Last summer while delivering an F33 Bonanza from North Carolina to Porto Alegre, Brazil my co-pilot Stu and I met the owner of the hotel we were staying at in Georgetown British Guiana. He was quite a story teller and sort of a famous pilot in the area. His big claim to fame was being the first pilot to land in Jonestown after the massacre and airlift one of the dead congressman’s aids back to Georgetown. When he found out that we were heading south to Macapa in Argentina he suggested we take a small detour and visit Kaietuer Falls. Stu and I had our reservations about making our route over the rainforest any longer than necessary he the hotel owner told us it was worth it.
After flying for an hour and change over flat thick triple canopy rain forest we came upon a series of steep ridges and plateaus rising up out of the mist. We found a river emerging from a deep canyon and assuming that might lead us to a waterfall followed it upstream. When we came around a sharp bend and saw the waterfall we couldn’t believe our eyes. It was fantastic! We made a number of passes over the falls, one down in the canyon with a zoom climb to just miss the water, then headed for Argentina. The fuel situation getting to Macapa was a little tight but getting that shot was totally worth it.