Fall of Grace

Untouched, untarnished and uninhabited, Venezuela’s Angel Falls defines natural wonder.

Shortly after the motor broke it began to rain. It was an easy enough fix. Six indigebolivarnous Pemon guides fiddled, lifted and watched, with varying degrees of utility, as a fresh Yamaha 48 Enduro was attached to the stern of the curiara—the long, wooden canoe that would ferry me up Canaima National Park’s rivers to my final destination, Angel Falls. It was replaced by the time Charlotte, a French woman, had finished her cigarette on the small, sandy island where we waited and watched, squinting in the sun even as sinister clouds began to gather upriver. Smoke swirls meshed with the new, revving motor’s exhaust before evaporating against the background of towering tepuis, the table-top mountains of Venezuela’s Gran Sabana region. Charlotte stubbed her cigarette out on her shoe, placed the butt in a tin and we were off.

The rain was a bigger deal. As the curiara raced upstream, struggling against rapids and rocks exposed by the “dry” season, tropical drops fell like grenades, assaulting the 10 of us crammed into the canoes. Tense and under siege, leaning forward in a seated fetal position with the subtle, morbid rocking of a shock victim, the final 90 minutes to the Angel Falls base camp wasn’t exactly what I had imagined. Sure, this was meant to be a grittier waterfall experience—one to be earned, without paved trails or fireworks or air-conditioning—but this rain was miserable and highly distracting.

No “ooohs” and “ahhhhs” came from our chattering lips as we landed at the base camp—a pebbly beach across the river from the falls, with little but a mucky path leading to rows of mosquito-netted hammocks. The rain softened to a drizzle, too late, and the falls misted indifferently out of the clouds surrounding the tepuis’ peak. Surely everyone saw them, through dripping eyelashes, or from below the damp hoods of raincoats that the vigilant had kept on hand. But no one said a word about his or her first glimpse of the world’s highest waterfall; no cameras were urgently snatched from waterproof cases. Our travellers’ instincts were overwhelmed by our soggy predicament.

This isn’t standard decorum for the world of waterfalls, which relies on superlatives and exclamations: tallest, biggest, widest. Waterfalls are symbols of power and eternity, of nature’s brutal force and humbling timelessness, the pawns of romantic poets. Thomas Hardy wrote in his poem “Under the Waterfall:”

The purl of a runlet that never ceases

In stir of kingdoms, in wars, in peaces;

With a hollow boiling voice it speaks

And has spoken since hills were turfless peaks.

It’s this power and perpetual quality that draws people from across the world to Niagara, Victoria, Iguazú and, of course, Venezuela’s Angel Falls. But the destination status given to so many of these falls risks transforming them into more than simply natural wonders, where entertainment and accessibility are given priority and nature is reshaped to accommodate man. Like Angel Falls, Iguazú (South America’s other great waterfall) is protected by a national park system. The site is monumental, a collection of 275 falls cascading across three kilometres. But the park’s paved roads and air-conditioned buses, its sanitized paths and lineups for boat rides, while making a virtue of accessibility, simultaneously tame its natural force.

I was hoping Angel Falls would be different. Canaima National Park, the falls’ home, covers 30,000 square kilometres of Venezuela’s southeast Gran Sabana region, making it roughly the size of Belgium. In 1994, Canaima National Park was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its tepuis—table-top mountains made from pre-Cambrian sandstone. Tepuis are the remains of a sandstone plateau that eroded 180 million years ago, making them some of the continent’s oldest geological formations. The mountains’ tops, which range from 1,000 to 3,000 metres in height, are basically ecological islands, completely isolated from the ground forest: a third of their summit vegetation is endemic. The moisture collected atop these humid summits provides the fuel for Angel’s 979-metre drop.

There are no roads leading into the park and up to that spectacle, though, forcing a convoluted journey in small airplanes and long canoes. Unlike Niagara’s towering chain hotels or Iguazu’s recent onsite Sheraton, Angel’s base camp offers only hammocks and a firepit. It’s going to be a long, wet night.