Kaieteur Falls is 226 metres of the Potaro River going over a sandstone cliff in one sheet, in the rainforest of central Guyana, and there is no road to it and no railing at the top. The only way in is a small plane out of Georgetown, an hour low over unbroken forest, and the pilot banks past the falls before landing so the whole drop fills the window beside you. From the grass strip a trail crosses the bare tableland to the lip itself. The Potaro arrives calm, tips into open air beside your boots, and the ground trembles. Nothing stands between you and the gorge. You cross to the lookout on the far side for the plunge top to bottom, mist boiling up from the base against dark forested walls. The number that matters here is not the height but the volume: roughly 663 cubic metres of water a second, an Olympic swimming pool every four seconds. Plenty of waterfalls are taller. Very few move that much in a single drop.
Out on the plateau the trail passes clumps of giant tank bromeliads, relatives of the pineapple that grow up to three metres tall and hold rainwater where their stiff leaves meet. A golden rocket frog lives in those pools, and in no others anywhere. It never touches the ground at all: the male guards the eggs in the water trapped by one plant, then carries the newly hatched tadpoles from pool to pool. The forest around it has never been cut, and the plateau has been a park since 1929, the oldest protected ground in the Amazon region. The Patamona, who named the falls, tell of a chief called Kai who paddled over the lip to save his people. Then the light goes, and the last thing to watch is the birds. Thousands of swifts gather in dark streams above the gorge and drop one after another straight through the falling water, to ledges on the rock behind it where the constant spray keeps every predator away and they raise their young.