You do not see Gocta whole. It drops 771 metres in two leaps through the cloud forest of northern Peru, and you meet them separately. A thin upper ribbon falls first, then a broad lower fall carries on down, and each belongs to a different village and a different trail. The outside world did not know it was here until 2006, when a German surveyor measured it and announced it as one of the tallest waterfalls on Earth. The people in the villages below had always known. They kept away, because of a mermaid said to guard the pool at its foot and to take the men who went near. The usual walk leaves Cocachimba and takes you five to six hours there and back, through cloud forest hung with orchids, bromeliads and giant ferns. Crimson in the branches overhead is usually an Andean cock-of-the-rock.
The roar builds as you go, and the path ends among the rocks at the foot of the lower fall, where the water hammers into its pool and throws up cold spray and a wind of mist. The sound alone tells you how much is coming down. A separate trail climbs from the village of San Pablo to the foot of the slender upper fall, where the forest is thicker and far fewer people go. Doing both, on separate days, is the only way to see the whole cataract from below. A morning at the hummingbird feeders on the slopes nearby is one of the only chances anywhere to see the marvelous spatuletail, which lives in this corner of Peru and nowhere else. The male grows just four tail feathers, two of them impossibly long and tipped with blue-violet discs he can swing on their own, waving them at a perched female. For the whole of it at once there is one place. From the open hillside above Cocachimba the thin upper ribbon and the broad lower fall are visibly the same water, 771 metres from the lip to the valley floor.