Guyana

In 2007, I visited Kaieteur Falls, in Guyana, the only English-speaking country in South America. We took a tiny plane that reeked of petrol out to the rainforest, and when we stepped into view of the waterfall, it was breathtaking. There is no way this photo does it justice, but here it is:

Kaieteur is the tallest single-drop waterfall in the world, and despite the searing hot sun, the water was icy cold. As I stood there, overlooking a lush canyon and misty clouds, I breathed in deeply and thought to myself that this was probably the cleanest, most unpolluted air I had ever breathed. Here is the edge of the falls:

Beneath it (as I learned tonight while watching the Werner Herzog film White Diamond) is a massive, unexplored cave where perhaps a million white-tipped swifts live.

While I can't fly into the cave like those birds can, I did fly over the falls in the plane, and this was our view: