Gocta Waterfall drops 771 metres down the eastern Andes of northern Peru in two long leaps. A slender upper tier of about 231 metres feeds a thundering lower fall of some 540 metres, and from the valley you can line up the whole height in one view. It stands in cloud forest in the Amazonas region, walled by green ridges and usually half-wrapped in mist. The outside world knew nothing about it until 2006. A German explorer, Stefan Ziemendorff, surveyed the cataract and announced it at a press conference that year, and the villages below had kept quiet about it for generations. It is among Peru's tallest waterfalls and one of the highest free-falling cascades anywhere. The forest around it is one of the richest bird habitats in the country.
The only way in is on foot, and the walk feels like an expedition. From the village of Cocachimba the trail winds five and a half kilometres through cloud forest thick with wild bananas, giant ferns and orchids. A flash of crimson overhead is usually the Andean cock-of-the-rock, and these hills are one of the last homes of a hummingbird that trails two racket-tipped tail feathers. As you close in, the murmur of water swells to a rumble, the air turns cool and wet, and a white curtain grows between the trees. At the base you stand in drifting mist that falls like fine rain, dwarfed by the wall of water above. A second trail, from the village of San Pablo, reaches the upper tier instead. Neither is a simple descent: each rises and falls close to four hundred metres across the side ridges, and the water itself comes off peat bogs on the high grassland above 2,500 metres. The falls run hardest from December to April, when the path turns to mud.