scree slopes. Gazing at them for the first time, I experienced something akin to deja vu. Had I seen this landscape before, perhaps in some primordial memory stored deep in my DNA? Either that or watching Raquel Welch in 'One Million Years BC'.
Perkins and Im Thurn took two months to climb Roraima. Today it's a little easier to reach from Caracas by either land or air. The group I travelled with drove for three days from the capital, crossing the Orinoco and passing into increasingly unpopulated country on the highway built in 1972.
At the small Indian settlement of San Francisco, high on the Grand Sabana, we transferred to four-wheel-drive trucks for an hour's bone-shaking ride to the hill village of Paraytepuy. This is where the trail to Roraima begins. We camped by the village soccer pitch and drank a last beer while shadows crept up Roraima's forested flanks, the setting sun turning its cliffs amber, then rose pink. ... more