The horde of moto-taxis waiting at a traffic light in Jaen

The view of Gocta from a distance

Crossing a stream on the trail

Strange jungle fruit

Gocta Waterfall

The lower falls, some 500m tall

The bottom pool of the falls

Standing near the base of the waterfall

The crazy rock formations behind the waterfall

The surrounding countryside

Church in the town of San Carlos near the trail

The townspeople of San Carlos get out of church

This innocent looking creature landed on my arm

The bus backing up around the corner under the cliff

Panorama of Gocta

Bagua Grande, Peru

Gocta: The World's 3rd Highest Waterfall

February 2, 2008

A peaceful place, so it looks from space

A close look reveals the human race

- The Grateful Dead

Gocta, is actually located slightly south of Pedro Ruiz, where I spent the night after arriving from Jaen. To get to Pedro Ruiz I had to take a combi from Jaen to Bagua Grande and then take another one from Bagua Grande. Bagua Grande was an oppressively hot dust bowl of a town where everyone appeared to just be sitting around sweating. The scenery around the area was much like Arizona or Utah with canyons and red rock cliffs. After waiting for two hours for the car to fill up we were off to Pedro Ruiz. There wasn´t much in Pedro Ruiz and it seems to exist mostly because it lies at the crossroads of the road to Tarapoto and the jungle and that to Chachapoyas and the multitude of ruins that abound in that region.

It is convenient for visiting Gocta, and there is also another large waterfall nearby that looked nice. There are no tour operators in Pedro Ruiz so tours to see the waterfall are run from Chachapoyas, about 2 hours to the south. After asking the elderly couple that owned the hotel where I stayed about how to get to the waterfall I had figured out how to get there, but finding a way there was another matter. The next morning I started walking the two main streets and asking some moto-taxi drivers but they wouldn´t take me because they said it was too far. Finally I found someone to drive me there, it was only about 30 minutes to the small town where the trail starts. I was dropped off in front of the tourist office and just happened to arrive a little bit after a Peruvian man who was going to hike the trail so together we went with a guide to the waterfall.

The Peruvian man turned out to be a history professor and a tour guide himself from Lamud, a city to the south, and so together the two guides were very knowledgeable about nearly everything, from the plants in the jungle to the ancient ruins. The tour guide and a few of the people from town were so happy that I was there visiting, they thanked me multiple times for coming to visit and they encouraged me to tell all of my friends about the waterfall and to urge them to come and visit as well. It was refreshing to have someone thank me for visiting, that sort of thing doesn´t happen often in the touristy places. It was a nice hike to the waterfall and the views of the waterfall running down the high mountains in the midst of the rural setting were stunning. After returning we had lunch in the town and then the Peruvian tour guide gave me a ride back on his motorcycle, a very nice gesture.

After returning to town, showering, and packing my stuff I was ready to head to Tingo where I would hike to the fortress of Kuelap. I caught a bus to Chachapoyas and was planning to take a car from there to Tingo. Unfortunately, shortly after the turnoff for the waterfall, the road south was closed until 7pm for paving. Paving wasn´t really an accurate term because to pave a road, a road has to exist, and in many places this dirt track was barely more than one lane wide. The bus waited about 2 hours for the road to open and by the time it did there was a caravan of about 30 vehicles. These 30 vehicles traveling on a dry dirt road kicked up a huge cloud of dust that enveloped our bus and blocked out most of the amazing scenery. The road followed the river and the canyons and in many places was literally carved out of the rock wall of the canyon with rock arching up to form half of a tunnel over the road that was seemingly so low that I thought the roof of the bus would scrape the rocks at any moment. There were many places wide enough for only one vehicle and these were carefully negotiated, for the most part. The highlight of the trip was when the bus rounded a one-lane hairpin curve and came face to face with a large truck. With no place to go, our bus was forced to back up around the curve to give the truck room to pass, quite harrowing indeed.

Despite the darkness we made it Chachapoyas around 8pm or so and by that time there was no more transportation to Tingo until the next morning at 4am. Why they felt that the cars needed to leave at 4am is beyond me, but I got something to eat and then went to sleep. I got up early to get a car to Tingo but when I woke up I found that I was locked into the hotel like a jail. There was no one around to open the doors and I had to search around the place for about 30 minutes to find a way out like a prison escape. The way out consisted of tossing my bag onto the low roof over a walkway and then scaling a ledge, dropping my bags over the wall to the sidewalk and then jumping over the wall to the street. After all this I had managed to miss the car, or maybe there never was one since the office was all locked up. I was lucky enough to find a car going to the next town past Tingo and caught a ride, arriving in Tingo in the early morning; perfect timing for the hike to Kuelap.