BY STEVE HENDRIX
Washington Post Service
Here I am in remotest northern Peru, hard on the trail of the world's third-largest anticlimax.
This is a story of waterfalls and expectations, and you can count me a waterfall skeptic. I know they are picturesque. I know they are soothing, in that stock greeting-card way of rainbows and unicorns. I know they figure largely in the preflight videos they show on planes to take the edge off your airport rage.
But actual waterfalls? They're seldom worth the walk. Somebody always insists on taking the two-mile side trail to see the local waterfall. And so you go. And there's a waterfall, dribbling (picturesquely) down the rocks. And then you hike back.
In my experience, waterfall equals anticlimax.
But the press release that crossed my desk last year was darned near irresistible: ''World's Third Highest Waterfall Discovered in Peru.'' Howzat? Discovered? The Age of Discovery was ages ago. The biggest things they discover these days are new species of beetle and, every now and then, a forgotten cable network. But the major landforms were all mapped out long ago.
A 250-story waterfall that instantly climbs up on the podium with Venezuela's Angel Falls and South Africa's Tugela Falls? 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 September, I set off on the most harrowing waterfall side trip of all: an overnight flight from Washington 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, dubbed Gocta after an ancient Chachapoyan village, is deep in one of the many blind valleys they inhabited between 800 and 1400 AD. You can still see their carved tombs, some with intact mummies, in the surrounding cliff walls.
According to the press release, the government of Peru was hard on the case, promising safe tourist access and basic accommodations. In the meantime, getting to Gocta requires bone-jarring days on the terrifying roads and hours on steep and dubious valley trails. All to see a waterfall.
This had better be good.
THE `DISCOVERY'
So how do you discover a waterfall? The local people knew about it, of course. It just wasn't a big deal to them.
Luis Chuquimes is an elder in the tiny village of San Pablo, a few hours' hike from the falls. Tourists were unknown in San Pablo before word spread about Gocta last spring. Now Chuquimes' little cantina serves as an unofficial visitors center. According to the wrinkled sign-in book on his bar, more than 70 people had made the trip by the time I got there at the end of the dry season. On the other side of the valley, another village has logged just over 1,000 Gocta tourists.
It's mostly Peruvians coming so far, eager to make the acquaintance of a new national icon. A couple of Israelis and Germans have been. No Americans have signed in yet. (Now that boggles the mind.)
''We knew it was there,'' Chuquimes said as he busily delivered bottles of beer and Inca Kola to a group of Gocta-bound students from Chiclayo, a day's drive away. ``But we didn't know it was one of the tallest in the world.''
It took a German engineer named Stefan Ziemendorff, working on a nearby water project, to realize that the nameless falls might boast world-class specs. He got the Peruvian government to survey it, checked his National Geographic stats and called a press conference. Gocta came in at 2,532 feet, which put it, by Ziemendorff's reckoning, at No. 3 in the world.
Or not. It turns out that waterfall ranking is, well, rancorous. Waterfall people -- who are a lot like train people and lighthouse people -- are burning up the discussion boards, debating Gocta's place on the charts with fierce references to seasonal flow, degree of slope and something called ''freeleap.'' (Partisans of certain Norwegian cascades have bordered on rude.)
All of which makes Peru's bold claim such a brilliant stroke of marketing. Whether or not Gocta deserves the bronze, ''third highest'' gives it instant Seven Wonders cred. That ensures tourist interest in a spectacular but little-known region that really does have a lot to offer anyone lured in. After all, billboard attractions are often not as fun as the areas that surround them. The Hanging Gardens, for example, may have been a wow, but you know the real treat was knocking about the back roads of Babylon.
''I don't know if it's the third-highest waterfall on Earth, but I know it's a very high waterfall,'' said Peter Lerche, a German anthropologist who has lived here since 1980. ``It gives us a diversity of attractions. We have rivers, lakes, archaeology and now this waterfall.''
The Chachapoyas area of northern Peru already attracts two kinds of tourists: birders and a trickle of hard-core archaeology buffs, those who have already seen (or been turned off by) the hugely popular Machu Picchu (so commercial in places you might call it Inca Inc.). That was my toehold in the region.
I found a guide company in the region willing to take me to the waterfall and show me around the archaeological highlights during a six-day flying visit. They paired me with another tourist, a California antiques dealer, who was fishing around for a Gocta visit. Add a photographer from Lima and we would make a threesome.
