Gocta Waterfall - Peru

Called Gocta, the 2,532-foot Peruvian waterfall instantly climbed up on the podium with Venezuela's Angel Falls (3,212 feet) and South Africa's Tugela Falls ( 3,110 feet). How did that avoid the unblinking eye of satellite cartographers?

Who cares? If it was that big and that remote, I just wanted to get there before they bulldozed a road, built the hotels and generally tarted up the place.

And so in the fall I set off on the most harrowing waterfall side trip of all: an overnight flight to Lima, a dawn hop to the northern coastal city of Chiclayo and a 12-hour drive over dicey mountain roads to Peru's impossibly secluded upper Amazon basin. This high, dry tropical Shangri-La was the domain of the Chachapoyas, a mysterious Andean race that predated the Incas. The new waterfall, named Gocta after an ancient Chachapoyan village, is deep in one of the many blind valleys they inhabited between 800 and 1400 A.D. You can still see their carved tombs, some with intact mummies, in the surrounding cliff walls.

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