Kaieteur Falls Magic


Georgetown, Guyana's capital city, from the air. It is not particularly cosmopolitan, as you can see.

A leper colony, now defunct. The graveyard was on the little island in the foreground. I thought of all the suffering that had gone on there.

I could hardly take my eyes off our pilot


Today, we'd take a much-too- brief excursion to experience the magic of Kaieteur National Park. Designated in 1929, the park is huge--242 square miles of almost- unbroken rain forest.

When I spotted these denuded mountains from the air, I assumed they'd been deforested. Isn't most of Latin America thus scarred? But no--I was told that these are natural savannahs, formed because the soil is too thin to support trees. Amazing.





OK, that's probably plenty close. Eeeeek. Tannins stain the water a cola-brown.

There were rainbows in the mist.

Two by intrepid two, we crawled to the edge to look down into the gorge. Here are Terry and Judy Moore.

I was fascinated by the cushiony plants on the gorge walls. A biologist once lowered himself down on ropes and spent a very cold, uncomfortable night in the gorge, collecting plants and checking out the bizarre life forms down there. I'd love to know what he found.


But I was more than content to spend my time at the top of the gorge. No ropes, thank you.
Labels: ecotourism in Guyana, Georgetown Guyana, Guyana, Kaieteur Falls

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