The World's largest waterfall

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.

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