Peru's waterfall in the sky - now that's worth a hike

Here I am in remotest Northern Peru, hard on the trail of the world's third-largest anticlimax.

This is a story of waterfalls and expectations, and you can count me a waterfall skeptic. I know they are picturesque. I know they are soothing, in that stock greeting-card way of rainbows and unicorns. But waterfalls are seldom worth the hike. Somebody always insists on taking the two-mile side trail to see the local waterfall. And so you go. And there's a waterfall, dribbling (picturesquely) down the rocks. And then you hike back.

But the press release that crossed my desk was darned near irresistible: "World's Third Highest Waterfall Discovered in Peru." Howzat? Discovered? The Age of Discovery was ages ago. The biggest things they discover these days are new species of beetle — all the major landforms were all mapped out long ago.

Called Gocta, the 2,532-foot Peruvian waterfall instantly climbed up on the podium with Venezuela's Angel Falls (3,212 feet) and South Africa's Tugela Falls ( 3,110 feet). How did that avoid the unblinking eye of satellite cartographers?

Who cares? If it was that big and that remote, I just wanted to get there before they bulldozed a road, built the hotels and generally tarted up the place.

When to go

You can go in the dry season, traditionally May through September, and have an easier trip but a smaller waterfall. Or you can go with the rains and have a wetter experience all around. Be aware that the waterfall is in the moderate Andes, 8,000 to 10,000 feet in elevation. Bring light fleece and rainwear at all times of year.

Getting there |

The Peruvian government and local tour operators are falling all over themselves to make seeing Gocta easier. Working through Florida's World Class Travel (800-771-3100, www.peruperu.com), which has a long presence in Northern Peru, I booked a six-day tour of Gocta and several local ruins for $750, including all ground transfers from Chiclayo, meals, accommodations and expert guides. In Chachapoyas, the company booked me with Vilaya Tours, www.vilayatours.com, a friendly and competent local company owned by English expatriate Rob Dover.

Information

Peru government tourist office: 866-661-7378 or www.peru.info.

— Steve Hendrix, Washington Post

And so in the fall I set off on the most harrowing waterfall side trip of all: an overnight flight to Lima, a dawn hop to the northern coastal city of Chiclayo and a 12-hour drive over dicey mountain roads to Peru's impossibly secluded upper Amazon basin. This high, dry tropical Shangri-La was the domain of the Chachapoyas, a mysterious Andean race that predated the Incas. The new waterfall, named Gocta after an ancient Chachapoyan village, is deep in one of the many blind valleys they inhabited between 800 and 1400 A.D. You can still see their carved tombs, some with intact mummies, in the surrounding cliff walls.

The locals know

So how do you discover a waterfall? The local people knew about it, of course. It just wasn't a big deal to them.

Luis Chuquimes is an elder in the tiny village of San Pablo, a few hours' hike from the falls. Tourists were unknown in San Pablo before word started spreading about Gocta last spring. Now Chuquimes' little cantina serves as an unofficial visitors center.

"We knew it was there," Chuquimes said, as he busily delivered bottles of beer and Inca Kola to a group of Gocta-bound students from Chiclayo, a day's drive away. "But we didn't know it was one of the tallest in the world."

It took a German engineer named Stefan Ziemendorff, working on a nearby water project, to realize that the nameless falls might boast world-class specs. He got the Peruvian government to survey it, checked his National Geographic stats and called a press conference. Gocta came in at 2,532 feet, which put it, by Ziemendorff's reckoning, at No. 3 in the world.

Or not. It turns out that waterfall ranking is, well, rancorous. Waterfall people — who are a lot like train people and lighthouse people — have been burning up the discussion boards, debating Gocta's place on the charts with fierce references to seasonal flow, degree of slope and something called "freeleap." All of which makes Peru's bold claim such a brilliant stroke of marketing. Whether or not Gocta deserves the bronze, "third highest" gives it instant Seven Wonders cred. That ensures tourist interest in a spectacular but little-known region that really does have a lot to offer.

The Chachapoyas area of Northern Peru already attracts two kinds of tourists: birders and a trickle of hard-core archaeology buffs, those who have already seen (or been turned off by) the hugely popular Machu Picchu. I found a guide company in the region willing to take me to the waterfall and show me around the archaeological highlights during a six-day visit.

Really rough roads

We convened in the tiny airport parking lot in Chiclayo, piled into one of the ubiquitous hired white Corollas that rattle around Peru and began to climb the Andes. Six hours on, the pavement ended. Unless you regularly holiday in Bangladesh during the monsoon, these will be the worst roads you've ever seen: pitted, shoulderless one-lane threads draped along the lips of bottomless Andean voids. Yet you get used to it, mostly because the destinations are more wonderful than the roads are awful.

