The World’s largest waterfall
Sunday, July 16, 2006 8:58:53 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Ok so perhaps that is a slight overstatement. As with the lady boy show and elephant trekking, I’ve always felt that swimming in the plunge pool below a huge cascading waterfall is something that you’ve just got to do so when the offer of a trip to the Paulo Waterfalls came around both Stacey and I jumped at the opportunity. After visiting a pineapple plantation1 (btw did you know they grew on knee high bushes?) we finally arrived.
We’d already been told about the 30min trek through the jungle to the waterfalls which was something I was really looking forward to –not being able to go off for 6months backpacking this was the closest I was going to get to it. After wandering along a dirt track for about 3mins we stopped as another crowd of visitors threw fish food into the water. The fish were going mad for it2, some looked like they would even beach themselves for the food!
After taking a bunch of photos and videos of the water/fish we were ready to move on but the guide didn’t look as though she was going anywhere so, while wandering along the shoreline I jokingly told Stacey that this was it… little to my knowledge and to my disappointment, I was actually right.
It turned out that the night before there had been massive rainstorms which meant that the bridge3 had been washed away (when I say bridge I mean a single plank that was in two pieces on the shore). We were gutted. Had I thought about it at the time I would have swam across the river (it wasn’t going that fast) and continued on. Instead, we returned back to the hotel.