GOING TO KUELAP
We convened in the tiny airport parking lot in Chiclayo, piled into one of the ubiquitous hired white Corollas that rattle around Peru and began to climb the Andes. The highway from the coast was flat and paved, lined with beige villages and the colorful political graffiti of the recent election.
In the foothills, the road climbed through an arid, Maui tropicality where cacti grew in the shadow of papaya trees. But six hours on, the pavement ended and the rest of the day was spent lurching on a rope ladder of a road that clung to the cliffs above the frisky Utcubamba River.
Unless you regularly holiday in Bangladesh during the monsoon, these will be the worst roads you've ever seen: pitted, shoulderless one-lane threads draped along the lips of bottomless Andean voids. They are not so bad in the daylight, when the splendid scenery is both compensation and diversion. But when you're trying to sleep (our first sightseeing trip started at 3 a.m.), a radically rough road is a kind of torture.
Yet you get used to it. Mostly because the destinations are more wonderful than the roads are awful.
Our base was in the city of Chachapoyas (which is the name of the ancient civilization and the current biggest town). It's a pretty mountaintop berg of about 17,000 people, with numerous Internet cafes, one good steakhouse and a tradition of awful coffee. From there, our first outing was 2 ½ hours to Kuelap, a walled Chachapoyas city perched grandly on a commanding peak.
At almost 20 acres, Kuelap is actually bigger than Machu Picchu. It's a huge stone battlement with two narrow crevices allowing access to the ruins within.
At daybreak, we stood amid the carefully carved stone foundations of ancient Chachapoyas houses -- there were more than 400 of them in Kuelap at one time, before the Incas, invading from the south, conquered the region in the late 1400s.
The view is 360 degrees of forever. A morning moon hung over a distant ridge even as dawn fired the tips of surrounding peaks. Soft morning murmurs and a little tin-pot clatter floated up from the dark, misty villages below.
Flocks of parakeets darted from tree to tree, reminders that this starkly beautiful mountainscape is the upper edge of Amazonia. They were only cackling shadows until they flew through columns of sunlight and flashed a sudden brilliant green.
Except for a crew of local restoration workers and a group of six Austrian students, we had this majestic enormity to ourselves. Kuelap, by far the signature tourist attraction in the region, had just over 10,000 visitors last year. Machu Picchu saw more than 410,000.
We got a deep briefing on Chachapoyas history from Lerche, the anthropologist, that night at his brother-in-law's hotel, a charming colonial-era hacienda near the river. Numbering nearly half a million at their peak, the Chachapoyas were taller and paler than the Incas who eventually overwhelmed them. At least one scholar argues they may have been the lost tribe of Israel.
Like the mystical, mysterious Anasazi of the southwestern United States, the Chachapoyas left a vast and scattered archaeological record in dry mountain cliffs. Most of them are yet undiscovered.
''Personally, I know of more than 350 sites,'' Lerche said.
One of the best, Lerche said, was a massive necropolis discovered by looters, a grave robbery that ended up founding a remarkable local museum.
In 1996, in a high alcove above the nearby Lake of the Condors, a group of workers found a huge cache of ceramics, textiles and almost 220 perfectly preserved human mummies dating back more than 500 years. The looters pilfered some, but infighting among them quickly led someone to spill the beans to the authorities. What was left is now housed in the Leymebamba Museum at the far end of the valley, a little Smithsonian in the heart of nowhere.
It took another three-hour lurch-fest to reach the tiny village of Leymebamba. But all the shaking was forgotten when we entered the stylish, modern museum. The textiles and pots alone are worth the trip.
But it's the glassed-in chamber of mummies that will grab you by the retinas. The scores of desiccated men, women and children are clearly visible, tucked in tight fetal curls and draped in moody white gauze. Hollow eyes peek between bony fingers, giving them expressions both terrible and bashful.
Marcelita Hidalgo, a white-coated technician, took a withered little man from the shelf and showed us tiny threads tied around his fingers and how his ankle tendons, like all the mummies', were cut to make him fold more compactly.
We were the only (living) people there. I was growing to adore this place.
A MISTY WRAITH
Until now, the tourist itinerary around Chachapoyas has been limited to a circuit of ancient relics and ruins: Kuelap, the mummies of Leymebamba, the intact tombs known as Karajia we would visit on our final day. But now, there's a major waterfall to fit in.
''We've never seen this much interest in the area,'' said our expat English guide, Rob Dover, who started his Chachapoyas-based Vilaya Tours eight years ago. ``It's all Gocta, Gocta, Gocta now.''