Our base was in the city of Chachapoyas (which is the name of the ancient civilization and the current biggest town). It's a pretty mountaintop berg of about 17,000 people, with numerous Internet cafes, and one good steakhouse. From there, our first outing was 2-½ hours to Kuelap, a walled Chachapoyas city perched grandly on a commanding peak.

At almost 20 acres, Kuelap is actually bigger than Machu Picchu. It's a huge stone battlement with two narrow crevices allowing access to the ruins within. At daybreak, we stood amid the carefully carved stone foundations of ancient Chachapoyas houses (there were more than 400 of them in Kuelap at one time, before the Incas, invading from the south, conquered the region in the late 1400s).

The view is 360 degrees of forever. A morning moon hung over a distant ridge. Dawn murmurs and a little tin-pot clatter floated up from the dark, misty villages below. Flocks of parakeets darted from tree to tree, reminders that this starkly beautiful mountainscape is the upper edge of Amazonia. Except for a crew of local restoration workers and a group of six Austrian students, we had this majestic enormity to ourselves. Kuelap, by far the signature tourist attraction in the region, had just over 10,000 visitors last year. Machu Picchu saw more than 410,000.

To the waterfall

Until now, the tourist itinerary around Chachapoyas has been limited to a circuit of ancient relics and ruins: Kuelap, the mummies of Leymebamba, the intact tombs known as Karajia we would visit on our final day. But now, there's a major waterfall to fit in.

"We've never seen this much interest in the area," said our expat English guide, Rob Dover, who started his Chachapoyas-based Vilaya Tours eight years ago. "It's all Gocta, Gocta, Gocta now."

Like any outing here, the approach to Gocta begins with a bumpy few hours in the van, this time climbing a steep valley up to the village of San Pablo. Gocta is a two-tiered waterfall; it plummets over the ridge and hits a shelf on the cliff, where it pools up for a few hundred feet before falling over the edge to the valley floor. If you want an up-close look at both sections, you have to make two trips.

The gateway to Upper Gocta is San Pablo, an isolated, attractive hamlet of mud-brick buildings and wide Andean views. Tourists have become more common, but not normal enough to prevent a parade of dogs and marveling kids from falling in behind us as we walked up the only street.

We settled into a blissful morning of hiking in a dry, wide vale. After a couple of hours, we passed the limit of usual village activity and a raw forest gloom closed over our heads. The guide pointed us down a newly slashed side trail, a steep scramble down to a small viewpoint. We huffed out of the trees and there, still two miles away at a distant end of the valley, was the world's third-highest waterfall.

This is the moment that I usually stare for a minute, say "Oooh," and then turn in search of the hotel bar. But this ... was a really, really big waterfall. Even after four days of hard travel, hundreds of miles of chiropractic roads and impossible emotional windup, I was simply awed.

Gocta is a misty wraith dancing with gravity, a huge, twisting white column of froth chasing itself down the cliff face. It made an immense noise. Even two miles away we could feel its strange clackety vibe, like an infinite train over a bad track. In the rainy season it must shake the world.

We sat for an hour, having lunch and getting our brains around Gocta. It took another hour to reach the upper base of the falls, where I picked my way over soaking rocks to look down at the thundering impact zone 50 yards away.

There are no safe trails connecting the upper and lower sections of Gocta, so we backtracked to the van. By dusk, we had reached the other side of the valley and the tiny village of Cocachimba, gateway to Lower Gocta.

After camping overnight, it took us about three hours to reach the true bottom of the waterfall, a natural rock amphitheater where Gocta releases its final energy in an everlasting explosion of wet. When the falls are running at their max, the guide said, the entire end of the valley is consumed and unapproachable. But in September, we were able to scramble to the edge of the pool. I even put on my hardiest rain gear, thinking I might get close enough to touch Gocta's very hem. Bad idea. Within 20 yards, the shrieking blow of mist nearly tossed me off my feet.

I slunk away in a soggy crouch, about as happy as I'd ever been.

No doubt they will make it easier to get to Gocta in coming years. But they will not make it better. Paved roads, nearby hotels, scenic overlooks will allow more people to see this place, which is good. And they will mean more money or local people, which is great. But I was glad to fight for it a bit, glad to have jumped bare into the thing and elbowed my way into the hurricane heart of its final plunge.