Kaieteur Falls

Kaieteur is a river that walks off the edge of a plateau: the Potaro, tea-dark with the forest it drains, reaches the lip of the Pakaraima escarpment and drops two hundred and twenty-six metres in a single leap — more than four times the height of Niagara — into a gorge that it has been carving since before the Andes rose. Few great waterfalls of the world are so unbuilt: no rail, no turnstile, no town, only the roar, the mist that keeps a rainforest wet on the cliff, and a national park drawn in 1929, one of the oldest on the continent, that has kept it exactly so.

The traveller flies an hour from Georgetown over unbroken forest and lands on a strip in the middle of it; walks with the ranger to the three viewpoints — Boy Scout at the very lip, Rainbow for the arc that forms in the afternoon spray, Johnson's for the whole leap seen at once —; looks into the giant tank bromeliads for the golden frog that lives its entire life in their cups; hopes for the cock-of-the-rock, orange as a lamp, in the forest behind; and, if it stays until dusk, watches thousands of swifts pour through the curtain to roost on the wet rock behind the falls.

The Guide's honesty: the day trip by small plane is the way most people come, and it is worth every dollar of a country that asks few of them; the overland route — three to five days by boat and foot from Mahdia — is a true expedition and wants a licensed guide; there are no railings at the edge, and the rangers' word about where to stand is not a suggestion; the falls are fullest in the rains, when the flights are also more often delayed; and the story of Kai, the old chief who paddled over the edge to save his people, is told at the top by those who still own it.