Like any outing here, the approach to Gocta begins with a bumpy few hours in the van, this time climbing a steep valley up to the village of San Pablo. Gocta is a two-tiered waterfall; it plummets over the ridge and hits a shelf on the cliff, where it pools up for a few hundred feet before falling over the edge to the valley floor. If you want an up-close look at both sections, you have to make two trips.
The gateway to Upper Gocta is San Pablo, an isolated, attractive hamlet of mud-brick buildings and wide Andean views. Tourists have become more common, but not normal enough to prevent a parade of dogs and marveling kids from falling in behind us as we walked up the only street.
At the end of town, a drunk blocked the trail, haranguing our local guide about the increased foot traffic past his house. A local loco, the guide whispered to us.
We moved on, settling into a blissful morning of hiking in a dry, wide vale. After a couple of hours, we passed the limit of usual village activity and a raw forest gloom closed over our heads. The guide pointed us down a newly slashed side trail, a steep scramble down to a small viewpoint. We huffed out of the trees and there, still two miles away at a distant end of the valley, was the world's third-highest waterfall.
This is the moment that I usually stare for a minute, say ''Oooh,'' bounce my knees Chevy Chase-style a couple of times and then turn in search of the hotel bar. But this . . . this was a really, really big waterfall. Even after four days of hard travel, hundreds of miles of chiropractic roads and impossible emotional windup, I was simply awed.
Gocta, at this time of year, is a misty wraith dancing with gravity, a huge, twisting white column of froth chasing itself down the cliff face. It made an immense noise. Even two miles away we could feel its strange clackety vibe, like an infinite train over a bad track. In the rainy season it must shake the world.
We sat for an hour, having lunch and getting our brains around Gocta. It took another hour to reach the upper base of the falls, where I picked my way over soaking rocks to look down at the thundering impact zone 50 yards away. The boulders within the falls were red with some mineral patina, or maybe just raw from centuries of flaying. I was soaked in seconds, looking up to bathe my face in an ecstasy of proximity.
Then, feeling oddly rushed, as if the promised tourist boom was about to appear on the trail, I stripped off my clothes and dove into the freezing pool. (OK, I lowered myself gingerly into the freezing pool.)
THE LOWER FALLS
There are no safe trails connecting the upper and lower sections of Gocta, so we backtracked to the van. By dusk, we had reached the other side of the valley and the tiny village of Cocachimba, gateway to Lower Gocta.
Dover asked around and arranged for us to camp in the yard of an Adventist church. He paid a neighbor woman to stir up her outdoor fire and boil us some fine chicken and rice. We ate, fended off stray dogs and played with our cook's two sweet and baffled children. We turned in, in utter silence under bright stars.
Of the 20 or so Adventist parishioners who showed up for the 5 a.m. singing service, about 15 of them tripped over my tent line.
It took us about three hours to reach the true bottom of the waterfall, a natural rock amphitheater where Gocta releases its final energy in an everlasting explosion of wet.
When the falls are running at their max, the guide said, the entire end of the valley is consumed and unapproachable. But in September, we were able to scramble to the edge of the pool. I even put on my hardiest rain gear, thinking I might get close enough to touch Gocta's very hem. Bad idea. Within 20 yards, the shrieking blow of mist nearly tossed me off my feet.
I slunk away in a soggy crouch, about as happy as I'd ever been.
No doubt they will make this easier in coming years. But they will not make it better. Paved roads, nearby hotels, scenic overlooks will allow more people to see this place, which is good. And they will mean more money for local people, which is great. But I was glad to fight for it a bit, glad to have jumped bare into the thing and elbowed my way into the hurricane heart of its final plunge.
By the end, I didn't visit this waterfall. I had an affair with it. And that was more than I ever expected.
IF YOU GO
• GETTING THERE: Reaching Chachapoyas in northern Peru takes time and, lately, money. In addition to the fare to Lima, the onward flight to the northern coastal city of Chiclayo will cost you $150 to $200 round trip. Lan Peru dominates the route and has ticket and baggage agreements with American. The long overland trip from Chiclayo to the Chachapoyas region will usually be wrapped into your tour, but inexpensive overnight buses are available if you go on your own.
• SEEING GOCTA: You can go in the dry season, traditionally May through September, and have an easier trip but a smaller waterfall. Or you can go with the rains and have a wetter experience all around.
Be aware that the waterfall is in the moderate Andes, 8,000 to 10,000 feet in elevation. Bring light fleece and rainwear at all times of year. The Peruvian government and local tour operators are falling all over themselves to make seeing Gocta easier. But for now you pretty much have to rough it with one of the archaeological tour companies already there.
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