Canaima & Angel Falls

Canaima is the lagoon at the door of a lost world: a sheet of tea-dark water fringed with pink sand, fed by a row of falls, at the foot of the tepuis — table mountains of sandstone two billion years old, the oldest rock on the continent, rising sheer from the Gran Sabana. From the largest of them, Auyantepui, the water leaps 979 metres — Kerepakupai Merú to the Pemón, Angel Falls to the world since a bush pilot named Jimmie Angel flew past it in 1933 and crash-landed on the mountain four years later. It is the highest waterfall on Earth, and it falls so far that in the dry months it arrives as mist.

The traveller flies in over the savanna to the strip at Canaima; crosses the lagoon in a curiara to walk behind the curtain of the Salto El Sapo; and, in the months of high water, goes upriver two days by dugout — the Carrao, then the Churún into the tepui's own canyon — to the camp on the island facing the fall, sleeping in a hammock while the mountain clears at dawn and the whole white line appears; in the dry season, the fall is seen from the air, and the lagoon and its saltos are the trip. The Pemón, owners of the sabana, guide all of it.

The Guide's honesty, held as for all of Venezuela: come through an established operator who arranges the flights, the camps and the Pemón guides together, carry US dollars in cash, keep the plans loose and the patience long — logistics here bend to weather and to the country's moment —; the rivers decide the calendar, not the brochure; the sun on the water and the sabana is severe; and none of this has ever kept the fall from being what it is: the tallest thing water does anywhere on Earth.