Kaieteur Falls sends the Potaro River over a red sandstone cliff and drops it 226 metres in a single unbroken plunge, about four and a half times the height of Niagara. Height is not the whole story. Many falls drop farther, but few carry this much water at once. Around 663 cubic metres pour over the lip every second and burst at the base with a roar you hear from far off, throwing a column of mist up the gorge. The cliff is part of the Guiana Shield, some of the oldest rock on Earth, and the falls stand at the head of a 32-kilometre gorge with no road or town in sight. A British surveyor recorded them for Europe in 1870. The Patamona had long known this as the place where their chief Kai paddled over the edge to spare his people.
No roads reach the falls, so almost everyone flies in on a small plane from Georgetown, skimming low over unbroken forest before a short walk to the rim. There are no railings and rarely a crowd: you stand on the bare ledge beside the thundering water and feel the drop in your chest. As the morning mist lifts, rainbows arc across the curtain. At dusk thousands of swifts that the Patamona call Makonaima birds fly straight through the falling water to the wet rock behind it. On the plateau above grow giant tank bromeliads up to three metres tall, and in the pools they hold lives the golden rocket frog, found nowhere else. Since 1929 the plateau has been a national park, the oldest in the Amazon region, which is why it still looks much as it did when Kai's people named it.